{"id":8441,"date":"2013-02-27T13:16:07","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T07:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.entecity.com\/?p=8441"},"modified":"2013-02-27T13:16:07","modified_gmt":"2013-02-27T07:46:07","slug":"oscars-protest-by-vfx-artists-over-life-of-pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/oscars-protest-by-vfx-artists-over-life-of-pi\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars protest by VFX artists over Life of Pi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Protestors are no rare sight outside Hollywood awards shows. But at this year\u2019s Academy Awards, a protest of a different kind took place. Around 400 or so visual effects artists gathered outside Dolby Theatre on Sunday demanding better recognition for the work they do behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

The film ‘Life of Pi<\/a>‘ won the \u201cBest Visual Effects<\/strong>” award and rightfully so, ‘Rhythm & Hues’, the company that did the visual effects on the film. The company had done a beautiful work that really created the world of the movie. Unfortunately, Rhythm & Hues had to file for \u2018Chapter 11\u2019 bankruptcy a few weeks ago, and laid off close to 250 employees. The protest named “A Piece of the Pi\u201d conducted by the VFX technicians was to show that the VFX studio behind the film wasn’t getting their share of its success.<\/p>\n

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Photo credit: @tvaziri (pic.twitter.com\/JjGOJ8zsQg)<\/p><\/div>\n

So, what was the protest about exactly?<\/h3>\n

When Bill Westenhofer, VFX supervisor for Rhythm and Hues Studios, was done giving his thanksgiving, he turned his attention to the troubled effects studio, saying, \u201cWe want to thank all the artists who worked on this film for over a year, including Rhythm & Hues. Sadly Rhythm & Hues is suffering severe financial difficulties right now. I urge you all to remember \u2013\u201d then he was cut off by the orchestra playing music from Jaws, because the speech was running long.<\/p>\n

The next opportunity came when Director Ang Lee gave his acceptance speech for winning \u2018Best Director\u2019 for Life of Pi. While he did thank “all 3,000 people” who worked on the movie, he didn’t mention Rhythm & Hues by name, and that enraged the protestors and fueled the fire even further.<\/p>\n

The VFX technicians also protested on Twitter calling foul play with the hashtag #VFXProtest. The website called vfxsoldier which supports VFX technicians wrote an open Letter to director Ang Lee, showing their protest.<\/p>\n

Rhythm and Hues’ troubles come despite working on a string of highly successful big budget films, including The Lord of the Rings trilogy, X-Men: First Class, Night at the Museum, The Incredible Hulk, The Hunger Games etc. The company also won two Oscars, for The Golden Compass and Babe.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the media did not report on the protest at all, and there was no mention of it on the televised broadcast. This tragic story is just one example of the poor state of the VFX industry. With overseas competition, many VFX houses have been getting only less than 5% profit margins and many have gone bankrupt as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Protestors are no rare sight outside Hollywood awards shows. But at this year\u2019s Academy Awards, a protest of a different kind took place. Around 400 or so visual effects artists gathered outside Dolby Theatre on Sunday demanding better recognition for the work they do behind the scenes. The film ‘Life of Pi‘ won the \u201cBest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8443,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,4,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english-movies","category-general","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8441"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entecity.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}