SpiUnion

03/04/2013

Keep hearing people want a guild like the The Art Directors Guild, The Editors Guild, The Cinematographers Guild, or the Animation Guild rather than a union. You realize all those guilds are labor unions right?

03/04/2013

http://animatedviews.com/2013/animation-guild-provides-free-lunch-to-vfx-house-rhythm-hues/

To help start one’s week, The Hollywood Reporter delivers news of a good deed: The Animation Guild, Local 839 of IATSE, provided 64 pizzas for lunch Saturday for the employees of visual effects house Rhythm & Hues. Last month, Rhythm & Hues – whose artists won an Oscar this year for their work on Li...

01/30/2013

Hotel Transylvania is released on DVD and bluray today! The artists at Sony Pictures Animation will have 5% of the sales residuals going into their union pension accounts. The majority of contract artists at Imageworks, who made the film, do not receive any retirement savings at all.

11/29/2012

Don't miss this VES event! Open to non-members! This Saturday Dec 1st, at the LA Film School in Hollywood, 9:30am . Be there!

The Visual Effects Society is the entertainment industry's only organization representing the full breadth of visual effects practitioners including artists, technologists, model makers, educators, studio leaders, supervisors, PR/marketing specialists and producers in all areas of entertainment from...

11/01/2012

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-sony-pictures-cutbacks-20121030,0,5840519.story

Adam Sandler has made 15 of his last 18 movies with the backing of Sony Pictures . The studio has maintained a production deal with the comedy star since 2002 and stuck with him through hits like “50 First Dates” and “Grown Ups” and flops like “Spanglish” and ...

10/31/2012

http://spiunion.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/the-price-of-working-non-union-health-insurance/

If you worked on Hotel Transylvania or are working on Cloudy 2 at Sony Pictures Animation, you are receiving excellent health and pension coverage. If you’re a show hire working at Imageworks...

10/18/2012

An abridged version of our twitter conversation with Scott Ross the other night (co-founder and former CEO Digital Domain, and ILM General Manager) , usually not a Union cheerleader:

Scott Ross
A Union makes sense ONLY when an industry has the resources to address the demands of a Union. today has no $$

SpiUnion
the $100 million and counting from respectfully disagrees.

Scott Ross
well.... different here.... the employer is a studio... not a VFX facility

SpiUnion
It's absurd that 37 people earn union benefits, the other 200+ don't on the same film that has grossed $100 million so far

Scott Ross
AGREED... so what gives? Get those cards signed!

09/13/2012

To all our friends at DD, hang in there, we're pulling for you to keep doing great work for a long time to come.

09/10/2012

Check out pictures of all the SAG members earning health and pension benefits from our work.

09/03/2012

Shout out to working through Labor Day weekend for no health and pension benefits making Hollywood's blockbuster movies.

08/30/2012

Are artists really as scared as the press says? Or just apathetic?

Visual effects are now the foremost draw for most big-budget movies, and yet conditions for the workers who create those effects have never been worse. Many VFX artists face punishing schedules, working with no health insurance or benefits to meet the demands of effects-laden motion pictures.

08/26/2012

LA Times looks at Hotel T. No one mentions Imageworks. Not once.

"Hotel Transylvania," an animated comedy about Dracula running a high-end resort for monsters, had already sucked the lifeblood out of five directors when Genndy Tartakovsky came aboard as director No. 6 in February 2011.

08/23/2012

Attn : and from Variety want to talk to you about the industry. Contact them via tweet, DM, email.

08/22/2012

Big story from Variety today on the rapidly imploding VFX business. We talked to them to try and get the word out.

The Siggraph computer graphics conference earlier this month should have found the visual-effects biz on top of the world: Visual effects blockbusters and CG-animated family pics dominate the annual box office, and vfx have become the strongest marketing hook for the majors' biggest pictures.. Techn...

08/20/2012

" The threat of out-sourcing, job-eliminating technologies, and corporate consolidation has propelled many members to understand that – no matter how big they are – they’re not immune to being crushed by the system; that even in their relatively privileged positions, they have a great deal in common with the rest of the region’s working-class."

VFX- are you listening??

With large-scale domestic manufacturing off-shored and de-unionized, Hollywood film and television production may now be the most heavily unionized private-

08/16/2012

Very good article on the state of the vfx business

http://filmworks.filmla.com/2012/08/15/rhythm-hues-special-effects-powerhouse-offers-insight-into-vfx-industry/

In 1987, six talented California co-workers in the special effects industry decided to make a leap of faith and start their own computer animation and visual effects company. They decided to name it Rhythm & Hues (“rhythm” for timing and “hues” for design). During those early days in 1987, Rhythm ...

08/16/2012

Tax incentives. The elephant in the room. Scott Squires enlightens us all as to exactly what they are and how they work.

Insights to Visual Effects for Motion Pictures and Television. Tips: Use the Search in the upper left to search the site or simply check the links on the right if you don't see what you're looking for. Comments are moderated so may take a couple of days to show up. All material here is ©Scott Squi...

08/14/2012

Digital Domain CEO, John Textor ,pledges $100,000 to formation of VFX trade organization. What does it all mean? Read Scott Squires' commentary: