As Marvel continues to face increased criticism for the quality of its visual effects work and the working conditions of the teams struggling to keep up with the studio’s massive output, another veteran VFX artist has come forward with his experience working on Guardians of the Galaxy. According to Emmy award winner Joe Pavlo, the production “was a mess,” and that was before Marvel significantly upped its cinematic output and branched into mammoth streaming series, which has only exacerbated the situation.
While speaking to The Guardian, Pavlo explained that the VFX industry is “filled with terrific people with lots of goodwill,” that all goes away when you have a demanding client who has become accustomed to making wild changes on the fly.
“All the goodwill in the world just evaporates when everything gets changed and they decide they’re replacing that character with a different actor or changing the entire environment – they’re now in a pizza restaurant instead of a cornfield,” Pavlo said. “It can be that extreme at the very last minute.”
Those demands turn into a bullying problem, which quickly trickles downhill, Pavlo told The Guardian:
“The average artist doesn’t even have any contact with the clients. It’s really just the people at the producer and the supervisor level and then they pass it on to their crew. So you could say, oh, the supervisor’s a real bully, but actually it’s a knock-on effect and then the people who are the team leaders, once they can’t handle it, end up being bullies.
“Bullying is a huge problem in our industry because everybody’s so desperate sometimes. It seems like there’s such a high level of stress and pressure on these jobs to complete on time, to change everything at the drop of a hat.”
As the plight of VFX workers starts to become a more prominent issue, She-Hulk star Tatiana Maslany recently came to the artists’ defense and didn’t deny that they’re working under extreme time crunches.
“I feel incredibly, like, deferential to how talented these artists are and how quickly they have to work, obviously, like much quicker than probably should be given to them, in terms of like churning these things out,” Maslany told Variety ahead of She-Hulk‘s premiere.
(Via The Guardian)