Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
When I worked on one movie, it was almost six months of overtime every day.
I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week.
Marvel genuinely works you really hard.
Ive had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying.
Ive had people having anxiety attacks on the phone.
So the effects houses are trying to bend over backward to keep Marvel happy.
But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed.
So every person is doing more work than they need to.
The other thing with Marvel is its famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process.
And some of those changes are really major.
It has really tight turnaround times.
So yeah, its just not a great situation all around.
Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.
Part of the problem comes from the MCU itself just the sheer number of movies it has.
This is not a new dynamic.
Thats a term we use in the industry when the client will nitpick over every little pixel.
Even if you never notice it.
A client might say, This is not exactly what I want, and you keep working at it.
But they have no idea what they want.
So theyll be like, Can you just try this?
Can you just try that?
Theyll want you to change an entire setting, an entire environment, pretty late in a movie.
The main problem is most of Marvels directors arent familiar with working with visual effects.
They dont know how to visualize something thats not there yet, thats not on set with them.
So Marvel often starts asking for what we call final renders.
But that is the way the industry has to work.
You cant show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.
The other issue is, when were in postproduction, we dont have a director of photography involved.
So were coming up with the shots a lot of the time.
It causes a lot of incongruity.
A good example of what happens in these scenarios is the battle scene at the end ofBlack Panther.
The physics are completely off.
Suddenly, the characters are jumping around, doing all these crazy moves like action figures in space.
Suddenly, the camera is doing these motions that havent happened in the rest of the movie.
It all looks a bit cartoony.
It has broken the visual language of the film.
Things need to change on two ends of the spectrum.
The studio needs to hold its directors feet to the fire more to commit to what they want.
The other thing is unionization.
Some of the problems I mentioned are universal to every show and every project.
But you end up doing less overtime on other shows.
You end up being able to push back more on the directors.
Not every client has the bullying power of Marvel.
Have a story to share about working as a VFX artist?
Let us know at stories@vulture.com.
