Good one. He should host the next Oscars!

It's a beautiful movie. But the Cinematography Oscar should have gone to the VFX guys. Or Roger Deakins.

@DouglasHorn yeah, I'm still waiting for this Claudio guy to do the right thing and give it back. Of course that would never happen but he's basically a thief now. His giving it over to the R+H team to go along with their other rightfully earned trophy would be one option, or just giving it back to the Academy and making them publicly acknowledge their mistake in awarding it to him would be the more appropriate.

PS> my little brother did the layout for a good chunk of this film, most notably on meerkat island, seen in the breakdown video above :)

@vicharris no real savior yet. Getting bought by an Indian company is, in this industry, the kiss of death. Only a matter of time from that point that they'd be shuttered. There's little precedent for any foreign investment being more than a speed bump on the way to demise.

This would be the first time a truly significant force in VFX went out of business since the collapse of Robert Abel & Associates / Abel Image Research, which were the ashes that R+H rose out of like a phoenix back in the late 1980s. Other good, talented shops have shut down but PIXAR is the only company with a longer pedigree (by months) in CGI in existence with its core company culture still intact.

If they don't live through this I wonder how long it will be before the techniques developed there filter out to other shops and another studio is capable of creating totally photo-real land animals. Nobody else has come close to what they have busted their asses to achieve.

What do the assets of R+H really amount to? The proprietary software? That's assuming that the company owns it and not the company's principles. The value of the company, on the other hand is in its workforce and their collective experience. There's so much fluidity in that industry that I suspect the artists have all picked up new work already and this is mainly an exercise for the accountants.

Wow. Thanks for the clarification. I know a bit about VFX houses but it looks like I was off-base on this. I really hope they can pull it together.

Let me ask this. Who decides the composition/layout/lighting scheme/details/ect of these vfx shots in Pi?

@Stylz it was a combination of Ang Lee himself, the VFX supervisor, DFX supervisor, Compositing supervisor, CG supervisor and perhaps an art director or two. Let's see...texting my brother since it's not too late in LA right now...Bill Westenhofer, who accepted the Oscar for R+H,and got the shark, was both R+H and "client-side" VFX.

Besides Ang, he was the "go to" guy and reviews were with Ang, Ang's editor and Bill. Miranda was never involved at the facility during post production.

@DouglasHorn yeah, it's extra sad when artists in LA get stuck in the middle and go five weeks or so without pay. That's hard anywhere but out there, where a shitty one bedroom apartment can go for $2K+ a month, depending on how far West it is, it's crippling. R+H is full of families though, more so than your average facility. I've heard some folks have already lost their houses in the turmoil. Everyone kept working though as a point of personal pride and commitment to making the film what it is.

Some companies exploit this common attribute in your better artists (cough, Hydraulix, cough) but at least I can say R+H did not with absolute certainty. The executive staff there is the classiest and most compassionate in Southern California. The only reason things being as bad as they were came as a surprise to everyone was because they were legally precluded from speaking a word about it, having already started looking for solutions long before anything was made public. It's just too bad this fact is lost on a bunch of SCAD newbies that have decided to take their frustrations out on the facility now...I hope that doesn't gain any traction, personally.

@zcream I'm not speaking generally I'm speaking to the years that it took R+H to overcome the caste and other cultural issues that were very real setbacks when they were setting up the studio. It didn't matter how trained, how smart or how capable the Indian artist was, culture was what held the Indian studio back. In the beginning it was such an issue that producers in the American facility had constant questions as to why the company was even doing what they were doing. American supervisors had to step in to back up seniority within the Indian facility that played against cultural bias. Work had to be redone multiple times. But they stuck with it.

More than any other studio that I'm aware they put the effort in to train Indian artists and overcome the cultural issues that other studios simply ignore and that's how R+H was able to eventually get end-to-end shots and sequences completed at their Indian facility where firms like Sony Pictures Imageworks, whose Indian facility is being shuttered, was just used mostly for skilled bulk labor to reduce the cost of tracking and roto and painting tasks. Non-creative tasks that require skill but are scalable. The creative work, the work most influenced by culture or dependent on clear communication, that doesn't scale.

Caste isn't an issue here, we've never had that particular mess. Religion makes a rare issue but it's handled fairly respectfully in my experience. And race and gender aren't issues in American firms at all that I've experienced. Your ability is generally the currency that puts everything else in line.

The "kiss of death" reference is based on a pattern of eventual dissolution of any American VFX studio bought by an Indian firm. The "Why?" I don't know, I only know to start the clock. It has nothing to do with "hire and fire" it has to do with counting down to the company being no more.

And, actually, you can't just be fired from a firm in the US, at least not in California. To straight up "fire" someone "for cause" takes a lot of documentation and absolutely cannot happen based on a whim or a company opens themselves up to liability. It is very, very hard to "fire" someone. Layoffs are how most people lose their jobs. I'm speaking specifically about my industry and the film industry. But, in general, getting "fired" is very difficult and that difficulty scales with the size of the company.

I can tell you though, the Indian worker in these firms are apparently much less likely than their American counterpart to give notice. It's apparently such an issue in the Indian VFX/Animation industry that one of the largest firms had (I don't know if this policy stands) resorted to requiring all new employees to pay the company a deposit that was refundable at the end of their contract. They had to do this because it was too hard to maintain confidence in their ability to complete work because from day to day they didn't know who was going to actually show up.

The flip side to that is that the Indian industry is an environment filled with abuses and a current culture where it's more or less just expected. I don't think that R+H had much of a problem with that because they, by and large, treated their artists much better than the local industry standard, which was in keeping with their company culture in the States. R+H was historically the best company in LA to work for from an employee comfort and benefits standpoint, especially in the earliest years of the industry.

I never said caste was an issue in the States, I said color and race was. And it was more in the smaller towns and villages than in the cities. The company is located in mumbai - the caste system is less of an issue in mumbai than it is in the rest of India. Its quite sad if its true - wonder what happens in the rest of India. And - I mixed up "fire" with "layoffs".

I agree. But exploitation of labour is a problem is every 3rd world country. Its hardly something specific to India.

The end of Rhythm & Hues, VFX house for Life of Pi.