By Simon Parkin

On 7 October 2019, Yves McCrae, a 29-year-old visual effects artist, received an email from a recruiter asking if he would be interested in a job at the Vancouver branch of the Moving Picture Company (MPC). Since its founding in London in 1970, MPC has grown to become one of the most prestigious and storied visual effects houses in the world, winning three Academy Awards for its CGI work on the films 1917, The Jungle Book, and Life of Pi. McCrae expected a rigorous recruitment process, involving multiple interviews and probing questions about his showreel and experience. The recruiter explained, however, there would be no interview. If he wanted the job, McCrae just needed to forward a copy of his passport and show up at the office the following week. “Is this legit?” he replied.

Seven days later, McCrae arrived at MPC’s Vancouver studio, a red-brick building situated in the expensive, historic part of the city, less than a mile from the Art Institute of Vancouver, where he had studied visual effects (VFX) several years earlier. McCrae, who has a youthful face and auburn hair, half expected to have been the victim of a prank. Instead, he found the lobby crammed with dozens of other young VFX artists, some of whom he recognised from his work on other projects: Godzilla, Black Panther, Stranger Things. “The waiting room was literally packed,” McCrae recalls. “There was nowhere to sit.” While he waited, McCrae struck up a conversation with the artist he was squeezed up against. “Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before.”

The group was then led into a screening room, a cinema-like auditorium with comfy chairs and insulated walls, where staff would watch the “dailies” – VFX-heavy shots that had been completed – throughout the day. One of the heads of the department walked in, McCrae recalled, and addressed the crowd. “We’ll get right into it. We have two projects you’re going to be working on: either Cats or Sonic.” McCrae felt the energy in the room perceptibly shift. Both films were already notorious, and not just among VFX artists. A few months earlier, Paramount Pictures had released the first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog, a live-action adaptation of the Sega video game. Unlike his streamlined design of the games, film-Sonic embodied an eccentric quasi-realism, featuring a chattering row of teeth, beady, fearful eyes, and a questing snout. On social media, the design was immediately pilloried. A journalist from The Guardian described Sonic’s design as looking like “a cheap knock-off… toy your child might win at a fairground stand and then be terrified of.” To fans this was, he added, like a “200mph slap in the face.” 

Cats, a live-action adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, had similarly been subjected to an online pile-on for the effects work seen in early trailers. Real actors played the cats – James Corden as Bustopher Jones, Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy, Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger – but their fur, among other things, was computer generated and digitally applied, a prodigiously challenging task. Mill Film won the contract to supply the film’s special effects, a senior industry insider told me. The once-defunct movie arm of commercial studio The Mill, it had only relaunched in 2018. “Cats was one of their first jobs,” he said. “They underbid and crewed up a junior-heavy studio to do thousands of shots that would be incredibly hard even for an established studio with a proven pipeline. That apparent hubris was ultimately paid for by the artists.” (Mill Film’s parent company, Technicolor, denied this account, and said its work on Cats had been “adequately staffed by experts in the field.”) 

The crunch on Cats seemed to encapsulate every problem in an increasingly beleaguered industry. Another VFX artist told The Daily Beast that the workload made working on the film “almost slavery”. Some artists reportedly were at the office for days, taking breaks to sleep under their desks. (Technicolor said it had investigated and “found no evidence” to support these claims.) 

Sources who worked for Mill Film alleged that, like many contemporary filmmakers, Cats director Tom Hooper did not properly understand the VFX process, and failed to appreciate that early renders of characters were just that: incomplete sketches without the proper lighting, textures, or colours. (Representatives for Hooper did not respond to requests for comment). When Mill Film failed to deliver, its sister company, MPC, took on a major chunk of the project. (Technicolor said: “It is not uncommon for multiple studios to work on client projects.”) 

Two months before the release of Cats, and four months before Sonic, McCrae had been recruited as part of the clean-up squad. He was there, as one insider told me, to “shit-fix”. 

The seeds of the special effects industry’s current crisis were sown decades ago. When King Kong premiered in 1933, audiences could not fathom how the filmmakers had captured a 24ft gorilla climbing New York’s most famous spire, clutching a terrified woman in one paw. (The answer: mostly maquette models covered in rubber and rabbit fur.) That film broke records, and established the link between extravagant effects and extravagant profits. Ever since, Hollywood studios have competed to produce the most spectacular special effects, hoping to attract similarly sizeable audiences.

For decades, effects in films meant practical effects: puppets and pyrotechnics. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, the introduction of CGI enabled directors to create scenes that previously would have been too dangerous, expensive, or impractical to render on screen in any other way. In time, VFX artists gained the facility to recreate, pixel by pixel, any fruit of the imagination. Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park – a film about a safari park filled with reanimated dinosaurs, which arguably marked the beginning of the industry’s almost wholesale shift from practical effects to CGI – featured fewer than 60 shots of fully computer-generated dinosaurs. Today, even a relatively low-budget romantic comedy will feature five times as many CGI shots. “Other than maybe the lowest-budget indie project, there is no film made today that does not feature several hundred visual effects, at absolute minimum,” a veteran VFX artist told me.

Where King Kong’s maquettes were handmade over a prolonged period that required careful planning, the rise of digital technologies spread the idea that any prop could be changed on a whim with apparent ease. Now, not only were VFX houses responsible for conjuring vast fictional cities, bustling crowds of tens of thousands, and cascading waterfalls, but they would also spend months fixing mistakes: digitally erasing visible wig lines in period dramas, inserting absent props, snipping away errant strands of hair, tucking in double chins. In one scene in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick – a film which touted its use of so-called practical effects over VFX – artists digitally swapped a pair of white trousers worn by Jennifer Connelly’s character with blue jeans. These divine powers to reshape the physical world became the VFX industry’s essential weakness. Once artists could create anything, soon enough, they were asked to create everything. 

Not all changes are so minor. On 2016’s Suicide Squad, for example, studio executives were unhappy with a pivotal scene involving one of the film’s stars, Dylan*, a former senior VFX artist on several major blockbusters who has left the industry due to burnout, told me. “So, a month prior to release, we replaced her entire body with a computer-generated double that the executives at the studio could direct. Nobody noticed.” (Warner Bros. did not respond to requests for comment.) 

On another film, Dylan says, a Marvel executive decided to change the location of a key scene after it had been shot. “So we had to cut the characters out of their original footage and put them in an entirely new environment,” he says. “I was called in on a Sunday because an executive didn’t like the position of a rock in a shot that didn’t end up even being visible when other effects were added. My team of four worked 12-hour days for a month to move clouds in the sky to the exact position they wanted.” (Marvel did not respond to requests for comment.) 

The recent explosion of streaming services, combined with a fashion for VFX-heavy fantasy and superhero shows, has increased budgets – according to The Wall Street Journal, Netflix spent an average of £25 million on each episode of the fourth season of Stranger Things, which aired in May 2022. As much as half of the budget of a Marvel film will be spent on effects. But industry consolidation (almost all big releases are now made by just a handful of studios: Disney, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Netflix, Amazon, and Warner Bros.), and an absence of the coordinated unionisation that protects workers across almost all other aspects of film production has resulted in often toxic working conditions. “Companies underbid rivals to get the work, offering to do it at cost or even lower than cost just to win in more work,” Andrew*, a former lead artist from one of the major visual effects companies told me. “VFX houses are terrified of being blacklisted,” he said, “so will often compromise to maintain their commercial relationships with the clutch of studios that hold the power.” 

When directors or studio heads demand last-minute alterations that fall outside of the scope of the original contract, companies can theoretically place a change order. “But if you piss off one of them, and they take their business away that is a whole chunk of potential work from that studio that disappears,” Andrew added. “So often you’ll just take the hit.” 

The artists, inevitably, shoulder the burden, working destructively long hours, damaging their physical and mental health, and tumbling into burnout. “It was not uncommon to walk into  bathrooms to find people crying, and I’ve had to console people falling apart at two in the morning at their desks,” Dylan told me. 

Another source told me that, during a particularly intense period, managers at one VFX studio once blocked the office doors to prevent staff from leaving at the end of the day. Fearing for their jobs, frustrated VFX workers have taken to social media forums such as the VFX subreddit to share horror stories. “I’ve been worked to the point where I felt like I was going to die,” one person wrote in a Reddit thread filled with complaints from disgruntled VFX artists. Another described working in the industry as “like psychological torture.” 

In April 2020, Malcolm Angell, a senior VFX producer at Mill Film Montreal, died by suicide. Angell’s family has in part blamed his workload; according to emails obtained by The Canadian Press, Angell had complained to a friend that he was doing the work of two people. A clause in Angell’s contract reportedly required him to pay a £30,000 penalty should he quit in the middle of a project. His family have since campaigned for better workplace practices. (Technicolor said it received no formal complaints about Angell’s treatment, but has since launched new company programmes to support employees.)

Without adequate time or resources to complete their work to a high standard before a film’s release, VFX artists are increasingly being accused by fans and, in some cases, even directors, of shoddy workmanship. (One recent, typical headline in a national newspaper: “Why is the CGI in She-Hulk so terrible?”) “When people complain our visual effects look shit, they should know we can make anything look absolutely fucking real,” a senior artist, who has worked on several Marvel films and the Harry Potter series, told me. “Every time I see a shot that looks bad, like, say, the last third of Black Panther, all I see is a group of artists who were not given time to finish their shots.” 

It is a thankless task. When a VFX artist’s work is indistinguishable from the real objects, people, plumes of water and bursts of flame they have sought to recreate, it becomes essentially invisible. The untrained viewer notices only when things look wrong – and at a time when there is clout to be had by posting stills on social media that mock imperfect effects, fans are incentivised to prompt pile-ons. Poor management, misery and exploitation have become so commonplace across the industry that VFX artists have coined a term for the experience of working on a film or television series that is underbid, understaffed, subject to unreasonable, inflexible deadlines, and endless directorial nitpicking: “pixel fucked”.

Yves McCrae joined the VFX industry seven years before he started working on Cats, soon after graduating from art school. As a production assistant, his responsibilities included cleaning toilets and fetching takeaway orders. In the evenings he would stay late, teaching himself how to use effects on an unoccupied computer, quizzing his colleagues on the subtleties of the software. His efforts caught the attention of his managers, who allocated McCrae to work on a trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past that was due to be shown at that year’s Comic-Con.

After two weeks, the work was done, and McCrae glumly returned to managing the office. With experience on his CV, however, he began to apply for VFX roles at other studios. He took a job working on Godzilla. “I was being paid close to minimum wage, no overtime and asked to do crazy hours,” he recalls, “but that was the only way to get in the door.” Soon, McCrae was routinely working 70-hour weeks, around double the British and North American national average. (One source told me that, in the UK, employment contracts at many effects houses historically included a clause waiving the EU Working Time Directive, which set a maximum 48-hour working week.) “It was exploitative, but those first jobs are so important to get into the industry.” 

At MPC, McCrae bounced back and forth between the two struggling projects, but most of his time was spent on Cats. He was one of 30 compositors, the artists who merge the VFX with the live footage and other elements to create the finished shots we see in cinemas or at home. McCrae insisted that the team strived to make the shots look as good as possible, but there was a sense that there was only so much they could do. “There just wasn’t enough time, or enough experienced artists, to give it nearly as much polish as such a VFX-heavy movie like this requires,” McCrae said, “We knew it was going to look horrible. But we were all having a fun time working on it.” 

One day, while work was progressing, the team learned Cats had been shortlisted for an Academy Award for visual effects. “We were all just laughing,” he recalls. “Like: how did this even happen? Which shots did they send in? How do you get shortlisted for an Academy Award that you can’t possibly win?” Meanwhile, last-minute changes kept arriving from Hooper and the studio, adding to an already insurmountable log of work. (McCrae disputes the popular internet story that some last-minute CGI work centred on removing the cats’ anuses. “I didn’t see any buttholes,” he said. “Maybe the fur pointed in a certain way near their butts, and maybe that spiralled out of control, but I don’t think there was a design choice to put a butthole on cast members.”) 

“When you’re working on a film set, every minute that you’re not doing something you’re burning money, and it’s easy to see that, because there are people standing around doing nothing,” Andrew, a former senior employee for one of the largest VFX houses, told me. “With VFX, however, directors almost never physically see the creative people working on their film; they are separated from the process. Notes get passed up and down the chain, and it becomes difficult to know exactly what’s happening at any given moment. They can’t see the money that’s burning.”

At the world premiere of Cats in New York in December 2019, Hooper told reporters that he’d only put the finishing touches on the film and its “digital fur technology” 36 hours earlier. Still, conspicuous mistakes had slipped through. In some scenes, characters’ feet did not touch the ground, giving the appearance of feline levitation. “It used to be that you could make changes the last couple of days before release,” a former senior MPC employee told me. “Then you put it out. Now you’re seeing films getting released to the cinema, and then they’re still not happy.” 

Universal issued a downloadable “patch” for Cats a few days after the film debuted in cinemas, designed to fix some of the most egregious errors. But even these after-the-fact changes were insufficient to save the film critically. The Guardian panned it as a “CGI nightmare”. Screen Rant described the film’s visual effects as “sloppy and flat-out unfinished”.  The New Yorker’s film critic imagined audiences leaning forward in their seats and asking of these digital furries: “What in God’s creation are they?” Two weeks later, after an accumulation of scathing reviews and meagre box office takings – the film reportedly lost £60 million – Universal pulled Cats from its Oscar awards campaign. The same month, MPC Vancouver closed its doors due to, according to a memorandum sent to staff, “external market pressures”. (MPC’s other studios  were unaffected.)

The following February, at the 2020 Oscars ceremony, James Corden and Rebel Wilson took to the stage to introduce the Academy Award for Outstanding Visual Effects dressed in cat costumes, Corden with a tuxedo jacket pulled tight over his non-digital fake fur. Dangling their hands like paws, the pair swiped at the microphone stand before Wilson opened: “As cast members of the motion picture Cats, nobody more than us understands the importance of good visual effects.” The room erupted in laughter and applause. 

Afterwards, McCrae tweeted: “Hey guys, I haven’t watched all of the Oscars but I assume these two were really classy and thanked me for working 80 hour weeks right up until I was laid off and the studio closed, right?” 

The following day, the Visual Effects Society issued a statement: “On a night that is all about honouring the work of talented artists, it is immensely disappointing that the Academy made visual effects the butt of a joke.” By then, McCrae’s tweet had garnered more than 120,000 likes. 

In the weeks that followed, infuriated VFX artists started speaking out publicly. “Working on Marvel shows is what pushed me to leave the VFX industry,” tweeted Dhruv Govil, an artist who had worked on Spider-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy. “They’re a horrible client, and I’ve seen way too many colleagues break down after being overworked.” 

The VFX artists had finally, it seemed, had enough. 

The Oscars was not, however, the first time VFX artists had tried to make their voice heard. In 2013, Bill Westenhofer, VFX supervisor on Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, took to the stage to accept the Academy Award for Best Special Effects. Life of Pi, a film in which a boy shares a trans-Pacific boat ride with a tiger, had been a  VFX-heavy production: thousands of computer-generated shots were created by the artists at Rhythm & Hues, one of the most established special effects houses. Midway through production, Lee reportedly made a substantial change to the tiger’s design. The studio, already financially stretched, chose to absorb the costs, rather than charge Fox for the extra work. Days before Westenhofer accepted the award, Rhythm & Hues had filed for bankruptcy. On stage, Westenhofer tried to draw attention to the artists’ plight, but the orchestra drowned out his words less than a minute into the speech with the theme from Jaws. (As Business Insider reported at the time, the average Oscars acceptance speech clocks in closer to two minutes.) 

There was no orchestra to move on the 450 VFX artists who had gathered down the street to protest at working conditions in the industry that had won them an Oscar but lost them their jobs. Many held placards bearing slogans such as, “The visual effects industry is suffering,” “My job was outsourced and all I got was this lousy sign,” and “This is the first time I’ve been outside in three months”. Rhythm & Hues was not the first VFX studio to fall into administration following a successful project; Digital Domain Media Group, which worked on Titanic, had filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier. For some houses, a single intensive project can put the entire company under. There’s a quote often brought up in the industry, allegedly made by a producer in 2007: “If I don’t put a visual effects shop out of business on my movie, I’m not doing my job.”

Paul Allen Newell joined Rhythm & Hues in 1988 as a technical director, overseeing visual effects work for the company. At that time, most of the work was split between advertising commercials and network idents – the swirling logos used before the news, for example – work for which the company won several awards. Even then, however, Newell says the seeds of the current crisis were sprouting. “The profits were so thin that, if you bid for a couple of jobs and didn’t get any of them, payroll might be missed or, in the worst case, you could face going out of business,” he recalls.

Even back then, Newell routinely saw directors changing their minds late in the process, which meant he and his colleagues would have to work unreasonable hours. “You’re not going to go: ‘Well, screw you, we’re not going to do this, because that’s not what we bid on,’” he said. “You’re going to make them happy, because you need them to come back.” 

Later in his career, Newell worked for both Disney and DreamWorks, studios that created much of their own content in-house. “You still had punishing deadlines,” he said. “The studios never wanted to change an announced release date so the only way to make late changes is to work longer hours and weekends. The last weeks of making a movie were very rough.” 

Changing studios was difficult; artists and animators later discovered they had been prevented from moving between companies and negotiating better salaries and benefits. In 2014, three visual effects artists launched a class action lawsuit alleging that between 2004 and 2010, numerous big studios – including Disney, Pixar, Lucasfilm, DreamWorks Animation, and Sony Pictures – had colluded in setting salary limits and avoiding hiring artists from other studios. (The studios settled the case without admitting liability, paying out a combined £140 million settlement.)

By the time Rhythm & Hues started work on Life of Pi, the problems Newell had experienced had only exacerbated, while there appeared to be less willing to share credit for creative successes. During their acceptance speeches for Best Director and Best Director of Photography, neither Ang Lee nor Claudio Miranda thanked the VFX teams who worked on the film. Bruce Branit, a VFX artist for high-profile TV shows such as Star Trek: Voyager and Lost, complained on Facebook: “[Where was the mention of] the VFX artists who made the sky, the ocean, the ship, the island, the meerkats and, oh yeah… the tiger.” 

The anger still lingers. For many VFX  artists, what happened on Life of Pi remains an instructive tale about how Hollywood views their art, upon which modern film depends. “Claudio Miranda won an Oscar for director of photography but it’s like, what do you think he did for that?” says one senior insider. “He is an exceptionally good cinematographer, but for Life of Pi, he essentially lit people on green screen. All those skies, all these environments, everything was created by the [visual effects artists]. The disparity between the DP winning the Oscar while the VFX studio goes bust is still striking.”

For Andrew, who has worked on blockbuster films for most major studios, Hollywood executives must shoulder some responsibility and train directors before they assume their first big-budget, special effects-heavy film project. “A director makes one good, well-received indie film and then it’s like, ‘Cool. Can you now do a £150 million VFX-heavy summer blockbuster?’” he explains. Rookie directors are usually paired with an experienced VFX supervisor who can interpret what’s happening and filter out parts of the process that they don’t necessarily need to see. “But then sometimes stuff reaches the director late in the day,” he says. “And then they’re like: ‘What the fuck is this? Change it.’” 

Even some experienced directors don’t know how to work with visual effects, said Dylan, who said he was so burned out after working on the Marvel film Spider-Man: Homecoming that he was unable to work for several weeks. “And the condensed project time means there’s little pre-production time, so they’re going into this without a strong vision, and aren’t able to understand the process.” The result can be chaos. “Often, we’re making up the cinematography in post, by which time the director has checked out.” A few directors, including Jon Favreau and David Fincher, are known in the VFX industry for respecting the art and history of visual effects, and have incrementally built towards VFX-heavy work. The lack of mid-budget films today has eliminated projects on which newer directors might previously have been able to cut their teeth.

The boom in streaming content has at least improved salaries. “In London, you have junior artists a year or two out of university commanding salaries of £40,000 upwards,” Andrew told me. But the ebb and flow of the industry means there may soon be a recession. “Then these companies that hired in a load of juniors at high cost will have to make redundancies.”

Recently, more established, experienced artists have been emboldened to stand up for themselves, and for the industry. Last summer, MPC announced that it was freezing pay rises for all staff. The same month, the company instituted a so-called Red Amber Green scheme, or RAG, whereby a project experiencing severe difficulties would be classed Red, and all team members would be expected to spend five days in the office, removing the possibility for hybrid working conditions. Many staff walked out, rejecting the terms. In September last year, visual effects workers made a concerted push to unionise with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a US and Canadian trade union that represents more than 150,000 workers in arts, media and entertainment. 

“As we’ve seen in other industries, in the early years, companies will burn through 20-year-olds like fuel to grow whatever business they’re in,” said Andrew. “But after a certain point, you’re going to either run out of people, or those who have been in the industry for a decade and now have kids just won’t stand to be treated that way any more.”

Yves McCrae left MPC Vancouver in December 2019, two days before the studio closed down, and joined an effects start-up run by a friend. Unlike some of his colleagues, he has managed to maintain a sense of humour and perspective on what, for many others, has become a dispiriting job. “Everybody is different and has different thresholds for the work they can do, and for what pay,” he says. The excessive working hours and unfeasible demands have not dulled his passion for special effects, first kindled as a cross-legged teenager sat in front of the television watching DVD making-of features of Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. The company where McCrae currently works, Barnstorm – which has supplied VFX work for Avatar: The Way of Water, season four of Stranger Things and Ted Lasso – is eager to keep staff rather than churn through them, so, he says, limits crunch periods. “I think if I had only ever seen studios that required crunch-style working conditions all the time, I might have been more likely to  consider leaving.”

And where Cats has become a lingering industry joke, McCrae reflects on his experiences with a certain fondness. “People can make fun of the VFX in Cats, but I know we all did the absolute best we could given the circumstances – I don’t take it personally,” he says. 

McCrae appears to represent a new breed of young VFX artist, one who seems less anxious about toeing the company line, and burning out simply to maintain the status quo. Where others have chosen to walk away, moving to more lucrative, less demanding industries, McCrae plans to stay – for now, at least. “We do have control over our own fate,” he said. “It’s not like I wouldn’t love to have a team of people in a union fighting for my value and protection. That sounds great. But working on Cats, I saw older artists – people with families – and they would just get up at the end of the day and walk out. And they didn’t get fired. They said, ‘I’m here for 40 hours. If you want me to work here, that is what you can have of me. If you want more, I’ll go find a job somewhere else.’” 

Simon Parkin is an author and journalist based in West Sussex. His latest book is The Island of Extraordinary Captives.

*Names have been changed.