Others work for mammoth VFX houses like MPC, which in July announced that it was freezing pay raises for all employees, according to the Animation and Visual Effects Union. These are workers who, similar to video game developers, will work more than 14-hour days for days on end, on long-gestating projects and on emergency, two-day turnaround jobs. Once the time comes to do that post-production work, the crunching begins. “It’s so low on the pole that it’s not a consideration.” One source told Defector that studios almost never take post-production staffing into account when they set a release date. Now they, along with secondary effects houses, are being tasked with a sizable portion, if not a majority, of post-production duties on shows that have hard premiere dates which rarely, if ever, get moved. Visual effects departments didn’t even exist, particularly in television, until roughly a decade ago. These workers are part of a beloved art form undergoing a rebirth, on the fly, across a global patchwork of studios, effects houses, boutique shops, and freelance contractors. And all described experiencing similar problems with their work, across projects of various budgets and sizes, including The Walking Dead, Moon Knight, a terrible sequel to 300, and Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Netflix series, Cabinet of Curiosities. All were granted anonymity due to signing nondisclosure agreements, as well as fear of retaliation within the industry. In the process of reporting this story, Defector talked to a dozen people who all work in various aspects of post-production: compositors, supervisors, technicians, generalists, VFX coordinators, colorists, editors, and more. “They’ve Got To Pee On It”: A VFX Supervisor Explains Why Their Job Is So Tricky What matters most, though, is that those messes are forever growing, as more and more of what doesn’t go quite right on set is being left to a post-production workforce that is disparate, overworked, confused, and exploited. Those messes can be enormous-sometimes the crew on the set will outright forget to shoot something-and they can also be tiny, as tiny as a strand of hair. In today’s Hollywood, compositors, along with all of their colleagues, are often left to clean up all of the messes left by writers, actors, directors, producers, and all of the other name-brand talent.
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Another source working on a period TV show said that they blew “80 percent” of their effects budgets fixing visible wig lines in the locked picture. That’s not the only time wigs have caused VFX artists headaches.
“If I looked at the shot now,” that compositor said, “I could probably point out to you all of the morphs and dissolves that most people don’t see when watching it casually.” In the end, they spent over two weeks working on that single head of hair, for an expository sequence in The Avengers that you almost certainly don’t remember.
They even tried getting the original wig Johansson wore on set, so they could shoot the wig by itself on a green screen and then marry those shots with the original footage. They blurred the edges to more easily integrate it. For Johansson’s wig, the compositor and their team struggled to seamlessly blend the actress’s fake tresses into the finished background. The compositor’s job is to merge all the elements from a movie, from the principal photography to the special and visual effects, into a single, final shot: the one you see in the theater or on your TV at home.
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We had to figure out how to get sky behind her head instead of mountains. Scarlett Johansson had this curly red wig on. “The heli-carrier sequence was shot on a runway in New Mexico. According to a compositor who worked on the first Avengers movie, this is not an easy task. When you shoot an actor in one location but have to digitally relocate them to another, which happens quite frequently, you have to bring along every last follicular imperfection with them. It is also a massive problem if you happen to be making a film or a television show. It’s unavoidable but also quite natural for hair to behave this way. Look in the mirror right now and you’ll inevitably find not one, but many stray hairs poking out this way and that. It never stays in the same place, unless you have Doctor Strange amounts of pomade on you. A head of hair is a wild, unreliable thing.
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