“In regards to the future long-term, there seems to be ever more VFX in every medium (TV, Film, Advertising, online) and so VFX is a burgeoning creative industry. However, there are challenges. The film industry tends to ride on the wave of Tax incentives often given to high profile creative businesses. For instance, The British government offers the following tax incentive: For all British qualifying films of any budget level, the film production company can now claim a payable cash rebate of up to 25% of UK qualifying expenditure.
This tax incentive was partly responsible for a lot of work moving from LA to the UK over the last 10 -15 years as it allowed companies to do a lot more work for the same price. However, there are countries such as Canada where new and greater tax incentives have been offered and so work is often moving there. Vancouver and Montreal are rapidly becoming very popular destinations to do VFX and so we are seeing a lot of talent move away from the UK, just as talent moved away from LA all those years ago.
For the individual with a thirst for travel, this is not necessarily a bad thing (I myself went away to New Zealand to further my career working on King Kong for the company that made The Lord of the Rings films – Weta Digital). However, for those of us more anchored in the UK with families, it poses a worry. What is more, as well as Canada, more and more bigger facilities are opening offices in India and China to tap into the high number of low paid but well-educated graduates in those locations.
Globalisation is becoming an ever growing issue, there is also the looming worry of Brexit. London is the European centre of VFX and around 40% of the UK VFX workforce is made up of EU Nationals. In the last decade, with only very small facilities and limited work available in other European countries, anyone from Europe who dreamed of making it in VFX headed to London, and thankfully they did, as the speed at which the industry grew meant that we as a nation had a shortage of VFX savvy workers and couldn’t teach enough new starters to feed the demand. With Brexit looming, a lot of these EU nationals are concerned for their future, and if they move away, then we will face a very real problem trying to fill the creative roles that they have filled previously.
Finally, there is the prospect of AI tools learning how to do a lot of the currently manual tasks that we perform. On first sight, this may sound like good news as it will hopefully mean we can do laborious, repeatable work much quicker. However, there is a downside. If this happens then there will be fewer jobs in the industry, and also it will become increasingly hard to teach new recruits the basics of VFX. It is generally by doing these tasks that junior artists develop the skills and judgement needed to become better and more skilled at what they do. VFX is a subjective and creative industry and so I don’t believe AI will remove the need to have VFX artists completely, but I do believe it will change it beyond recognition. It will probably lead to more VFX being achievable on smaller budgets and even from your own home. You have already witnessed this amusingly and crudely with Instagram filters but also more worryingly and much more potently with the emergence of deep fake software.”
