Animator hopes Oscar helps to save firm
FX firms struggling: Algonquin grad
Life of Pi was the big winner Sunday night at the Oscars, taking four major awards, including a best director award for Ang Lee.
But the Los Angeles visual effects company that produced much of the stunning effects for the movie filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States 12 days ago, laying off more than 200 employees as part of a reorganization.
The financial troubles afflicting Rhythm & Hues are indicative of how much the animation scene has changed in recent years, said a former Hull resident who was one of the animation supervisors on Life of PI.
“There was little sign this was coming. Work has been slow,” said Blum, 36, an Algonquin College animation program graduate who moved to the U.S. in 2009 and joined Rhythm & Hues.
“A lot of studios are in this position,” said Blum, adding that the big Hollywood studios are paying companies that do visual effects less money even though the demand for animation work is on the upswing.
“Budgets are getting smaller and smaller and they (studios) are paying less money for more work. A lot of the movies that make the most money out there have big visual effects, like The Avengers and The Hobbit.
What was real in Pi was the actor in the boat. Everything else was special effects — the water, the sky and the tiger.”
Blum left the company’s Los Angeles office about a month ago and transferred to its Vancouver operation, hoping things would improve. But he is worried that the 1,000-plus employees working in Los Angeles will be out of work for some time as Rhythm & Hues looks to find a new owner.
The Chapter 11 bankruptcy only affects the Los Angeles office. The company’s other locations in cities around the world operate independently.
“I didn’t see there was much coming up this year (in Los Angeles), so I decided to come back home,” said Blum, who worked at Ottawa’s Amberwood Studios in the mid1990s before moving to Toronto and working in the animation field there.
“Since we won Oscars on Sunday night, that could help, and I am hoping somebody else will buy the company,” he said.
Rhythm & Hues is among the top five visual effects companies in the world, behind George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic and Weta Digital, which worked on Ava- tar and The Hobbit, he said. Rhythm & Hues has previously received Oscars for best visual effects in 1995 for Babe and in 2008 for The Golden Compass. It has also received four scientific and technical Academy Awards.
Blum said most television viewers probably didn’t notice when executives of Rhythm & Hues went up on stage to collect their Oscars and their speeches were cut short by producers.