Jacob Smith and Adria Schimmenti
Opinions Editor and Staff Writer
It feels like as more and more new pieces of entertainment are released, their quality just gets worse and worse. While in some cases this is due to the project itself not meshing well with audiences, the source of the other cases is oftentimes due to overworking. As social media has diverted our attention away from traditional media outlets, like film and video games, the titans of those industries have responded to the changing times by adopting an assembly line approach, when it comes to producing content.
Since 2021, Marvel has released 15 films and 14 TV shows, with each project making generous usage of CGI, green screen and special effects. This constant stream of content has placed a monumental amount of work onto the shoulders of the VFX workers.
The toll of this workload was reflected in the final product of the 2022 film “Thor: Love and Thunder.” Vanity Fair conducted an interview on their YouTube channel with the film’s director Taika Waititi and Valkyrie actress Tessa Thompson where they were critical of the VFX. At one point in the interview, they were pointing and laughing at how a CGI character looked.
“This doesn’t even look real. Does anyone look real?” were some of the comments made by Watiti and Thompson and viewers did not take well to these remarks. User @Heyjessicah wrote under the video “Honestly the poor VFX workers that were given just a couple weeks to produce high quality content are not finding the comments about it too funny but hey at least they were fairly compensated — oh wait, they weren’t.” This comment received around 1,400 likes.
Dhruv Govil was a VFX worker previously employed by Marvel that did work on Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-Man: Homecoming. He made a tweet in regards to the harsh treatment in the workplace and criticized Marvel for their pressuring of workers to meet unreasonable deadlines.
“Working on Marvel shows is what pushed me to leave the VFX industry,” Govil said. “They’re a horrible client and I have seen way too many colleagues break down after being overworked, while Marvel tightens the purse strings.”
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees has attempted to appease the worries of VFX artists when they ratified their contracts in May. These contracts place protections on overtime pay, health insurance plans, rest periods and turnaround times. These contracts also included pay raises by 4% for the first year and are expected to increase by 3.5% by the second year these contracts are in effect.
These contracts are a step in the right direction and will hopefully allow VFX workers to be properly treated and compensated for their hard work. The video game industry faces similar issues of crunch culture, with CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 being an example of how overworking and rushing a project can be harmful to both the employees and the product itself.
The game was first teased in 2013, with the trailer showing a woman with cybernetic enhancements encountering a gang of cyborg cops in a futuristic looking environment. It’s important to note that the trailer used pre-rendered footage, footage specifically made for this teaser, and not actual game-play footage. The trailer ends with a line of text saying “Coming: when it’s ready.” If only they knew how poorly this statement would age.
Further information about the game would be sprinkled out over the next six years, including glimpses at the combat system, the character customizer and the setting, Night City. By this point in time, the game had been heavily hyped up by CD Projekt Red and fans were dying to get their hands on it. These feelings were heightened after E3 2019, a now defunct video games conference, when Keanu Reeves took to the show stage and revealed that he would be playing an integral role in the game’s story.
It was also announced at E3 that the game would be released on April 16, 2020. Then it got pushed back to Sept. 17 for play-testing purposes. Then it was Nov. 19 to give it even more time in the oven. Then finally, the game was pushed back one more time to Dec. 10 where it finally made its release date. And what a release it was.
The game was riddled with numerous bugs and graphical issues on launch. This was even worse on the Xbox One and Playstation 4, where it was clear the game was not optimized for these systems and resulted in poor frame rate performances and game crashes. Public perception of the game was so bad that it was removed from purchase on the Playstation store and Xbox offered a full refund.
In the years following the game’s release, numerous bug fixes and content updates have been added that have placed the game into a more complete state. Although the game’s actually playable now, that doesn’t erase the memory of how it was originally sold to customers.
There was definitely pressure to finally release the game placed onto the development staff. Adrian Jakubiak, the game’s former audio programmer, told Bloomberg how there were times when he would crunch up to 13 hours a day, five days a week. The emotional toll that must have been placed on the development staff after working on the game for years and then knowing that it’s going to be released in an unfinished state sounds awful to have dealt with.
We can only hope that companies in the film and video game industries have learned that crunch culture and overworking their employees just isn’t worth it. In order to create something that will be loved and appreciated by people for years to come, there needs to be a group of people behind that project that approach their work with ambition and excitement, not dread and dissatisfaction.
