Search results
Sep 13, 2023 · More than 50 visual effect workers at Marvel Studios are looking to unionize. The group filed its desire in August, asking the National Labor Relations Board to schedule a formal election for as ...
- Five VFX workers and organizers on the poor conditions that led them to a potentially groundbreaking union push.
- ‘The McDonald’s of Content’
- ‘We’re Out of People’
- ‘Our Lives Are Ultimately Unsustainable’
- IGN Recommends
By Alex Stedman
Updated: Aug 11, 2023 3:27 am
Posted: Aug 10, 2023 8:04 pm
After countless reports of crunch, impossibly tight turnarounds, and drastically low pay for long hours, Marvel’s VFX workers are fighting back.
It was announced earlier this week that over 50 VFX workers at Marvel voted to file for a union election at the National Labor Relations Board to be represented by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). And, according to five organizers and Marvel VFX workers IGN spoke to in the wake of the announcement, the move isn’t just something that’s been a long time coming in an entertainment industry where nearly every other faction is unionized – it’s necessary to even make it possible to continue doing this work.
“These are companies which are making billions of dollars off of our work, so the reasonableness of our demands – asking just to be put on the same deal as the people working alongside of us and be given access to health care and a pension fund and the basic protections of work – we feel that this is one of the most reasonable demands that anyone's ever made,” Mark Patch, a VFX organizer for IATSE and a former coordinator on Disney+’s WandaVision, tells IGN.
Efforts to unionize within Marvel truly started to ramp up with a “grounded plan” in August of 2022, says Alex Torres, an organizer who worked on Marvel’s Runaways. It’s worth mentioning that that places it in the midst of the MCU’s absolutely jam-packed Phase 4, and the workers and organizers that IGN spoke with agree that the onslaught of content helped make an already difficult and understaffed job even more of a grind.
To put it in perspective: between the Disney+ series and theatrical feature films, Marvel’s Phase 4 had a total runtime of approximately 60 hours. That’s significantly longer than the runtimes of Phases 1-3 combined.
“When you're turning a 90-minute movie into a 10-hour feature basically, you're doing 10 times the amount of work within the same, or even sometimes a shorter period of time,” Patch points out. “Particularly from Marvel, we certainly have seen since COVID and streaming the amount of demands on our time and mental and physical health just explode.”
“With Disney+ and its advent, there was a bunch of new content that was being requested for the service, but we actually were finding that visual effects workers were so tapped out and being spread out so thin that shows were waiting in line to essentially get their work done,” Torres adds.
Gabrielle Levesque, one of the workers that IGN spoke with, can speak to the situation with quite a bit of experience, as she worked with Marvel before and after the launch of Disney+. Her credits include Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World.
“What you're expected to do each day and how the shows are run, it definitely feels more like a conveyor belt nowadays than necessarily each project being given its own thought and time,” she says. “As opposed to now where it's like, ‘well, this is coming up and now we have to do this, and this is coming up, we have to do this.’ It really becomes like the McDonald's of content.”
The question Patch asks, of just who is expected to do all that work, is a real one – and an urgent one. Maggie Kraisamutr, an in-house artist who’s worked at almost every major Los Angeles studio except for Marvel (“and that’s for a reason,” she pointedly notes), says they’re quite literally running out of people who can take on this work, even with the amount of VFX that’s furnished to outside vendors.
“Like, across the globe, we're out of people,” Torres agrees. “But the order still keeps coming down. It still says just like Mark says, ‘oh, you got 10 days to finish this because that's what we need.’ “
And, when the workers are so understaffed and overworked, it’s something that will no doubt be reflected in the VFX itself. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, for example, one of Marvel’s most recent releases, was one of the projects to be ravaged by critics for its special effects, but it’s not the only one.
“That happens pretty regularly,” Torres says. “Things do take a dive. You can kind of hear it in the press these days. You hear some detraction from people saying that, like, ‘Oh, these Marvel films feel too CGI,’ or something to that effect. Some of that really does come from the amount of corner-cutting that gets done in order to try and get these things out by X deadlines so that the studio ultimately can make all of its numbers that it needs to make so that it can make the maximum amount of profit.”
Those tight turnaround and hard deadlines, Kraisamutr says, are a constant problem for those in the industry. As an in-house compositor, Kraisamutr works along post-production to basically create fully realized storyboards, applying visual effects to them. In short, she describes, her job is to basically save studios from spending more money and going into reshoots.
"They think AI is a quick fix, but it's not. It takes thousands of people to touch upon a single shot.
The passion for the work, they all agree, is what keeps them going – and what powers them to take action into their own hands.
“I like the kind of problems we solve in this department, but if you make the job so difficult and so unsustainable, what do you expect us to do?” Kraisamutr says. “We want to save this job, so we're going to unionize. We're helping ourselves.”
It can be demoralizing, too, to work in such a union-friendly industry without being part of a union themselves, something IGN previously spoke to several VFX workers about. Kraisamutr recounts an experience while she was working on Disney’s The Muppets, where she was in a room of editors and a union representative went around to make sure everyone in the room was unionized. When Kraisamutr said she wasn’t, the representative was shocked.
The experience, she recalls, made her feel “secluded” as she worked alongside those who were protected by a union, and “really feeling the difference between, I don’t know, the classes of people that we fall under.”
After Kraisamutr shares that story, Levesque chimes in that she had nearly the same exact experience on Spider-Man: Far From Home.
“They (the union rep) looked at me and they go, ‘Are you camera or are you VFX?’ I went, ‘VFX.’ They're like, ‘Okay.’ They just kept walking,” she says. “It's just like, ‘cool, thanks. Okay, I get it.’ You just see it so starkly. You can't ignore it.”
Sep 13, 2023 · September 13, 2023 8:20am. A supermajority of Marvel’s roughly 50-worker VFX crew has already signed authorization cards indicating they wish to be represented by the union. Courtesy of Chrissy ...
Sep 13, 2023 · Though this union only includes Marvel’s in-house VFX workers, its parent company Disney’s visual effects crews filed for their own election to unionize with the NLRB, and backed by IATSE, at ...
Last month, 50 VFX employees from Marvel Studios filed for a union election at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to be represented by the IATSE, and votes were cast and collected between ...
- Cristina Alexander
Sep 13, 2023 · Visual effects workers at Marvel Studios have voted to form a first-of-its-kind union with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. The Marvel VFX shop not only enjoyed a historic ...
People also ask
Will marvel VFX workers unionize with the NLRB?
Will marvel VFX workers vote for a union election?
Did Marvel VFX workers vote 'yes' during NLRB election?
Should VFX employees be unionized?
Will marvel VFX workers unionize with IATSE?
Why did Marvel VFX workers sign union authorization cards?
Sep 13, 2023 · The workers filed for the election on Aug. 7, and votes were cast by mail between Aug. 21 and Sept. 11. The count was held on Tuesday. When the final National Labor Relations Board election votes ...
