The search for VFX talent

Broadcast

Growing demand for visuals effects in film and TV and the lure of the drama tax break are putting the UK’s VFX talent pool under increasing strain.

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It would be a stretch to suggest there is a skills crisis in UK visual effects, but there is a growing shortage of quality personnel.

As more producers of feature films and episodic TV place their post-production in the UK to maximise tax credits, taking inspiration from HBO’s Game Of Thrones, the VFX community finds itself at times struggling to keep pace with demand.

“VFX is still a growing industry and the talent pool is often insufficient in skills across the board,” says Amy Smith, head of recruitment, VFX, at Framestore and chair of Skillset’s VFX Skills Council. “Recruitment difficulty in some departments is more pronounced when there are several large projects in town.”

This view is echoed by Will Cohen, chief executive and executive producer of Milk VFX: “Skills gaps are spiky, often depending on the content of a show. If we have a big animation job, it can be hard to find quality character animators and riggers.”

The visual effects industry is only about 20 years old and while London has proved itself a strong base for feature film post, VFX for TV is a fledging part of the market. It draws on many of the same attributes, yet several distinct ones too.

“With feature film, your relationship with the project is as a vendor but in TV, the role is more collaborative,” explains Cohen. “People can make the adjustment from film to TV, but they have to be prepared to liaise directly with clients, to work on all parts of the process, and at an accelerated rate.”

Opinion is divided on whether film VFX talent can translate to the world of high-end TV. Their skills are not in question, but the need to work on several different shot components or one-on-one with a client demands particular personality traits.

“People with natural management and production skills are a very rare thing in this industry,” says Louise Hussey, VFX producer at Dneg TV.

“Training has historically been very focused on the artist, but as the industry has got larger, the responsibility placed on individuals to understand team dynamics, deliver to high expectations and meet tight deadlines has got greater.”

So-called ‘softer’ creative skills are harder to master, it seems, than pressing the right button in a software package.

“The feature film process is very regimented; the VFX department would receive a list of shots for artists to work on independently and submit for review,” says Molinare managing director Julie Parmenter.

“That timeline doesn’t work for drama. If something is picked up in the edit, we need a quick fix, and that requires a different mindset.

It means interpreting what the other person is saying, reading body language and then delivering a result. It’s easier to find people with the right service skills and upskill them than to train VFX people in a client-attended session.”

Molinare’s solution is to enrol its online editors in a programme to learn the advanced VFX functions of Nuke and Flame. “The line between online editing and VFX has narrowed,” says Parmenter. “Online editors are being asked to do more and more work.”

Meanwhile, Avid’s market withdrawal of online editing system DS is forcing facilities to deploy kit that was once the preserve of VFX departments, such as Flame, online.

The dearth of senior production talent is also acute in film and commercials, in part due to lack of experience.

“It takes time for someone to move through the ranks and build client trust,” says Smith. “When you need someone on the ground straight away, they are in short supply.”

Lack of experience, rather than specific training, also explains the perennial shortage of compositors.

“Virtually all work done in VFX passes through compositing, which can be a bottleneck,” says Philip Attfield, partnership manager, VFX, at Creative Skillset. “Over time, a good compositor can build up a collection of personal shortcuts to solve a problem and be innovative with particular software.”

The importance of feeding the talent pipeline to capture more inward investment has not been lost on industry or government.

Creative Skillset’s two-year Skills Investment Fund, which expires at the end of March, injected much-needed cash and direction into facility training schemes.

But some £3m of the £16m government pot (matched by industry) is being left on the table.

According to Attfield, some facilities didn’t maximise their fund allocation because training was cut short by work demands.

Smith says it is a case of needing to spend the money within fixed terms that do not account for the peaks and troughs of VFX projects.

Either way, Skillset is lobbying the government to carry over the remaining cash into a third year. “If we want a healthy, sustainable industry, training regimes need to be embedded to ensure it automatically continues in down-time,” says Attfield.

Facilities seem willing to buy into a change in corporate culture. Lip Sync runs lunchtime training sessions for junior staff at which more experienced artists talk about a shot on which they are working. “Our training won’t switch off at the end of March,” confirms Hussey.

“Thanks to investment from Skillset, we’ve developed a modular online training system that will remain; it will only need updating.”

Last September, Dneg TV parent Double Negative, plus Framestore, MPC, Sony and Ubisoft, formed the

Next Generation Skills Academy to deliver new nationally recognised qualifi cations, higher-level apprenticeships and continuing professional development. It secured £2.7m from the government, plus £3.6m from industry, over three years.

Another important concern is that the industry, as Jellyfi sh Pictures’ founder Phil Dobree says, is “too skewed towards 25 to 35 year-old white men”.

Smith agrees. “The way to promote innovation and creativity is through diversity of approach and thought process.”

Hope for change is invested in campaign groups such as Animated Women UK, which works to bring down these barriers but also notes the continuing existence of a gender pay gap.

Improving the situation requires long-term education to shift the perception of VFX from one of relationships with computers in darkened rooms to one in which all students appreciate the full range of careers on offer.

ANIMATION: STRETCHED RESOURCES

After decades in which television animation was dominated by financially incentivised production in Canada, Ireland or France, talent is returning to the UK.

The tax relief for animation, introduced in April 2013, attracted £52m of production spend in its first year, but has also stretched human resources. The biggest concerns are a lack of people with training in industry-standard software or experience in key production roles.

“As more episodic animation gets done here, we are going to need more people with traditional skills,” says Jellyfish founder Phil Dobree.

Jellyfish is producing 52 x 11-minute series Floogals for NBC Universal kids’ channel Sprout and Dobree was surprised at the difficulty in recruiting for it.

“There is a lot of talent trained in photo-realistic animation, but less in the traditional principals of 2D cartoon or ‘stretch and squash’ style of characterisation, movement and timing,” he says.

Lupus Films is in production with Welsh animation studio Cloth Cat on Toot The Tiny Tugboat for Channel 5, and is also crewing up for a hand-drawn feature. A shortage of 2D paint artists has led managing director Ruth Fielding to scout in Europe.

Lupus is hoping to establish a course at Bournemouth University allowing students to get handson with projects and learn more of the skills that will make them employable.

“Across the UK, high-level storyboarding, production coordinators and production managers are required,” she says.

“At an executive level, there’s a lack of legal and finance knowledge. We have the keys to a chest of animation tax credit, but we don’t necessarily have the skills, for example, to arrange a loan against the credit.”