discussion Animators speak out about bad working conditions on Across the Spiderverse

[mystery]

VULTURE: Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’
 

Four Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse crew members say unsustainable working conditions are behind the success of the animated film. Over the past decade, Phil Lord and Chris Miller have distinguished themselves as the critically acclaimed writer-director-producers behind animated crowd-pleasers like their breakthrough Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and the billion-dollar Lego Movie franchise. (The duo have succeeded in live-action fare too though they were fired mid-movie from the stand-alone Star Wars prequel Solo. But it’s their work on the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that set a new bar for the animation industry, borrowing from vintage comic-books, psychedelia, and street art to create a novel visual language for not just superhero films but computer-animated work generally. Why don’t more animated movies look this good?
 

According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable. Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion. Four of these crew members agreed to speak pseudonymously about the sprint to finish the movie three years into the sequel’s development and production, a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style — in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.
 

While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments. Across the Spider-Verse was meant to debut in theaters in April of 2022, before it was postponed to October of that year and then June 2023 owing to what Entertainment Weekly reported as “pandemic-related delays.” However, the four crew members say animators who were hired in the spring of 2021 sat idle for anywhere from three to six months that year while Lord tinkered with the movie in the layout stage, when the first 3-D representation of storyboards are created.

 

As a result, these individuals say, they were pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year to make up for time lost and were forced back to the drawing board as many as five times to revise work during the final rendering stage. In these insiders’ telling, Across the Spider-Verse’s triumvirate of directors, Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers, were overshadowed by the forceful presence of Lord, who sought final approval for every sequence in the film.
 

Sony executives dispute these claims about Lord’s management style, including his alleged insistence on approving every sequence in the film, describing feature animation as a generally “iterative process.” According to Amy Pascal, the former Sony Pictures Entertainment chairperson who produced the three most recent live-action Spider-Man movies as well as both Into and Across the Spider-Verse, “over a thousand” artists and techs worked on Across the Spider-Verse alone, tasked with scripting, storyboarding, animating, editing, and visually enhancing the film. So it’s unsurprising, she says, that as many as 100 of the Across the Spider-Verse film crew would choose to depart the grueling project, which Pascal admits involved major overhauls to both the narrative and visuals, along the way.
 

Michelle Grady, the executive vice-president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks, agrees, claiming that Lord is not to blame for the delays. He, as the main messenger for editorial changes coming from the three co-directors, executive producers, Miller, and the studio, is instead a convenient target for worker ire. “It really does happen on every film,” she says of the revisions. “Truly, honestly, it can be a little bit frustrating, but we always try to explain that this is the process.”
 

“One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right,” adds Pascal. “If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is.” To the workers who felt demoralized by having to revise final renders five times in a row, the Spider-Verse producer says, “I guess, Welcome to making a movie.”

Crew thoughts:
 

It’s common for executives on a production to have a big say, but usually, they’re not as heavily involved as Phil was. As producer, Phil overrides all the directors. They are obviously in charge of directing, but if Phil has a note that contradicts their note, his note takes precedence. They have to do what Phil says. So there were constant changes and cuts. With Phil Lord, nothing is ever final or approved. Nothing was really set in stone. Nothing was ever done. Everything was just endlessly moving beneath our feet because they wanted it to be the best that it could be.
 

For animated movies, the majority of the trial-and-error process happens during writing and storyboarding. Not with fully completed animation. Phil’s mentality was, This change makes for a better movie, so why aren’t we doing it? It’s obviously been very expensive having to redo the same shot several times over and have every department touch it so many times. The changes in the writing would go through storyboarding. These are a lot of artists affected by one change. Imagine an endless stream of them.
 

Over 100 people left the project because they couldn’t take it anymore. But a lot stayed on just so they could make sure their work survived until the end — because if it gets changed, it’s no longer yours. I know people who were on the project for over a year who left, and now they have little to show for it because everything was changed. They went through the hell of the production and then got none of their work coming out the other side. The majority of the crew were sitting idle for half a year because Phil was holding up sequences in layout. That’s a lot of money. Those people are sitting there getting paid to do nothing. Because we hired a massive team of artists to accomplish the October date and then we found out it was pushed. The water behind the dam kept growing because Phil was holding off sequences. Then at a certain point, we ran out of time. The dam broke, water came flooding in, and all the departments were swamped, doing overtime. But that didn’t stop all the changes from coming in. Things just kept getting changed and cut and redone over and over again, even though shots were getting pushed through all the departments. There are sequences that we started in 2021 that we just finished in May. That is a lot of artists’ hours and time and energy and stress. This production has been death by a thousand paper cuts.
 

They’ve announced that Beyond the Spider-Verse will be released in March of next year. I’ve seen people say, “Oh, they probably worked on it at the same time.” There’s no way that movie’s coming out then. There’s been progress on the pre-production side of things. But as far as the production side goes, the only progress that’s been made on the third one is any exploration or tests that were done before the movie was split into two parts. Everyone’s been fully focused on Across the Spider-Verse and barely crossing the finish line. And now it’s like, Oh, yeah, now we have to do the other one.

Of the claim that Across the Spider-Verse production was idle for three to six months, Grady says, “We did have more time than we would normally have on a film waiting for things, maybe to get feedback. And we did have time when the pipeline wasn’t chockablock full. But I got to say, from my perspective, that was a remarkable gift. We are often so back to back with work, we never get the time to stop and let a film breathe and let it develop into what it needed to be.” Sony representatives declined to comment on whether the third Spider-Verse film will be delivered on time.

The biggest issue we’ve had is the writing. Phil had no idea what he wanted. Maybe he has difficulties making up his mind. I don’t know! Of course, it’s part of every movie where the director says, “What if we could do this or that?” And normally, it’s the producer’s role to push back. The problem is, Phil is the producer. He can’t push back against himself. In addition to Phil being all over the place and not settling on the story, he has a big issue with not being able to visualize layouts. When there’s a 3-D layout in front of him, I guess he can’t visualize what it’s going to look like afterward. Which is kind of a problem when you’re working in 3-D animation. In the animation industry, ask anyone he’s worked with: It’s his reputation. I know a ton of people who never want to work on a project with him again.
 

On my last project, I worked with a few artists who had done the first Spider-Verse, and one of them said to me, “As long as I work at Sony, I’m never working on a Phil Lord movie ever again.” All these artists at Sony who worked on the first one and Mitchells vs the Machines were like, “My God, I don’t know if I want to put myself through this again. Is it worth it?” I was warned. It was like they were amping themselves up to run a marathon. Something like 90 percent of the shots in the trailer are not in the movie. We re-engineered or reanimated, had different characters doing the same thing. It was purely a sequence of cool ideas they made us slap together while they “rested” the production. We were “idle”; that’s what they called it. And that was probably the biggest de-motivator for a lot of people: some of them had been flown over to Vancouver, gotten an apartment to work on this movie and then sat on their hands for maybe three months. The worst thing you can do to an artist is hire them and then tell them to do nothing. These people were like, How do you expect us to make this huge movie in less and less time? Each week that went by idle meant that later on it was going to be more insane. An avalanche of work is waiting.

Phil and Chris have a reputation. As producers, they used to come onto a project when it was 80 percent finished. Once they could ingest the movie properly and see what it is going to be like, they would come through with the guillotine and start enthusiastically editing. They’d come in and start to rewrite lines, throw out entire sequences, throw out animations all over the place, everywhere. And this is animation that people have been working on for a long time. Finished work, not some mock-up thing. I heard on Mitchells they did that. On Spider-Verse 1, they did that. Lego, same thing.
 

What that means is you have artists who feel extremely vulnerable. Sony lowballs them on their salary with the promise that overtime pay will boost their income to the level that it should be. You have people living in a really expensive city who have bad job security, who don’t know what’s ahead of them. And then they’re put in a position where the production is pressuring them to work all of their waking hours and to basically keep their chin up while the conditions are really, really shitty because if they don’t keep their chins up — if they don’t work hard — then who knows if they’ll be kept around? Phil does have good ideas. He speaks creatively really well, and listening to Phil can be inspiring. But the process is not inspiring. The analogy for the way Phil works, it’s getting a whole bunch of construction workers to make a building without a blueprint. You get them to start putting bricks on top of each other. You get the wood guys to put the wood in, put the windows in, get some metal scaffold in there. And he’s like, “Nah, knock that part down.”
 

Sony spokespeople deny that the studio “lowballs” animators’ salaries.
 

 

Edited July 28, 2023 by mystery

[réveuse]

Oh my gosh...what is this? I can't with studios treating their employees poorly.

[WildAmerican]

Working in VFX or animation truly seems like the pits 

[Archetype]

16 minutes ago, mystery said:

he has a big issue with not being able to visualize layouts. When there’s a 3-D layout in front of him, I guess he can’t visualize what it’s going to look like afterward. Which is kind of a problem when you’re working in 3-D animation.

15 minutes ago, mystery said:

Phil and Chris have a reputation. As producers, they used to come onto a project when it was 80 percent finished. Once they could ingest the movie properly and see what it is going to be like, they would come through with the guillotine and start enthusiastically editing. They’d come in and start to rewrite lines, throw out entire sequences, throw out animations all over the place, everywhere. And this is animation that people have been working on for a long time. Finished work, not some mock-up thing. I heard on Mitchells they did that. On Spider-Verse 1, they did that. Lego, same thing.

Basically Lord has the right vision but doesn't have the skills or patience to make it happen ethically, which is a problem.  

 

[réveuse]

6 minutes ago, WildAmerican said:

Working in VFX or animation truly seems like the pits 

Agreed.

[mystery]

1 minute ago, Archetype said:

Basically Lord has the right vision but doesn't have the skills or patience to make it happen ethically, which is a problem.  

 

This seems to be the same issue that was described with directors and department heads when VFX workers were talking about Marvel. They cannot visualize the end result and don't offer any clear direction except on finished work.

Not only that but Lord and Miller seem to have that issue with live action films as well, considering their firing from Solo due to the messy production.

Edited June 23, 2023 by mystery

[Life Savers]

Beyond won't be done by the deadline, at all. I don't know why they set such an early date to begin with. 

[Smarticle]

Capitalism at its worst.

 

At least the storyline came out okay

[Augmented]

The fact that some of this also allegedly happened with the first movie as well 

[illia]

Sadly this is not surprising

Working conditions and schedules in animation studios are almost always rough, same in Japan with anime

[Timber]

Yo we're okay waiting more than a year for the next one.

[ultraviolence.xx]

this website has broken my brain. i read “arianators”  

[OnlyManInTheWorld]

Can’t even imagine how much work it takes to create such a long and spectacular animation

[Archetype]

7 hours ago, mystery said:

This seems to be the same issue that was described with directors and department heads when VFX workers were talking about Marvel. They cannot visualize the end result and don't offer any clear direction except on finished work.

Not only that but Lord and Miller seem to have that issue with live action films as well, considering their firing from Solo due to the messy production.

It’s these types of people that honestly shouldn’t be given these opportunities despite their other talents.  You can’t just expect everyone else to bend over backwards for you to do something that should be a requirement of said position. 

[fridayteenage]

Quote

In these insiders’ telling, Across the Spider-Verse’s triumvirate of directors, Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers, were overshadowed by the forceful presence of Lord, who sought final approval for every sequence in the film.

Feels very Marvel where Feige generally takes over the movies and has creative control, rather than the directors.

 

 

[D/X]

Not shocked. I remember several years ago when VFX artists tried to unionize and were targeted by studios. Not surprising it's the same with animators. 

While the end result is something they should be proud of, it's not worth any of it if they are not making enough money out of it.

[Gorjesspazze9]

That’s horrible. They should unionize too. Us fans and consumers can wait until companies pay and have good work conditions for thier artist