Anyone not demanding a % of the gross revenue in a negotiation with a soulless corpo is fucking insane.
If you accept a % of the net profit you will end up having to pay them after they twist their books into pretzels to claim a loss despite huge windfall profits.
This data isn't being used for contract negotiations in this instance though, it's something the union released to the public in order to argue that they aren't asking for much from these companies. If that's their line of reasoning, it would be honest to show how much these demands would take out of the business's profits, not out of their revenue. It'd still be a pretty small amount - using a much larger revenue figure just makes them look dishonest.
Well, % of gross is something that's completely beyond the expertise of 90% of the public.
I certainly have no idea what a "fair" % of the gross is.
People attacking them for demanding a % of the gross though.. should get out of the business of business if they're in it, and be glad they're not if they're not.
Asking for a percentage of sales can be appropriate in the right context. However, finding the right percentage that guarantees decent wages for the union employees while keeping the company a going concern (ignoring the bookkeeping and tax planning corps use to minimize their tax liability) and management happy can be a challenge. It doesn't help when both sides care about their own self-interests than what works best for the company as a whole to keep it profitable.
EDIT: Seriously, but what means is a member able to say "This is enough, I want to get back to work," considering the lack of information combined with the cult of "solidarity"? Members kicked this whole thing off by voting to strike in overwhelming number, but when is the vote to end it?
It all depends on how tight their personal finances get. The last prolonged strike that affected workers in my part of Kiwi Land lasted so long that some of the union members who were proud and emphatic about striking early on eventually crossed the picket line to go back to work because they had too many bills to pay (mortgage, college/private school tuition, etc.) that strike pay couldn't and didn't cover the longer the strike lasted. However, they tried to keep it on the down low as much as possible to maintain the facade that union members are in total solidarity with each other and the leadership wanting to strike until a deal was reached and ratified.
I can't see the WAG and SAG-AFTRA doing this, but the more the lower level workers they're supposedly fighting for feel the financial pinch of being on strike, the more some of them might reconsider the value of it.
Joe's one movie in 2022 was being an associate producer for an Apple original film called The Greatest Beer Run Ever. He has nothing listed for 2021. Not one single thing. In 2020 he had two movies come out, one called The Au Pair Nightmare and one of the twenty-four God awful Bruce Willis cash grab flics Bruce did before his brain went to mush called Hard Kill. He has one credit for 2019 and that's being a producer for some show called Conspiracy Coverups!. In 2018 he has one credit and that's being a producer for one of those horror anthology movies called Nightmare Cinema.
So now we're in a bit of a conundrum.
Not only does Joe not seem to know exactly when he did a thing, or at the most credible doesn't seem to agree on the timeline, but his point to dunk on the troll about him being a trust fund baby, I have no idea if he is or not because there's basically nothing about him other than people confuse him with the good Joe Russo, is dumb but he wants it to be profound. By his count in 4 years he's only had 7 finished projects. Instead of going the Roger Corman route and just unleashing a deluge of shlock, he only did 7 projects, 6 by my count, of varying degrees of involvement and none of them of any kind of quality despite how proud Joe is.
I doubt that another pass would've improved anything that he's touched because I think he's just bad at what he does.
Speaking personally, I hate you all. I want to see you rip each other's throats out. I want you out on the street and starving. Do I owe Joe something because he was a director for something called iNOODS? Is Tom worth sparing because he was a writer for the 2011 movie Playing House? I've looked at your works and the works of almost everyone else involved with this strike and found you wanting. For years you've shoveled shit in my face, called me a simpleton or cousin fucker who's too inbred to understand the greatness of your propaganda, and after I paid to see the best of your milquetoast dreck you want me to support your tantrum because YOU are the ones now getting replaced?
Though, perhaps they're right. My being on the wrong side of history has made me a bit harsh. I know you're suffering Joe. I know times are hard. You're showing your struggle on your twitter.
When your livelihood and very survival is being held hostage by evil corporate overlords and you need to convince the public to back you sometimes you just gotta kick back and have some fun!
I've had some impressive wines from ONX, but they're definitely restricted to special occasions for me - $50 a pop for most of their bottlings iirc, many go for higher. Lowest is around $30. Nice to see he's living it up over his vacation strike.
Anyone not demanding a % of the gross revenue in a negotiation with a soulless corpo is fucking insane.
If you accept a % of the net profit you will end up having to pay them after they twist their books into pretzels to claim a loss despite huge windfall profits.
The entity you contract with will never make a profit. The guy who wrote the book Forrest Gump was based on sold the rights to adapt it for $350,000 and 3% of profits. He only* got the $350,000, because the legal entity that made Forrest Gump lost over $62 million, despite making a movie that cost $55 million to make and grossed around $678 million.
*He later sued Paramount, and they reached a settlement where Paramount paid him seven figures for the rights to his sequel novel.
You only need one or two A-list actors for a film, and you don't even need the actor. You can just pay the estate to use the likeness of Alec Guinness forever and never pay an actual actor anything ever again.
THE George Lucas has weighed in.
This thread is now over.
In b4 "hopenothate" hitpiece in the guardian alerting the cathedral to Lucas having a KF account.
I’m gonna be honest, I’m one hundred times more sympathetic towards VFX artists than I am to writers and performers. I can actually get behind this.
That said, they could be shooting themselves in the foot. Writers are closer to having their numbers thinned by AI, but VFX artists are not far behind.
MiHoYo is already using vfx ai to do 90% of the grunt-work creating their waifus for Star Rail
I remember bored-browsing the jew toob and finding a pink anime rabbit using diffusion to create waifus.
Took about 40 minutes of prompting to produce an adequate one.
I know some people deep into avitar creation for vrchat and they can spend a day on them.
1 day down to 40 minutes is an absurd obsolescence of people.
I’d argue VFX artists are actually closer to the chopping block due to the process not really needing human involvement (outside of maybe being told what to do). Meanwhile writers are still needed for some vague kind of human touch- at least, if you want to make anything vaguely quality- especially if you want preachy symbolism or natural-sounding dialogue, you’ll need to wait a damn long time for AI to do it just as well as a human. (Even though the current humans behind Hollywood schlock are doing a dogshit job at proving my point, their most haphazard and awkward deliveries will never be as off-putting as the stiffness of an AI’s work.)
I sincerely wish them a ton of luck in unionizing and fighting for the best compensation packages they can get. I'm in total solidarity with them if they need to strike to show their seriousness, even if that strike lasts years.
Also they should probably get their CVs in order since their parents aren't quite the same as the writers' parents.
I’d argue VFX artists are actually closer to the chopping block due to the process not really needing human involvement (outside of maybe being told what to do). Meanwhile writers are still needed for some vague kind of human touch- at least, if you want to make anything vaguely quality- especially if you want preachy symbolism or natural-sounding dialogue, you’ll need to wait a damn long time for AI to do it just as well as a human. (Even though the current humans behind Hollywood schlock are doing a dogshit job at proving my point, their most haphazard and awkward deliveries will never be as off-putting as the stiffness of an AI’s work.)
Decent, maybe, but still rather obviously made by AI the moment you hear it. Singing an existing song is also incomparable to constructing metaphor and symbolism from scratch, though I don’t doubt that AI will be able to do both in due time. I just think creating special effects would be much easier to automate (and actually have greater incentive for automation, especially if the new strikes are anything to go by) than decent scriptwriting.
I love the AI covers of cartoon characters. They bring to life that dream of having your favorite voice-actor sing a song as X Character at conventions without worry of them getting in legal trouble for it.
That was almost certainly the Kiwi vtuber thread's patron deity Pipkin Pippa, in the process of memeing an entire vtubing group into existence (i.e., people took the character designs and created avatars based on them, some of whom are now getting up towards 10k subs).
I love the AI covers of cartoon characters. They bring to life that dream of having your favorite voice-actor sing a song as X Character at conventions without worry of them getting in legal trouble for it.
I love the AI covers of cartoon characters. They bring to life that dream of having your favorite voice-actor sing a song as X Character at conventions without worry of them getting in legal trouble for it.
I've heard so many Patrick Star country covers that I'm actually wondering if Bill Fagerbakke should've tried dabbling in music. It definitely fills a void left by the Spongebob cast never doing an album.
That's two vfx departments that are voting to unionize at the Mouse House. Marvel's vfx team are having their vote as we speak (votes will be counted on 9/12) so the disney general vfx team will have to wait their turn. Is Lucasfilm the only other studio under disney to have their vfx department not unionize or are there others that could join in?
