When it comes to blockbuster movies, the teams responsible for visual effects are often the unsung heroes. Top tier CGI has become a requisite for every big budget project, meaning that the effects are rarely singled out for praise, but they’ll quickly find themselves subjected to heavy criticism if they’re not up to scratch.
Tom Hooper’s Cats may have been a disaster on every level including the VFX, but since the musical was released, it came to light that the team was worked to the very bone, including the one animator who had to painstakingly comb through every frame and remove all of the digital buttholes from existence.
Disney, meanwhile, are now finding themselves subjected to legal action from facial capture software company Rearden, who were integral to the creation of many major characters in the studio’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Beauty and the Beast and Avengers: Endgame, and are seeking a share of the multi-billion dollar profits based on their contribution to the finished product.
The Mouse House have moved quickly to dismiss the case, and released a scathing putdown of Rearden’s reasoning behind filing the lawsuit, which you can see below.
“There are limitless reasons why consumers pay to see any particular motion picture, including (among many others) stars, script, costumes, and music. It is highly speculative to say which of these factors lead people to pay to see a motion picture, but at least these are things that consumers actually see visually or hear aloud. Rearden has no evidence that consumers decided to see any of the Motion Pictures at issue here because a third-party vendor, months (or more) before the Motion Picture’s release, made temporary RAM copies of software that no consumer saw.”
It doesn’t appear as if Rearden have much of a case against the multi-billion dollar corporation, but the speed at which Disney moved against the lawsuit doesn’t bode well for the thousands of artists employed by the visual effects industry that already feel as though they’re severely overworked and underpaid for their incredibly valuable contributions to some of the most popular movies in history. Which largely go unacknowledged by audiences who are so caught up in the action that they don’t pay much thought to how it’s created in the first place.
