(CartoonBrew) MPC, Studio behind ‘The Lion King,’ visual effects and the Sonic redesign Shuts Down Vancouver Studio

[ultracal31]

And you know what's worse? I guarantee nearly everyone on the team knew that initial look wasn't right, but got overridden by some exec.

This is horrible.

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Despite what was reported I suspect all of the animation and lighting/comping had to be redone for Sonic

 

[nanhacott]

I wonder if moving into game development could work out for at least some of them. For one reason or another, the tax incentives for growing game development jobs in Vancouver is lucrative.

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That's what I did. I was a technical director at a VFX company in Vancouver, then jumped ship for a gaming company. That was five years ago, I've never regretted the decision.

That said, game studios have also been closing left and right here. But the other game companies seem to be able to absorb a lot more of recently-laid-off people than VFX. A lot of VFX people I know really struggled to find work when they were laid off, whereas most of the game dev people I know landed on their feet at another company.

Feels like the game companies here ebb and flow, while the VFX companies just inevitably implode with no one to take their place.

 

[RadzPrower]

I think if they're saying the Sonic redesign did not cause the studio to crunch they're technically correct, because I would say that they are correct that very little work was done with the original model beyond the trailer scenes.

This is of course different from saying that the studio did not crunch. Obviously they did, regularly (can you really call that "crunch" and not "long-term exploitation of labor" though?) but they would have done that no matter what the deal with the Sonic movie ended up being.

Anyway times like this I wish I'd saved the "it's crunch time" panel from one of the early Archie Knuckles miniseries issues.

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Yeah, there are so many ways that people get around the moniker of "crunch time" to look better. In this case, it's likely that they didn't put in significant ADDITIONAL work as you say, but in other cases, it's the whole "we don't make people work, but they really just love their work" when in reality they know they'll be fired if they don't overwork themselves.

Wordplay at its finest.