Hasta La Motion!

Eric Glatt is a former intern on the film Black Swan who, along with Alex Footman, sued Fox Searchlight for unpaid wages related to his internship on the film, which was unpaid. His case has been getting some recent attention from the New York Times, KCRW’s The Business with Kim Masters and other media outlets since the judge on the case recently issued a clear ruling in their favor and as other unpaid internship suits are filed. ProPublica also recently launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for an investigative reporting into unpaid internships and a recent suit against PBS’s Charlie Rose was settled with the interns being awarded over $110,000 in back pay.

In light of all this, and with internships ubiquitous in the motion design, visual effects, and animation fields, Bran Dougherty-Johnson spoke to Eric recently:

Bran Dougherty-Johnson: So I’ve been following the stories about your suit and have read a bunch of articles — the Stephen Greenhouse article, and I just listened to that KCRW interview that you did the other day — and it reminded me that this is a really important issue that we should cover on Motionographer because everyone in our industry is working in animation and visual effects.
Eric Glatt: Right, and you’ve got your own big labor dispute going on.
BDJ: Yes we do, and internships have always been a big part of all the studios I’ve worked at.
EG: Sure, that’s how they keep their costs down.

BDJ: Can you give just a little description of the case against Fox Searchlight and tell me where the case stands now?
EG: So basically, if you’re in the industry, it comes as no surprise that studios, producers, employers control their budgets, among other ways, by using unpaid labor that they called interns. What might be an entry-level, or even sometimes an experienced-level job and add the word intern to it, and they don’t have to pay for it. It’s an industry that’s basically come to structure itself around that practice. It got to the point where I realized I was maybe in a unique position to do something about it by filing a lawsuit, particularly by doing so in a Federal court and getting a lot of attention paid to the practice — and hopefully by doing so, bringing that practice to an end.

BDJ: Now the judge ruled in your favor and ruled that you and the other plaintiff, Alex Footman, were employees. Is the case over?
EG: No, no! Since the case was initially filed the case was amended. About a year afterwards, we expanded the breadth of the suit to include an unpaid internship program run out of the Fox Entertainment Group corporate offices. And that was more of a formal, organized internship program also using unpaid interns. And there’s a different class representative, representing that class. What happened is that the judge agreed that Alex Footman and I were really employees who should have been paid at least the minimum wage, as required by law, and he certified the class of employees in that corporate program for which Eden Antalik was the representative.

BDJ: And they’re still working on it?
EG: It actually gets a little more complicated than that. It appears that Fox is taking all the initial steps necessary to file an appeal. That would probably, depending on how that procedure goes, bring all the claims before a Circuit level judge.

BDJ: So the case is ongoing?
EG: The ruling is final until Fox appeals — which it looks like they intend to do.

BDJ: Would there be a monetary reward, would you get paid?
EG: Yeah, we’re suing for back pay and covered expenses. For example, I used my cell phone and my laptop to help them make a profit. So we would get back pay, expenses, and damages. Damages typically in a back-pay lawsuit are two times whatever it was you’re owed. So it’s not a lottery ticket by any means, but yeah, it’s a lawsuit over pay.

BDJ: Okay, and that’s still to be determined?
EG: Right, that would come after the case is completely finished. Including the class-action. We have to wait until the whole thing has worked itself out.

BDJ: Right, so this could take another year or so…
EG: It could take quite a bit of time.

BDJ: What was the experience you wanted to gain taking on the internship?
EG: I took on the internship in the way that most people would: I had worked on mostly independent documentary films before that, and it looked like, wow to work on a feature with a name director, name stars attached to it — it sounded like a way to make connections and to open up a door to a different tier of film-making.

BDJ: And what was it that you were actually doing on the film?
EG: I performed all the normal roles and duties of an accounting clerk — handling paperwork, petty cash, checks, bank runs, set runs, purchase orders, all the personal files, a lot of day-to-day office work, keeping the accounting department workflow going.

BDJ: What did you hope bringing a lawsuit against Fox would accomplish?
EG: By getting a federal judge to agree that this practice isn’t in compliance with the law, what I hoped to accomplish is to bring this practice to an end, and to get people paid for their labor.

BDJ: Right, so to get a final ruling and to change the culture?
EG: Oh yeah.

BDJ: Cause it’s still a very fuzzy issue. On the Motionographer site we have a job listing. I just searched through it today and found an internship — it pays a stipend, but it’s $30 a day. [Note NY State minimum wage is $7.25 / hour]
EG: Right, it’s not wages. It doesn’t satisfy the requirement that employers who profit from people’s labor pay at least federal and state mandated minimum wage.

BDJ: So you are now studying law at Georgetown, and you’ve moved away from film production?
EG: Yeah, I have started a student group here to bring more law and justice-related documentaries and documentary filmmakers to campus and to the DC audience. In terms of working on productions, I basically realized in taking this step, it was going to be a foreclosed option.

BDJ: In taking the step of the lawsuit?
EG: Yeah. But I realized there was something bigger at stake than whether or not I worked on the next feature film. The feature film will still get made, whether or not I’m involved. But this was something that someone needed to come forward to do.

BDJ: And taking on the lawsuit, did that drive your decision to go to law school?
EG: Not directly, but they both came from the same place. They both came from a place of my deciding to do more, basically to, speak out more truthfully and honestly about what I think about things and how I think things should be – to seek out a little more justice in this world and to put more of my ethics and politics into practice.

BDJ: Are you interested in labor law at all?
EG: I am interested in labor law, and I’m particularly interested in a not-unrelated problem which I see as the dependency of even the legal system on a lot of volunteer and underpaid lawyering. The government uses unpaid legal labor. Non-profits providing necessary social services depend on voluntary and underpaid legal services. And I think ultimately in terms of long-term sustainability that isn’t really a viable way to get the peoples’ work done, to achieve the social aims that society has deemed on the one hand necessary, but on the other hand hasn’t figured out how to pay for.

BDJ: Is that the pro-bono, professional requirement?
EG: Yes, that falls into the area of my concern. I’m afraid thatpeople who provide pro-bono legal services may think they’re doing such a great thing, and maybe at the individual level they are, but at a structural level, what it means is that a lot of people aren’t receiving legal services at all or they end up receiving legal services from people whose time is just so split and compacted that they really can’t provide the quality of services that they really deserve.

BDJ: Right, they’re not getting the best representation that money can buy.
EG: No, not at all, which money is buying on the other side of the table all the time. It’s not something I think a lot of people want to hear. But they didn’t really want to hear about the unpaid internship issue either.

BDJ: And now the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA), I think in the last year or two, they re-issued the rules about unpaid internships or clarified something, is that true?

EG: No, what happened was in April 2010, the US Department of Labor (DOL) issued Factsheet #71, which outlines what the rules are, how they interpret the rules governing unpaid internships at for-profit employers. For example, the six-point test that they reiterate in that Factsheet was not devised by the DOL — that comes from a 1947 Supreme Court case. It was a case that settled the question about when a for-profit employer has people on their premises that are just trainees and they’re not helping the employer operate their business — if anything they’re actually impeding the operations of the business from time-to-time, they’re just there to receive training, they’re not helping.

You know, that was 9 years after the FLSA was passed and established a minimum wage. The Supreme Court looked at these factors, and it was a one-week training program at a rail yard. And they were like, you know what, if people on your premises that are taking away from your normal operations because you have to dedicate staff and resources to supervise them, to train them. And you’re not the sole beneficiary of it, i.e. you’re not training them like in today’s day and age with proprietary software, then it’s something that they’re learning that they can apply to any other employer. All you’re really doing is expanding the total skilled labor market. Yeah, if you meet all those criteria, and it looks like all they’re doing is learning, then it doesn’t make sense that you would have to pay them. It’s like a common-sense application of the minimum wage law. Why would you want to pay people who aren’t actually providing labor to you? So that’s what an unpaid trainee at a worksite should be doing, not contributing labor to your profitability but rather just there to learn.

BDJ: The other issue that always come up is that internships are educational, that they’re getting school credit.
EG: I think schools and universities have completely abrogated their responsibility to their students. They may make an argument in their own minds that the value of experiential learning is so high that it makes sense to confer credit for work done — experiential work done on a work site. But they’re not paying attention to the labor law. They’re not in a position where they should be arbiters of labor law. They’re educational institutions, they’re not labor institutions. They’re not paying attention to the fact that this is undermining the health of the labor market  their students are graduating into. As you know, in the industry these aren’t internships that are performed exclusively by college students. Now young adults and employers have internalized the idea that young, relatively inexperienced labor – if they can call it an intern or an internship – suddenly doesn’t need to be compensated.

BDJ: The new entry-level job.
EG: At the same time, students are saddled with astronomical debts. It’s a social experiment we’ve never engaged in before. People, before they’ve even begun their working lives, have six-figure debt on their shoulders. And all that does is profit banks with their interest payments. It’s absolutely unconscionable.

BDJ: Especially in our industry. People have gone to school for a while to learn art and animation.
EG: This is not unskilled labor. It’s basically what employers consider easily replaceable labor. That’s what I think a lot of people neglect when they think about who the minimum wage is meant to protect or who organized labor is meant to protect. It’s not about low-skilled. It’s about being easily replaceable. It’s about defending workers from the employers’ ability to dangle the threat of finding someone else to do it if you won’t do it on their terms.

BDJ: You mentioned before that you’re familiar with the visual effects labor struggle.
EG: Oh yeah, I’ve seen it a little bit from the sidelines. And it’s totally interrelated…
BDJ: Cool, well it’s just interesting to hear someone who’s not in the industry, just that you’re knowledgeable about it.
EG: Well, I pay attention a lot to labor issues related to the film industry and other culture production industries. [The VFX industry] was brought to my attention particularly around the Oscars because of the protest outside [the event venue]. I think they’re both examples of studios figuring out quote-unquote clever ways to control their budgets. Meanwhile they’re making absolutely ridiculous profits. What was it, Life of Pi? — I mean, they made oodles of money.

BDJ: They sure did. Well, thanks so much Eric for taking the time to talk to us.
EG: Great! Oh, thank you.

Links:
Department of Labor: Factsheet #71
KCRW: A Former Intern Who Sued Fox Speaks Out
NYTimes: Judge Rules That Movie Studio Should Have Been Paying Interns
ProPublica: When Is It OK to Not Pay an Intern?
Reuters: PBS’ Charlie Rose settles with unpaid interns as lawsuits spread
Intern Labor Rights:
NYTimes: The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not?

Posted on Motionographer

WISH LIST is an animated film, directed and animated by UK based Andrew Griffin (aka GRIFF) with illustrations from Scott Garrett. The amazing humour, the uniqueness of each character and the great illustration, makes this one of my favourite animations of all times.

Hat tip to Carolina Monza and Fred Cordier.

Director, animation & Sound Design: Griff
Original concept & Illustration: Scott Garrett
Written by Scoff & Gritt
Voices: Steve Furst
Commissioned by Chris Shepherd
Produced in association with Lupus Films for Channel 4 / Random Acts
Copyright Scott Garrett & Griff 2013

Posted on Motionographer

New Zealand-based Assembly is an intriguing shop. Headquartered on a tiny (but beautiful) island nation, their portfolio ranges across character work, high-end vfx and interactive experiences. Their structure is equally hard to pin down. One part collective, one part production company, they ooze the ethos of an artist collective but their output suggests the rigor of a well-run ship.

The team was kind enough to tell us a little about their shop and give us the inside scoop on a few of their projects.

Background and Basics

How would you guys describe the general structure of Assembly? A production company? A director collective? Something else?

Those all work! To be honest, we have tried to avoid putting a ‘service’ description on the company. We like to keep our options open in the hope that we get a look in on a whole range of creative endeavours. We love to shoot, animate, code, build, design, illustrate, fabricate — all at the service of a good brief.

Who were the founding members of Assembly? How did they arrive at the decision to start a new shop?

Damon Duncan, Jonny Kofoed, Matt Trott and Rhys Dippie are the four owners of Assembly. We all worked together at a bigger shop and realised we wanted to try running things our own way by getting closer to the idea — making it less about the hardware and more about being a creative partner with our clients. Don’t get us wrong… we still have all the gear… but it is not something that needs to come up in the creative conversation anymore.

Being four partners with a good cross section of skills also meant we could take on complete jobs without having to hire too many people as we were starting up. Which essentially meant we could secure a couple of jobs and pay for gear and rent without having to visit Mr Bankman. So all our money went into setting up the company the way we wanted to.

How do you get work done while surrounded by the staggering beauty of New Zealand?

We work in a brick bunker with no windows. It’s the only way to avoid distraction.

What’s the creative scene like in Auckland? Are there like-minded folks you can “talk shop” with?

New Zealand is renowned for punching above its weight when it comes to creative endeavours and this is a warm, primordial creative soup that we live in.

New Zealand is just another place with another timezone to do work in and really any boundary is based on ideas rather than geography. Being small geographically ensures that we are exposed to a myriad of ideas and opinions, arts and sciences, philosophies and political stances. Politically, New Zealand is one of the only countries in the world where our last Prime Minister was also the Minister for the Arts, overseeing and progressing a portfolio that encompassed the film industry as well as all of the creative arts.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that New Zealand is a small market, in terms of advertising dollars. Is most of your work for Australia? Other markets?

It is not a huge market but the agencies are strong in New Zealand and consistently rank highly on the international award circuit. We’ve always worked internationally and in fact have just signed with Falcon in the USA (a Stardust company) which is hugely exciting for us. We are longtime friends with Dex Deboree and are looking forward to working with him and his team.

Sudafed

The Sudafed spot (posted at the top of this article) is just so well crafted. How “complete” was the script when you guys received it? What did you bring to it?

The original thought from the agency was that it would be predominantly 2D with few 3D elements to highlight the X Ray workings — but we were pretty keen to steer it down the full 3D path.

We also wanted it to feel ‘hand touched’ — so the character design was kept simple, like you could actually make them out of plasticine. This also drove the idea of animating the commercial on 2’s. To make his head grow and get heavier also just seemed to make more sense being made out of a solid material.

The character animation is spot on. Was there a particularly challenging sequence?

Fortunately, we made a well-developed 2D animatic early on in the production, which researched well — so we had a strong base to work from when going into 3D. This helped to drive expectation and led to very smooth sign off and delivery process.

This commercial is a great example of leaving ourselves nowhere to hide by providing internally imposed limitations to the brief. By locking off to a single camera angle for the entire commercial, the character animation was left to carry the story and direction of the piece. We believe that this helped people connect and relate to the characters by giving them space and time to emote and deliver nuanced performances, something often missing from hyperactive, camera driven work.

It appears as though your artists each have their own showreels. Is that so? If so, that’s a new one for me — and very impressive.

We have worked very hard to keep a Senior Artist base, essentially allowing for a head of department in each of their specific fields or area of expertise. This enables us to add freelancers when the job requires and still have a small, core senior team to ensure consistency of quality and most importantly creative.

Each of these artists has had a long and varied career in their own rights, and we felt it would be crazy to not let the world see how awesome they are!

Anchor

How did this project come about?

We have a great creative relationship with Colenso BBDO here in Auckland, and we had started talking to them about a job that involved glass cows. We got very excited by the concept, and we really wanted to test out the visual execution of this idea.

There was some nervousness around these cows not retaining a level of engagement or looking a little creepy, so a test to prove the concept really helped everyone get on the same page with the look and potential of the piece. They had talked to us very early on in the creative process, as this was a huge product for their client and had been in development for a few years. This enabled a good amount of R&D time, and allowed us to test some theories.

Was developing the look of the cow challenging?

There were many challenges involved with developing the final look of the cow. We spent a lot of time working with different looks around the eyes and face, ensuring there was engagement without the cow looking like it had dead eyes. It is often the subtle things that make the biggest difference.

We also realized early on that the amount of liquid we had sloshing around inside a very fast moving cow would become like shaking a cocktail shaker full of milk, a messy, indefinable mass within the cow that wouldn’t read properly. Also, the physics of that amount of moving liquid would essentially bowl the cow over.

We removed all of the directional animation from the cow when simulating the liquids, so that the actions, timing and motion of the liquid felt correct without it having to calculate the translational forces exerted on the milk.

The cow breakdown video has been very well received. Did you guys consciously set out to rethink the way breakdowns are usually presented?

Yeah, we definitely looked into the way that breakdowns are presented. They are often leaning towards very technical or they are very surface, just touching on topics or providing frustratingly simplified versions of very complex issues. There is a lot of information that is very interesting to present to our clients that you wouldn’t necessarily present to industry.

We are very big on educating our clients so that they can become involved with the process rather than feeling like they are on the outside of it, empowering them so that the money that they are spending is ending up on the screen rather than working through things they don’t have the knowledge or experience to truly understand.

This style of breakdown came from a desire to make this type of information accessible and understandable for both technically minded people as well as our clients and people outside the industry… ie, our mums!

The Future!

So is there a longterm goal for Assembly? World domination or stay small and nimble?

Assembly was set up with a desire to get our artists closer to the idea, to be as involved with the creative process as intimately as possible, following trends and technologies so that the idea is at the core of all our decision making, not whether we had the biggest computers or not.

This will always be the driving factor as to the scale and size of our business. In such a changeable and constantly evolving industry, it feels like a mistake to put a stake in the ground and say this is who we are and this is what we do. We are in service to the creative and willing to use art and science to solve any problem.

Digital: You guys did a bang-up job on The V Motion Project and you have an FWA award on your shelf. Any aims on doing more digital work?

Definitely! We have always been involved in interesting digital projects and have recently bolstered the digital roster with our Lead Developer Jeff Nusz joining the team.

It’s exciting jumping onto jobs like the V Motion Project, where the outcome is something new and we get to play with code and a more generative design process — then handing over control  to a live human performance — which was a somewhat unnerving experience for guys who are used to crafting a finished piece of work. The idea of setting up an environment for other people to experience or play in is a whole new design challenge and jobs like the V Motion Project have exposed us to some great new opportunities.

We’ve actually got few FWA’s for various project we’ve been involved in — The New Zealand Tourism job on our site involved building a 12 metre tower with a motion controlled camera in some of our county’s most beautiful locations. We then shot timelapse as the camera tracked from top to bottom. This sequence was then attached to the scroll bar on the website so when you scroll up and down you essentially control the camera moving through four iconic locations.

So even though the end product was a website it still required high end tech, production, and visual craft to pull off — thats the kind of digital work we love being involved in.

Posted on Motionographer

Password: cantor

Shynola has been releasing some clever movie marketing for their forthcoming feature, “The Red Men.” The latest is a research film from Monad Life Science, creators of the fictional Dr. Easy robot at the center of the film’s story. The film serves the dual purpose of building the backstory behind the Dr. Easy robot while also showing off the cool machine vision system Shynola has dreamed up.

In case you missed it, here’s a short film/prologue for The Red Men.

Posted on Motionographer

Elegant typography and buttery smooth animation from Buck make this spot for Apple a memorable, classy experience.

Posted on Motionographer