Visual effects is a very competitive market worldwide. The volume of work being produced today would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. The field of VFX artistry has expanded enormously.
The reasons you want to use VFX:
- Impossible to do in real life
- Risk doing in real life
- High EXPENSIVE to do in real life
- To improve/enhance the storytelling
There two main things that makes Visual effects expensive : Talents and Facility
Talents
Visual effects require people who have developed very specific skills through years of training and experience. A skilled effects artist costs a lot because demand is actually very high.
Unskilled effects artists can be cheap, wage wise, but usually, this simply means they take longer to get the same results or will produce results which are quite bad.
The highly skilled labor in the entertainment industry can represent an easy 40–50% of a company’s annual expenditures.
Also, it is not only the explosions and tsunamis that are executed by the visual-effects artist, but so many shots also have minor things like sky-replacement, crew removal, rotoscope, color-corrections and furthermore works.
To create a full VFX for a movie you need several 1000 artists for several weeks and months.
Facility
VFX is a niche market Margins are thin because schedules change, the creative direction frequently changes, and competition with other houses to get the work.
The company simply has to earn a specific amount of cash flow to stay in business.
Budgets shrink every year. It is expected to do more shots with better quality for the same price or less
A. Maintenance
Based on the size of the company, electricity, rent, Software licenses already can be a big constant cost that needs to be paid on a regular basis.
B. High-end computer systems
VFX is compute-intensive. A single VFX frame can take up to 12 hours to render depending on complexity. A single frame can take 12 hours to render.
C. Storage
A single iteration of a single frame takes around 50-100MB or so.
That’s around 5GB per second. Multiply that by 20 iterations and it’s 100GB/second or 12TB per show.
Studios also need to maintain backups of all this data. It’s difficult to put a dollar value on how much this kind of storage costs.
Final Thoughts :
The short version why is that it takes hundreds upon thousands of people working hundreds upon thousands of hours to create CGI, and those people, along with the facilities they work at, need to be paid for.
Good CGI is expensive, great CGI is REALLY expensive.
Next time you see a CGI movie try to stay until the end of the credits and see how many VFX people are involved in the production.
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