Isn't that just bad business? It sucks they went bankrupt but if you're working on a film of that size and can't make a profit you've either spent a huge amount of money and the profits you get from the film don't cover it or you've worked out a shitty deal and you get very little profits from the movie.
To a degree - but VFX companies are pretty much forced to underbid themselves in order to get contracts in the first place.
Several companies (Cinesite is a prime example - they underbid on John Carter heavily) underbid in the hope they'll be picked for future films as well.
And because VFX is generally the last (ignoring final grading) part of doing a film (occasionally the VFX for shots is still being done up to 2 weeks before the film's released), there's a hard deadline set that the VFX companies most of the time have to meet.
Often, while doing the VFX, the director's changed their mind several times regarding what they actually want, and any planning / previz that was done to agree on the shot is wasted, as is a lot of the work that was done do get to that point. You can often reuse assets and stuff, but that's about it if there's a change of plans.
Thankfully over the past few years, previz of VFX is getting more and more realistic (in terms of animation / layout - the look is still quite crap), giving directors a more accurate view of what they'll be getting at the end.
tl;dr It's a hugely oversupplied market and having good business skills to navigate such a scenario and write smart contracting agreements is important.
Former R&H'er here. The VFX industry is plagued with three major issues: 1) it's a work for hire business with no equity participation, 2) up front bidding on dynamic deliverables, and 3) international government tax incentives create a nomadic existence for VFX people and the companies who have to chase the work from country to country (who ever offers the better tax incentive at the moment.)
As former R&H employee, do you find blender to be usable or are there big missing features? Does it's open source nature make it more usable because you can patch whatever you want, or are things like Maya customizable enough? Blender and Maya are both scriptable in Python. Blender uses Python 3. Would you say Python 3 was a good decision?
