IS THE END NEAR?

I've been noticing an interesting trend in a lot of Hollywood motion pictures lately, most recently with the new Rambo film. While we have all known for a long time that shooting a film in Eastern Europe can lead to huge cost savings in production, now I am starting to see even visual FX, and sometimes the post production, being done in Eastern Europe! Considering the average salary in places like the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czech Republic or even China, how long before the cost effectiveness of employing the talent there becomes too big a temptation for our local producers.

Of course no FX house in Eastern Europe or Asia is going to be putting ILM out of business anytime soon, but for the more typical effects seen in most horror and action movies, they are proving to be more than up to the task. Recent films like Dragon Wars and The Host, show that they are quickly catching up in the area of creatures. The all Chinese Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie shows that overseas studios can even do an amazing job on a Pixar style CGI picture at 1/3 the cost. The human characters in that film looked like they were literally ripped right out of a Disney 2D film and given 3D life.

I first took notice of this phenomenon when I saw the comic book influenced Ultra Violet. That film was not only shot digitally in China, but the visual FX and post production were done there as well. Ultra Violet, though, was a highly stylized film where even the live action sets, costumes and wigs looked bright and plastic, like something out of a video game. As time went on, though, I became more and more surprised as I watched a good mainstream film and then see the visual FX credits full of names like Miroslav Ivanovitch, and the FX house is yet another new one I never heard of.

Were it not for the need for a quick turnaround and definite high speed English communication, I think most TV work would already all be overseas. Canada no longer holds the promise it once did as their wages are not only rising, our dollar has fallen dramatically. We all know George Lucas is currently in Singapore doing his new Star Wars TV series. I have also spoken to some studios in the Philippines which have made some very interesting claims about how much work, even on major pictures, is being done undercover there, where English is a lot more common.

So is the end near? Is it only a matter of time before it makes little sense to a producer to hire expensive American CG artists to do a project? Does the notion that, with a few summer blockbuster exceptions, CG seems to be getting worse in film mean the audience doesn't really care? Is it possible that, even at a slightly lower quality, overseas FX will become the accepted norm?

Tags: movies