So I was looking for “aki ross modeler” to look specifically for the amazing artist that model Aki Ross and what do I get ? “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within cast”~
No, I care about the person who MAKE the character from scratch in 3D, hell even the person who create the concept art, why are you telling me who are the cast who…by the way…all they do is “talk in a microphone with emotions and get millions” no I don’t care about these rich privileged people who get millions for talking and looking pretty while the people who actually does the REAL WORK get divided/distributed pay from a smaller pile.
Why are we living in a world where voice actors get the millions and we the artist get the scraps except for a few lucky ones ?
Sorry, I just need to vent…I just don’t get it…you see all those behind the scene stuff and you see the actors having fun and stuff…wow, HUGE TALENT looking pretty and talking to a mic…HUGE TALENT…deserve MILLIONS!!!
Modelers/Artist/VFX team working day and night and overnight ? Oh they don’t matter…no, they should be the one getting the millions, not the other way round.
I don’t mean to be a jerk, but I’m a film and VO actor, and I kinda take offense to this post. Hahah. I work my tail off to train, improve, and get better at my craft. I’ve been doing it for over 25 years, and have put my time in. I don’t want to get into it, but the craft of film and VO acting has a myriad very difficult layers, and you have to be firing on all cylinders before and during production. After the production, the ‘performer’ gets to stress about all the reviews and blah blah blah…
I’m also broke right now, while my main industry is completely shut down. I am not privileged.
I’m also a 3D artist. Acting is harder in my personal opinion. lol.
Dude, your opinion blindly burned another person’s life and profession. I don’t think you realized someone in that particular profession would be here–you thought it would be an open roast.
I’m not mad at all. Just throwing the other side of the coin 'atcha. MY opinion. You’re not nobody. You have strong, misguided feelings about this. It’s OK. Acting isn’t just getting up in front of a camera or microphone. That’s after you get a gig. IF you get a gig. There’s so much more that goes into it.
Believe it or not, I have put quite a lot of thought into this. And I have it worked out on a scale, So imagine a scale where at the very top of the scale is the idea. Just pure thought. Concepts. Intuitions and all of the finer ethereal things that go into pure creation. There may be a lot of work or preparation that goes into finally arriving at an idea. Or an idea might just land on you in a dream. Or doing something else. Whatever the case, the idea in the end is effortless. It has no weight no mass, nothing. It is just thought without any attachment to reality. It can be acted on, or not. Or it can change in a split second. Or it can evolve over time and morph into all kinds of shapes and concepts with absolutely no effort whatever in the physical realm. Yet at the same time, and idea is timeless. It can’t get old or erode. It can stay in the same pristine condition it was when you created it, or it fell on you. And idea is golden. And it is therefore on the very top of the scale.
Way way way down at the bottom of the scale is a solid piece of something. Like a rock. It just sits there. It just is. People walk over it. Cars drive over it. People take it from one place to another. It has no effort of its own. It has no volition. It can not change itself. It is just stuck there at the very bottom of the scale being a thing. It was probably the result of an idea at some point. But now it is just a thing. By itself it is completely worthless. The only worth it has is if someone has the idea to make use of it. “Hey those little rocks over there would be much better in our road than mud!”
So between these extremes of an ethereal idea and a rock, you have various stages along the way.
The closer you get to the idea, the more value there is. The closer you get to the rock in the road, the less value there is.
People with ideas and concepts are the writers directors the the producers. As you go down from there, basically the value drops in direct proportion to the physical effort it takes to implement the idea. The reason actors make as much as they do. Maybe even more than writers and directors in some cases, is because they are still primarily dealing with ideas. They are fluent at becoming something. Getting into character is basically changing your mind about things and then acting them out. Sure it takes a lot of training and preparation and so on. But again. The actors who can present the best ideas, (character transformations) usually are the ones who make the most money. Generally speaking of course.
People who slog all of the gear around make less. And the same is true in animation studios as well as other similar professions.
That is now it works. Right or wrong. But that is just how it is.
That is an interesting thought. Reminds me reading an article on a person, a freelancer, whose provided service is to invent names for new products. He might need anywhere from 2 weeks to a few months to come up with a name. And gets paid well, for simply thinking. For reference, he was the one who named the Smart car (for Daimler), the Froop Yogurt and a popular washing detergent (forgot which).
I think there’s much more than this. A well estabilished actor/actress gains more than a good script writer. Why? He/she also sells his/her own face on the screen. He/she hopefully makes a movie more valuable for the mass. How often you hear “From the director of…ABC, and the writer of XYZ”, that’s a way to sell a movie: if you liked ABC and/or XYZ you might get interset for this new product. I heared that also for people like Spielberg! But when it’s W.Smith or J.Travolta, or you name one(famous), it’s no use to say the movies they performed in. It’s their fame that it is selled. And this has a cost. It’s that high price cache this people get. And this also reflect in VO work for cartoons or even games.
The way I’ve thought about it before, the most important measure of the “worth” of a profession is how easily replaceable you are.
I think the easiest way to measure this is the length of time needed to learn it (for an average person!). Including studying PLUS the needed experience. The pay is proportional to this amount of time. Traditional manual labor (eg. working an assembly line), while hard work, can be taught in a few weeks. 3D modelling might need a low number of years. Being a surgeon or lawyer needs at least 10 years. Being a top professional soccer player, the time is not even measurable, as most people will never be able to learn it at the level needed.
You are also more easily replaceable if the supply is very high (vs. demand), ie. many people on the job market with the same skills. Especially if the job is location independent.
Or using the example of @lsscpp : well known names are not really replaceable at all.
Huge talent does not deserve millions.
There is only 24 hours in a day. Nobody works thousand times more than another.
That happens only because our world is unfair.
Whatever your job is, you will need more than a decade of learning to touch any aspect of it.
That being said a modeler may work less months than an actor on a movie.
He may not be restricted to modeling of a character and it may not be the concept artist.
So, it may be seen as a technician that did not bring to life most of character.
Certainly, an animator is performing a huge part of work.
All artists should benefit of a recognition for their work.
There is no reason to accept that is not the case.
Current promotion of movie is continuation about time when movies were captured on film.
Nowadays, that is no more the case.
But that is still more practical to only interview one actor instead of a crew of hundreds of people.
That practice is less and less the unique case, you can see more and more promotional material mentioning names of VFX studios.
That is still not the perfect way to credit artists of animation movies.
You should be able to find database where every name at generic will be cataloged.
(But that also means people’s work to create this kind of database. And finding a way to get paid to do that.)
You should see technical directors of lighting, animation departure, modeling departure and concept artists mentioned like scenarists or actors or film directors.
The idea, that fans of animation are mostly interested on voice actors, is stupid.
There are good voice actors that can be recognized as a good point to go in theater.
But main motivation is still the story and visuals.
So, building brands from visual artists names should be as rewarding as doing it with voice actors for this particular type of movies.
Modelers or animators will never become celebrities. But some may become recognized by cinephiles as good artisans to push them to promote a movie.
Being fair with artists, giving to them consideration is like being fair to audience of movie, giving consideration to your public. That pays off.
Seems to me that the pyramid of actors is a lot steeper than for 3D modelers. That is: normalizing for demand, there are many more out of work actors than 3D modelers, and on the other hand, the top actors make much more money than the top 3D modelers.
Just like if you want to be a programmer there are people making 300k at Google, but if you can’t do the job at a very high competence level, you might not make anything at all no matter how hard you work. If you just went to study and be a nurse, you would quite likely make much more on average.
There’s this “rock star” phenomenon in some professions. Like a pro basketball player. They become brands on themselves, as there’s no real limit on how good they can be at their job. For a nurse, or a plumber, they just need to do their job well, there’s really no possibility of exponential growth for value creation, unlike in some other professions.
I think people are paid for what they are worth, as long as they remember to negotiate and shop jobs. Saying that someone doesn’t deserve money is just against everything I stand and against reality itself. Yes, jealousy is common, but that doesn’t mean people who do well didn’t earn it.
Only if wealth is earned through illegal means, nepotism, extortion, and such is there such a point to be made.
OP: Aki’s face model was apparently done by Steven Giesler (probably best known for the Nvidia Dawn fairy from old Geforce demos). His website seems to have vanished but he had some good stuff up, most of which is about 20 years old but still holds up to some degree. Not alot of CG out there where you can say that about.
If you are interested in the character artwork from FF, there is an old Artbook for the movie that contains quite a lot about that, published by Bradygames. ISBN 0-7440-0071-8. Perhaps that can still be found somewhere.
Same team did work on a short movie for the ‘Animatrix’. Same style for the characters.
True. Unfortunately I’ve had to fix stuff after it was “outsourced”. By the time you deal with the time delays, miscommunications and having to do it all over again because they did it wrong you might as well have paid the money up front and been done with it.
Yeah, Union, pretty much sums it up. Also, with it, there is this thing that art world decided to demistfy itself. We are all working Joes. Anyone can do this. Well I don’t remember seeing a surgeon or a CEO saying “Yeah, everyone can do this”. So artisans became replaceable by their own guilt. Artstation is a good testament to that. An epicenter of world class technically perfect art… with very little to none storytelling capabilities (because everybody can do this).
The other answers are half baked at best, some are even laughable, like the idea that actors get paid more because they are dealing with ideas. It’s wrong on so many levels. The guys dealing with ideas are Concept artists. More often than not they just get a one liner and have to develop a whole character or idea behind it. Point in case, just listened to Ian McCaig on a podcast. He’s been doing Darth Mual for a straight year before figuring he could do well without a mask. One-year-of-designing-a-single-character-before deciding to go another route. Then did another one that was too scary, and then came up to now Iconic look by combining facial muscle patterns, feathers, and colors bugs use to signal they can be dangerous. The amount of thought and effort is mind boggling. Rogue One or Ep. I (can’t remember which), had a full six months of “Blue sky” design = Go wild and create. That being said, some of what you see in movies is actually story driving ideas pivoted around what came out of concept artists heads not directors.
Also the amount of years it takes to become an actor? It takes an average about a decade to become a pro at concept design/vfx arts by constantly learning new tools, new workflows, keeping up with the industry. When you are a talented actor? One brake and you become the face of the world. Also I don’t know about actors having deadlines of they personally have to do when they come on set (unlike other departments).
So as far as that line of argument goes, actors are classically trained interpreters more so than cantautore. Granted there anomalies like Rutger Hauer doing the “Tears in the Rain” in Blade Runner, but by and large the ideas actors spin off of actually come from conjunction of the lowest level (design department) and director.
On big feature films concept artists get some sway. On a lot of productions they usually are just told by a Director or Producer “Make it look like this” or “Make it look like Star Wars”.
I will give professional actors some credit. I’ve seen Billy Dee Williams working on a low budget movie. I’m pretty sure that morning he was hung over or High as a kite, maybe both, but when they yelled action he dropped right into character and delivered his lines. That’s when I realized what professional actors are like. He was working a with another actor that wasn’t as good and you could tell.
Keep in mind also actors still have to do their job, just like the rest of the crew, after a 12 hour day no mater how hot, cold, miserable they are. Trying not to look exhausted is a real acting challenge.
True, but the point was where the ideas come from. On the other hand, being professional is a must across all departments be it movies/games/whatever. If you pay one person 10 milion or more while at the same time VFX is doing their 3rd week of unpaid overtime fixing something in post that was already signed off, you are either paying one side too much or willingly underpaying the other, hence the Union.
I work my tail off to train, improve, and get better at my craft. I’ve been doing it for over 25 years, and have put my time in. I don’t want to get into it, but the craft of film and VO acting has a myriad very difficult layers, and you have to be firing on all cylinders before and during production. After the production, the ‘performer’ gets to stress about all the reviews and blah blah blah…
Acting isn’t just getting up in front of a camera or microphone. That’s after you get a gig. IF you get a gig. There’s so much more that goes into it.