ABSTRACT
On the February 11, 2013, days before the Oscars, Rhythm & Hues—the visual effects (VFX) company that made The Life of Pi (Ang Lee, 2012), nominated for Best Picture and Best Visual Effects—announced Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 1 Ordinarily, the bankruptcy of a VFX house is such a common occurrence that this event would hardly cause a ripple in the wider visual effects community. On this occasion though, in an irony not lost on anyone within the industry, Rhythm & Hues went on to win an Oscar for the visual effects that earned its commissioning studio (20th Century Fox) $600 million (up to that point), while the artists involved in the film’s production found themselves out of a job and awaiting paychecks for services rendered. At the heart of this movie was a visual effects spectacular that featured a remarkable and groundbreaking computer-generated tiger. Like many such spectacular innovations, Rhythm & Hues’s astonishing tiger captured the public imagination at precisely the point that the company had to announce its closure. Inevitably, this led to a media storm, as commentators and artists both inside and outside the industry highlighted the case as a classic example of all that ails the visual effects community in its current position of structural weakness.
