If you watched tonight's Academy Awards you would have seen how disrespectful the Academy was towards Visual FX artists. The Oscar was given to "Life of Pi" which was the work of Rhythm & Hues. A major FX house who had won Oscars before with a long and successful track record of servicing the motion picture and commercial animation industries. They declared bankruptcy the other day and this has thrown a big spotlight on the problems within that sector of motion picture production.

I did several projects for R&H back in the mid 1990s and as recently as August 2008. My experiences were always very positive. I had a high regard for the studio and felt fortunate to be associated with them. On behalf of my professional colleagues within the animation community whose magnificent and inspiring work drives the box office for a Hollywood system whose practices become more questionable with each passing day, you deserve much better treatment and consideration than what we see in the video from this evening's Academy Awards.

VFX artists protested today in Hollywood. Since my viewing of the video it's been taken down from YouTube. Here's the embedded video in homage to VFX Artists. Even though it is not currently there rest assured that it was. When it returns in its entirety I'll make it available here on AN's Frontpage. In solidarity with the VFX community...

EDIT: The entire experience is now available for all to see on Vimeo...

EDIT: It was taken off of Vimeo as well but it's resurfaced on YouTube once again. Also everything posted on Rhythm & Hues' Twitter by their community since last evening concerning this issue has been deleted and replaced with generic announcements about the Oscar win.

EDIT: Here's the topic on the AnimationNation Forums.

EDIT: Once again the video has been removed from YouTube. What does that tell you about Hollywood? Let's try again. No matter how hard they try and quell the truth it will come out...

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