San Francisco: VFX goes Ape. March 13, 2003
At a press conference on Tuesday, Special Effects Giant, VFX, announced revolutionary plans to hire rhesus monkeys to staff their effects facility. In a special joint venture with Stanford Medical School
plans were unveiled to rehabilitate research monkeys by training them to rotoscope.
"This is an exciting new phase for the effects industry and I'm proud to be a part of it," declared Amanda Holdtight, Vice President of the newly created Department of Monkey Wrangling. "It has long been known that this species of monkeys has very good hand eye coordination; and a love of pizza. Some have even shown signs of artistic inclination while in captivity. We believe that with the correct reinforcement schedule these monkeys can be trained to produce first class visual effects."
The idea was the brainchild of Hughes R. Milner, a frustrated lab researcher with a love of big budget action movies. Seeing a need in the industry he quit his job, sold his house trailer, and put all his money into Roto Monkey - the first temp service that deals exclusively with primates. "Up to now, our biggest demand has been for organ grinder monkeys and circus chimps, but I anticipate a huge potential market once we get the process streamlined. Presently we have a test group of seven Roto Monkeys working at VFX; and plan to double that number by the end of the quarter."
"I think it is great!" declared Hupson Ron Howard, Roto Monkey supervisor, "Once the little **** [monkeys] have been conditioned to produce quality rotoscope mattes they need very little supervision. We have a very extensive classical conditioning program and you should see how fast these little Roto Monkeys
will work once we put the "fear of God" into them."
"One big advantage," he continued, "is that there are few of the normal problems associated with a regular human workforce; such as hourly pay, parking spaces, union membership, medical insurance, or personal telephone calls. We save quite a bit of money because of the reduced costs associated with employing these Roto Monkeys. You could say that they literally work for peanuts."
The plan seems to be successful. As Milner explains, "Basically, the labs are just going to outsource the monkeys when they are finished. We take the ones that can be rehabilitated and train them to be VFX Roto Monkeys. So far the program is running smoothly. We are also examining the possibility
for a role in government. The Federal Government is the biggest employer in the United States and based on what I have read in the news, there could be great fiscal incentives to privatize government services and hire our specially trained Roto Monkeys to perform them instead. I can see a number of appropriate markets in community services, education, and safety."
Copyright©2003, 2014 William Schaeffer
It is interesting to note that at the time this was written, cell phones had not yet become ubiquitous. The VFX companies still supplied us with desk phones connected to the company switchboard and you had a phone extension. There was no instant messaging because computers were too slow. There was no streaming video.
ReplyDeleteIn 2003, while working at Rhythm and Hues, I originally wrote this piece as "ILM goes Ape." When publishing in my blog, I decided to change the company name to the generic VFX (which is shorthand for visual effects). I did not want to target a specific company, but instead reflect on the entire industry,
ReplyDeleteMuch to my surprise, it appears that there now is a company called "VFX" This writing is not about that commercial enterprise.