It is with sadness that we report that Cinefex magazine, that great stalwart of the VFX industry, is closing its doors after 41 years of publishing. The announcement cites the Corona virus as a major contributing factor for the closure, depriving the magazine of subject matter, retail outlets, and advertisers. Issue 172 will be the last, though several back issues are still available.
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Very sad news
Was it the Covid virus or the economic lockdowns initiated by the politicians that caused their demise? I am pretty sure it was the latter.
The latter for sure, the west is f*cked you sneeze and everyone hides in their basement. most of the brave men and women died in WW2 and later in Vietnam. Today’s generations are breast fed by Zuckerbergs. Meanwhile the rest of the world with some common sense fight it off and go on about their lives, starting from eastern EU all the way to east Asia and even in Africa. Becuase they have real problems to deal with other than some virus which has a 0.01% kill rate.
Good companies like this have to suffer for the corrupton of the political class and the cowardice ill informed people in key areas supporting them.
The Eastern EU has restrictions that hurt many businesses too. Eg: Our favorite restaurant is boarded-up. Maybe Cinefx be back in one form or another once all this blows over.
Another pandemic mitigation comment from the facebook peanut gallery. Stick to talking about subjects you actually know shit about, if there are any.
It is a shame really. I remember the excitement I had when I bought my first cinefex issue.
Ok, it is sad indeed, but let’s be honest: corona just put the whole process into hyperdrive.
A VFX Magazine (the name implicates already “something digital, effective”), in 2021, as a Print paper for US DOLLAR 20,- (!) (+8,- USD delivery outside US, which means it is 95% accessible only for a limited, US regional market, since too expensive) and with only Apple IPad (!) electronic version, no videos on the webpage (again, they have VideoFX in their magazine name): i am sorry but it had to die. They have missed few steps of the digital evolution.
I understand what you are saying, but then name a better alternative to Cinefex. There isn’t.
Cinefex will be missed.
ehm…what igor said and what i would extend: the wole idea of a printed or even digital vfx magazine is totally outdated anyways. cinefex was founded in a time, when all things regarding film were almost kind of mystical, only very few people knew how it was done and even them invented most of their techniques themselves as there was no industry to speak of. Today every friggin` vfx shop makes vfx break downs, hold presentations, artists share their knowledge for free and paid, heck, there’s more knowledge you could ingest in a day than you could gather in years back in the pre-internet days. Whatever info Cinefex could gather about a film’s vfx – it would be on the internet already weeks earlier. They should rather share the old issues on the net for nostalgic reasons so it is not forgotten how hard all this stuff was back, in the old times, far, far away…
Very sorry to hear that, really. Cinefex was one of the few reliable, respected outlets that provided extensive in-depth information that were hard to find elsewhere.
And I loved the thank-you ads after big productions, with all the names that could not fit into the regular credits.
Not sure I understand why they could not move to online