Several sources are reporting that MPC has shut down its studio in Vancouver allegedly citing “increasing external market pressures in Vancouver and more attractive opportunities in other locations” as the cause. For more on this story, please visit Cartoon Brew who first broke the story following rumours that circulated on Reddit.
MPC shuts down Vancouver facility
Related Posts
CGPress is an independent news website built by and for CG artists. With more than 15 years in the business, we are one of the longest-running CG news organizations in the world. Our news reporting has gathered a reputation for credibility, independent coverage and focus on quality journalism. Our feature articles are known for their in-depth analyses and impact on the CG scene. “5 out of 5 artists recommend it.”
MPC for the sake of f**ks new students and beginners who got a job. just read everything and understood. why the MPC does not think about caring for people and respect that there are families or a couple.
Did you have a stroke?
STOP chasing these big companies! They will own you and spit you out whenever they please, what are you complaining about? There is nothing to be done it is their studio they can and will do with it as they please, and for those working for peanuts it is entirely their fault and I wouldn’t care less unless something Illegal takes place. I could care even less if it is a student working for free 20 hours a day and being used up as a slave all the while smiling.
If you are serious you will go out on your own or make clever choices where to get hired and with whom. If you think that is too much for you to handle well tough luck welcome to life!
If your argument is that companies can do as they please. Let maukge just have this opinion.
If someone is treating you bad you can speak out. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t like it when people that are not feeling nice about something have to be silenced.
You can speak out as much as you like, someone slaps your butt you slap him back, someone tells you to f*ck off you tell him to go to hell. I don’t think anyone has any disagreements there. How exactly are they being silenced? in What manner? If you have a problem you raise it up with the managers and bring the troublemakers all in one room and have a face off to settle it like real men or women.
The disagreements come in when you start complaining that you are not getting paid enough for the job, when the case is that either you didn’t think it through the expectations or negotiate well enough or started caving in to work overtime without pay or got outmatched by someone (could be a student a foreign worker not having the expenses of feeding a family in Vancouver like yourself) to accept to work the same job with the same quality you produce for lesser pay! And he would be perfectly happy working for lesser pay and live in a pod or a one room apartment and still have enough savings to send abroad and feed a family in a third world country, or a student who is wetting himself for working on the next transformer movie so he can brag about it to his friends and dream of becoming a super star in Hollywood VFX in a few years.
Are big companies looking for the cheapest labor they can get who would work 20 hours for them a day if they can get away with it? Yes they are.
Do they care about your problems? No they don’t, unless maybe some rare exceptions. If you are lucky they do try to find you another job if they can if they are letting you go, that much i can give them.
Bottom line is yes companies can do as they please as long as it is within legal means, no one is saying this is moral or right, but it is what it is, you can shame them on social media all you want and cry about letting you go when you have mouths to feed, it sucks but its reality because so long as you are under their thumb and fully 100% dependent on them then you will always suffer the full consequences should they choose that they can no longer afford your services for whatever personal, business or even greed or profit reasons.
Any company – large or small – that pays qualified and talented employees ‘peanuts’ deserves peanuts back in quality of work, effort and respect. It doesn’t matter how young, old, or lacking in experience an artist is with whatever workflow is used. We all learn quickly in this industry to survive, and remuneration should ramp accordingly. Anybody’s skilled time and effort has real value.
On the topic of studio closures, I would never work for a studio that doesn’t pay a decent severance package if the unthinkable happens. There are several outfits I know out there with a record of paying the legal minimum, and at the same time I know of some that treat folks with the decency they deserve.
Very few, if any companies are immune to downsizing – unfortunately its part of the natural cycle for many businesses. If you’re sat in a large studio then it should be fairly easy to ‘do your own research’ because most if not all large studios will have had past runs of expansion and contraction. Its all too easy to develop a herd mentality and feel safety in numbers when you’re in an open plan office surrounded by tens or even hundreds of other artists, but sometimes those at the front can merrily lead you all over a cliff.
Merry Christmas everyone.
Sure they “Deserve peanuts” sure, in this day and age “Peanuts” is a matter of perspective you see, especially for bigger VFX companies (see what i wrote up). Animation companies are more or less in a slightly better situation.
Here’s the special recipe let me lay it out for you:
10% or 5% of the company workforce are almost always kept tight and paid the best a company can pay them, MPC closed in Vancouver I can assure you that the 10% or 5% who were working there are immediately transferred to their other studios in same positions. These 10% are the higher up super experienced artists and supervisors,directors, DP’s and art directors as well as supervisor TD’s, lead animator (maybe) you can count them with your fingers. for every 1000 artists in the world you can find 10 of them like so, this is true.
All the rest below this line are replaceable with the cheapest labor a company can find for peanuts. And if you don’t want to work for what you consider peanuts from X company then i can assure you there will be someone who would while at the same time producing similar or “Good enough” quality as you would have. the 10% higher up will always come in later take this “good enough” material and make it sell. Which is why that 10% are always there to save the day.
This is why so long as there is a student who is doing some grunt comp work masking shit out or a 3d artist modeling assets to populate some background environment or an FX artist simming away some Fume will always be available and lined up in the most competitive way to take your job even if it means being offered peanuts.
So do they deserve peanuts if they hire peanuts? sure in a perfect world, but who is going to give to them?
Thanks for laying things out for me – its a very familiar landscape. I take your point that what constitutes ‘peanuts’ is all relative, and that many people’s role requires no more than ‘good enough’. But delivering ‘good enough’ in a tight deadline can often require some serious graft. It might not be rocket science, or creative work but it deserves a good deal more in return than an Amazon warehouse picker or KFC bucket filler might expect for a days work.
Good evening, stop! I apologize and just read reviews; some people complained and work minus about MPC. I agree with you Sandr.
Sorry for everyone that was let go. I hope they all find a new/better place to go in short time.
I don’t understand why in english the term used is “to let go”, because those persons are not going away because they want to, they are getting fired, “to let go” is to allow someone to do what they want to do, saying “he was let go” is like if the company has any kind of power over that person, when the interchange between the company and the person is an equivalent agreement where the company has no more power than the person, the company receives the work of the person and the person receives it’s remuneration in different ways. So the company don’t have power to “let go” anyone, the person has power to “go away” or the company has the power to “fire” someone. To be fired is just that, to be fired, it’s like it’s easier for people in charge to think that they just “let go” other people, no, don’t think that way, those persons in charge are firing someone, and they should accept that, sometimes that’s the reality, and people in charge should accept that and use the correct term, they are firing people.
Cambridge dictionary:
Fire: “to remove someone from their job, either because they have done something wrong or badly, or as a way of saving the cost of employing them”
Let Go:
1.- to stop holding something:
2.- to stop thinking about or being angry about the past or something that happened in the past
3.- to be more relaxed than usual and enjoy yourself
As you can see none of them refer to fire anyone, and the company has no power to “hold” someone or to “let go” someone, so the company is not “letting go” anyone, it’s firing people.
Be aware I’m not saying that firing someone is inherently good or bad, just that we are all grown ups, and I personally really dislike the “disguised” language that try to avoid the reality.
Martin I know you are or were in charge of people and I’m sure you had to fire people at some point, like anyone in charge, sometimes it’s hard to deal with it, but please be the first amongst people in charge to call things by it’s true name.
I’m sorry for everyone that was fired.
You list all the definitions of “Let go”, except the part where it’s defined as an euphemism (a polite term) for dismissing an employee. It’s like complaining “kicked the bucket” shouldn’t be used to express someone dying, because, based on the literal definition, no bucket was actually kicked. What do you expect Martin to do, rewrite the English language?
Sorry if I missed it, it was not in the Cambridge dictionary I consulted, if that’s the case, ok, but I stand in my position, an euphemism is not good.
Another thing, that’s why I started with “I don’t understand why in english the term used is “to let go”.
I’m a native Spanish speaker and if in Spanish you say something like that is nearly something like an insult, like the company or the boss not taking responsibility of your layoff, like if you were wanting to go away from the company but you were unable because the company is your owner and from that point on time it “let’s you go”, you are now free to fly, you were not free before because the company owned you.
It may perfectly be that I don’t understand English language as you say, but I think it’s more appropriate to say “they were fired” than “they were let go” and I also think it’s more appropriate to say “he died” than “he passed away”, when in that situation I could understand the will for that term is to avoid pain in the receiver of the message, when in the first term the will is to avoid pain on the speaker of the message, and there is were I find the problem.
BTW this is not against anyone, it just happened that Martin used the term, but what would happen if you say “they got fired”?
You are assuming that the way the Spanish language says something is the right one. 🙂
Oh no!
I’m assuming is the most literal one (not just Spanish, as others said, it’s also common to be direct in german and other languages, even in UK english it seems), but that does not make it the right one.
From that point on, personally I like things to be as clear as possible, and people taking responsibility actually taking the responsibility, language is very important, and as I said what I dislike about that expression is that it gives the company a power that it actually don’t have and should not have, the most dangerous part of the language is the subconscious one, hence the importance of regular expressions and controlling what you say at all times, that’s why I started this conversation, because I really don’t understand why people use that expression that, at least here, feels like responsibility discharge from the person that is actually performing the action of laying off someone.
Understood, but it was Martin who said and he isn’t MPC. So in my view it’s fine.
As I said Marting was not the “target” of my comment, but on the other side, he was not the one doing the layoffs this time, but he may be, or will be, at some point in the future, so it’s a comment about how can he (or any other manager) make feel the person they are laying off, he is a team manager, if there is another team manager here, another person in charge of many persons that can be in that situation, this is also for them.
Specially in companies where the work force is not just from the states, is world wide, and there is nothing wrong in thinking about how the person being fired feels about it 🙂
This is generic thing, not a “Martin” thing 🙂
yeah man, why are you getting on his case? You clearly dont understand this term.
You may be totally right 🙂
Seriously?!? Technically it’s layoffs because the company is going through a change/transition due to some extraordinary situation. Hope you have a Merry Christmas.
Sorry if you felt it was against you Martin, it was not my intention to “target” you specifically. Hahaha
It’s that I heard this term many times and at all times the person that heard the term was pretty upset, and that term only made them more upset.
Lay-off is a way better term, may not be as hard to hear as “fired” but it’s not as “let go”-
Of course you can say whatever you want. I’m just starting this conversation because I think the term feel like an insult to the one that was fired, at least if I would use that in Spanish it would be like insulting the person.
You can say ” we have to fire you” or “we are not going to need your services anymore” or something like that, but the important part is the part where the language don’t give the company any more right or power over the person that the one it should have, not company has power to “let go” anyone because no one is owned by a company, and at the same time the company and the person who is firing someone takes the responsibility of the decision, a worker is collaborating with the company for a fair exchange.
That’s the English language for you. The words and the meaning are always at odds. This is why English speakers think Germans and most other Europeans are abrupt, because they actually say what they mean. Diverging off topic here, but I think your point is interesting.
I don’t think it’s off topic, it’s precisely what generated this conversation, if you see the reactions of people here, some where nearly mad or offended, while others understood what I was saying, so I think the key here is precisely that.
I find far more offensive the “let go” than the “lay off” or the “no need of your services” while others may find more offensive things the other way around, and the key must be what you said here 🙂
wtf ?
This sounds like a lost in translation/cultural thing. As no1nja mentioned it falls into a similar category as the phrase ‘passed away’ – it’s just intended as a more easy listening and friendly term when talking to those affected because it implies that they did nothing wrong to lose their jobs. Whereas the term ‘fired’ – at least to my ears – implies they were dismissed for incompetence or a misdemeanor. I think these are both ‘Americanisms’ though, so this is just my impression as a native Englander.
That may be the case of course 🙂 and if fixed means “it was your fault” then it’s not a good option either, so maybe the lay-off term is the best fit.
What would you use in England?
In the UK ‘made redundant’ is often used.. its a touch more formal than layed-off, but is still used in casual conversation. That might sound awkward to an American though (although they would know what you mean). I think ‘layed-off’ is also a good phrase to use.
Agree, “layed-off” seems to be the most clear and respectful term with all the parts IMHO