WGA/SAGAFTRA Strike Discussion Thread | SAG Ratifies Contract

[lilmac]

I hope that the 2023 strikes provided the writers and producers with additional time to work on the scripts, allowing them to carefully develop the best possible story. I’m sure writers were tinkering on their own with their work, unofficially.  

[SpiderByte]

This.. technically is unrelated but it really shows why VFX needs to unionize.

 

The legendary Weta Digital is being shut down.

 

[DInky]

16 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

This.. technically is unrelated but it really shows why VFX needs to unionize.

 

The legendary Weta Digital is being shut down.

 

 

Not really as big of a deal as the headlines make it out to be.

 

https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/unity-software-with-a-company-reset-walks-away-from-film-vfx-and-the-weta-deal/

 

Quote

t was just in Dec ’21 that Unity completed its acquisition of Weta Digital’s tools, pipeline, technology, and engineering talent. This acquisition was said to be “designed to empower the growing number of game developers, artists, and potentially millions of consumer creators with highly sophisticated content creation tools.” As part of that deal Unity ‘welcomed’ Weta Digital’s world-class engineering talent of 275 engineers who are known internationally for their architecting, building, and maintaining of Weta Digital tools and core pipeline. At the same time, Weta Digital’s Academy Award-Winning VFX teams moved into a standalone entity known as Wētā FX under majority ownership by Sir Peter Jackson and helmed by CEO Prem Akkaraju. At that time they issued a statement saying: “under the terms of the agreement, Unity acquired Weta Digital’s tools, pipeline, technology, and engineering talent for US$1.625B in a combination of cash and stock.” Their press release continued stating,  “Unity will not be relocating employees with this acquisition and remains supportive and committed to Wellington, New Zealand.”

 

[SpiderByte]

That feels like a needlessly confusing name change

[dudalb]

3 hours ago, SpiderByte said:

This.. technically is unrelated but it really shows why VFX needs to unionize.

 

The legendary Weta Digital is being shut down.

 

Unionizeing is not going to keep something like this from happening.

I am all in favor of the VFX workers having a union, but unions will not stop things like losing your job ecause your company is aold.

[Kon]

The voting for ratification has ended. So, I guess we should know the results soon.

Edited December 6, 2023 by Kon

[Porthos]

 

 

Edited December 6, 2023 by Porthos

[Porthos]

Interestingly enough the ratification vote was broadly in line with the National Board vote of 86% to 14%.  About an 8% difference when it came to the membership at large, but pretty much the same.

 

So a sizable chunk of the membership is against this deal, but not a huge amount.  But juuuuuuuust large enough, I think, to raise a real stink if things go south over the next two-and-a-half years over AI issues.

 

At the same time, near 80 percent isn't chicken feed, either, and lightyears ahead of the IATSE ratification vote.  So very likely broad support for this.  Still, studios better be careful here as roughly 1/5th of the guild still wanted to keep on striking after months and months of pain.

 

Time will tell if studios will be or not.

 

(NARRATOR: They would no—)

 

Shut up, Narrator, let's let this run out for once, eh?

 

(NARRATOR:  Fine.  Whatever)

Edited December 6, 2023 by Porthos

[titanic2187]

Just 38% turnout? Not even one- third of the members are fully registered or agreeable with what they got in the road ahead. 

[MysteryMovieMogul]

Watching the youths learn the internet isn't real life in real time.

 

 

[Porthos]

1 minute ago, titanic2187 said:

Just 38% turnout? Not even one- third of the members are fully registered or agreeable with what they got in the road ahead. 

 

Eh, I wouldn't read that much into that as the actual strike authorization vote back in June was 47.7 percent of eligible voters.

 

Did some surface level reading about internal SAG politics during the strike and apparently there's a decent chunk of SAG membership which aren't all that active (and I'm not even talking about retired actors either — at least from what I vaguely remember). Bit of a sticking/sore point when it comes to internal SAG politics, as I understand it. 

 

Either way, wouldn't read that much into the percentage, though I'm more than willing to listen to more knowledgeable on the subject folks than I.

[MysteryMovieMogul]

Honestly, this whole SAG contract vote was weird as hell. So many of the people upset about people voting yes aren't even in SAG.

 

[AniNate]

It became cool on social media to say "vote no". Was easy to make it look bad when you screenshot some less than ideal clauses out of context, but ultimately the actual voters were overall satisfied with the terms apparently.

 

Seriously, speaking of fear mongering and guilt tripping...

Edited December 6, 2023 by AniNate

[Porthos]

10 minutes ago, MysteryMovieMogul said:

Watching the youths learn the internet isn't real life in real time.

 

 

 

Sure hope someone is pointing out to that person that under their logic, a strike would continue when only 17% of the membership actively wanted it to.  Which is a hell of a lot "weird"er, IMO.

[babz06]

I also noticed a lot of the people saying ‘vote No’ in social media were not sag members as well. 
 

Looking at past history these ratification votes  don’t generally have high turnout. In fact a lot of sag members are currently inactive which is probably why they didn’t participate in the vote. 

[Porthos]

2 minutes ago, AniNate said:

It became cool on social media to say "vote no". Was easy to make it look bad when you screenshot some less than ideal clauses out of context, but ultimately the actual voters were overall satisfied with the terms apparently.

 

Seriously, speaking of fear mongering and guilt tripping...

 

It's not so much that "Social Media isn't Real Life" as much as, even the more viral of movements are still only thousands of people posting.  For something like this, I wouldn't be surprised if it was more in hundreds of people actively pushing something.  This is in a country with 330m+ people in it (and, yes, this ignore folks outside of the US commenting about this).

 

That is to say, it's usually apparent when something has a deeeeeep reservoir  of support on social media and something is more like clout chasing/farming for clicks/strongly held belief by a small number of people (spectrum covering folks who are in it for the attention versus the folks who passionately believe).

 

Or to put it another way, I never got the sense that this was an IATSE razor close vote in the making.  Just was never sure if it would fall under a 66% YES threshold or not.  That it nearly touched 80% is significant in both directions, for the reasons I mentioned above.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Skynet won

[Kon]

20 minutes ago, Porthos said:

 

Eh, I wouldn't read that much into that as the actual strike authorization vote back in June was 47.7 percent of eligible voters.

 

Did some surface level reading about internal SAG politics during the strike and apparently there's a decent chunk of SAG membership which aren't all that active (and I'm not even talking about retired actors either — at least from what I vaguely remember). Bit of a sticking/sore point when it comes to internal SAG politics, as I understand it. 

 

Either way, wouldn't read that much into the percentage, though I'm more than willing to listen to more knowledgeable on the subject folks than I.

 

In fact, this time the amount of people (38%) who vote in the ratification was high compared to previous years:

 

In 2020, 27.2% of SAG members voted and in 2017 it was 15.3%

[babz06]

16 minutes ago, Kon said:

 

In fact, this time the amount of people (38%) who vote in the ratification was high compared to previous years:

 

In 2020, 27.2% of SAG members voted and in 2017 it was 15.3%

Apparently 86% of Sag members are not active full time actors. They just pay their dues to keep their card and get free dvds. So it sort of makes sense that these people are not participating in the vote. 

[Cappoedameron]

5 hours ago, AniNate said:

 

 

Seriously, speaking of fear mongering and guilt tripping...

social media in a nutshell.