#they made that happen on a budget and deadline and the actor was still *alive*

[pixelcubito]

It's been more than two months since we found out that the amazing QSMP project treated a big chunk of their workers terribly.

When the news first broke, I was naive enough to believe that things could go back to the way they were before. That short break they had? I thought for sure the very first thing they would do is contact every single one of their regular workers, ask for their feedback and apologize for what they had been through. So naive of me...

Three weeks later, the worst possible outcome became true. Lumi's exit of the project did not only further confirm everything that had already been said, but it also revealed that repairing the broken trust of those affected was never a priority for the heads of the project...

In my personal opinion, more than trying to find ways to treat everyone better, it would seem like they chose to spend their time salvaging the project's image while making the least "noise" possible. Having event after event as if nothing had happened.

At some point, I simply stopped supporting the project all together. However, I still get updates because of the accs that I follow and I have some things to say:

-I still don't understand how the main problem (the treatment of their workers) would get better if they didn't contact any of the people that suffered this mistreatment?????? It just doesn't make any sense.

-It seems like with every project the team's ideas would grow ambitious but the budget to pay the people that made these ideas a reality kept diminishing. Don't get me started on those deadlines...

-Let me also say that "resolving things privately" was never an option. I didn't believe Quackity for a second when he said that in his last stream regarding this whole situation. Things would have just continued as normal and we all would have been blissfully unaware, like we were for months and months before.

To finish, I think what they created together (Quackity, the volunteers, writers, 3d artists, actors, managers, web developers, graphic designers, music engineers, assistants, translators, editors, illustrators, the ccs and every other worker that I might not even know about) was such a beautiful thing. A real exchange of culture. It felt like we could truly celebrate each other and have fun regardless of where we came from. I still watch clips and smile because the love is still there. It's so strange...mourning a project that's still "alive".

[hauntedfalcon]

actually the takeaway here is that Rian Johnson really had no fucking excuse at all 

[francisbaconguy]

To anyone who wants to commission VivziePop for a full scale drawing according to this tweet: https://twitter.com/VivziePop/status/1261016646853902336

My advice: STOP AT ONCE!!!!

DO NOT!!! I REPEAT, DO NOT DO IT!!!! STAY AWAY FROM THAT TRASH OF A POST!!! Your just going to end up getting your money stolen for years on end! Why? Because Viv is not mature enough to handle it! She is not READY AND NEVER WILL BE!!!!

Viv, your fans aren’t your damn welfare check! It’s not there responsibility to clean up after your shit! It’s called a JOB!!! A job that you don’t hand! Being a producer and showrunner is a career only for professionals who are responsible and can actually do proper management!

If you want to pay a bill, get off your ass and work for it! Do freelance, an office job, even a yard sale! But WORK!

Don’t sit back on your ass and use their money to pay people to do cartoons for you!

If you want to animate too for your cartoons, be my guest! But there’s gotta be some money coming from that too!

A problem with Viv is that she makes a lot of hollow promises and tries to bite off more than she can chew. She wants to make Hazbin a reality, wants to make a Helluva series, wants to animate Zoophobia, Tinder, a series of comics; but she can’t get off her lazy ass to even work on these commissions.

If you ask me, she shouldn’t have done them; PERIOD!

Because they are a huge responsibility and God knows how many she has taken. And Patreons also have to get a fucking’ speedraw with their purchase. A FUCKING SPEEDRAW!!! Her priority should’ve went to the Patreons and Patreons alone because it’s all done on a monthly basis and God knows how much money stashed was given to her.

For the production or no, that’s still a lot of bacon they gave. Not to mention that merch sales are also padded to the pile for budget, even if contributors have been given a cut.

Viv is just not good with managing money from the looks of it. I have half the mind to believe that some portions of the commission money also pile to the budget too. And maybe it would’ve been wise for her to actually make a decent and appropriate budget and work within the limitations (such as animating yourself or maybe heaven forbid; cut corners like rigging) instead of overly-expensive stuff like using a union voice record for Helluva Boss and getting big time people like Parry Gripp and Weird Al Yankovic involved.

I compare Viv’s strategy between two artists that she worked with; Nico Colaleo and Maxwell Atoms; one whom was more strategical and one that had a complete flop.

Nico was the creator of Ollie and Scoops (Viv voiced in the show). He did everything he was suppose to do before tackling on a big production he created. He pitched it first, worked on his own show for Dreamworks, and was able to build connections, save a bundle by STILL WORKING (Netflix) and was able to assemble a crew that were far more into consistency and expressive than Hazbin. And that show is gonna get a hell lot of celebrities; I’m talking Matilda from the movie, Angry Video Game Nerd and Kevin “Batman” Conroy. I’m shocked Weird Al turned the show down. Could’ve had potential.

Maxwell created Billy and Mandy and had a film that he Kickstarted called Dead Meat (Viv volunteered for it). Maxwell did not do his research and while he made a great working environment and a unique concept, had to spend a large portion of the budget on the actors alone because it was union, and he didn’t do his paperwork / research correctly which makes him legally unable to complete it without making major changes that would’ve made the project different. Most of what he can do is figure out a way to properly refund the backers because it has been 10 years. At least he learned from his mistakes and had to officially explain it instead of hiding like a coward.

What does this have to do with commissions? Because not only do I sense that the commission money is going to clean up any messes she made for production, but I also think that it’s a primary example of her falling into a flop category as Maxwell is.

I fear that people who commission with Viv are just gonna end up with no money in their pocket while Viv tries to find someone who can clean up her spilled milk.

Also, I saw a lot of posts saying that animators at Hazbin aren’t paid at all or paid enough. Most of their justifications come from using Viv’s Patreon goal of “full time paid” or Animator Guilds’ union rates to justify the claim. I will say that unless someone who literally worked for Viv immediately justifies the claim, I wouldn’t listen to it.

Rates are gonna vary from studio to studio, artist to artist, job to job; there’s no such thing as a set pay-rate. Some are paid hourly, some are paid bi weekly or weekly, some follow a “per second” / “per minute” guideline. Pencilmation, Skynamic Studios, Hobbykids and most indie productions follow the same guideline, which is a good tactic to get cheap and fair work while dangling the creative freedom carrot around. From what’s to speculate and from people who work on productions similar to Viv, her productions pay a “per second” system.

Again, rates and numbers are gonna vary from duty and artist but that’s the same system used in many independent productions. Is it common? Yes. Is it the same benefit as union rates? No. But it doesn’t necessarily support the not paying enough theory when you don’t even know the living conditions of said artists who work for Viv in the first place. For all you know, Viv’s job saved their unemployment.

However that doesn’t mean not all artists were comfortable working with Viv. There was a voice actor who was initially gonna sing as one of the main characters in one of Viv’s projects but was mysteriously replaced without his knowledge. According to him, working with Viv was stressful. Another storyboard artist was annoyed drawing her characters and was wanted to get the “damn” thing over with because they were awful. This shows that Viv can’t please everyone she works with.

All of this attributes on how Viv wants to overdo her creative urges by creating MORE and MORE. It’s okay to create outlets of materials such as cartoons and comics to keep your creativity alive, but doing too much will burn you out, which is what happened to her. She burns out too much which makes her unable to complete what she owed.

Hence why I say; DO NOT COMMISSION HER AGAIN!!! LET VIV FEND FOR HERSELF! LET HER USE HER CREATIVE VIBE ON ACTUAL WORK TO GET PAID! LET HER WORK HER ASS OFF!!!

If you wanna do it out of her own free will, go ahead. But I will advise to think it through. If you let her goat you to donate, what would you possibly have to gain from it? What’s in it for you; for the long year wait of a simple drawing?

Which btw, has a lot of questioning onto the price. While some artists do have high prices worth for their time, her room for improvement on her own artwork (anatomy, perspective) mixed with her inability to make deadlines kinda makes the price skeptical to worth that large amount.

So again, those who donate, what’s in it for you?

And if you want to donate just for the sake of the art, Don’t. Just don’t. Save your money and let her earn hers. She will be fine financially working on her own.

UPDATE: It came to my attention that Hazbin has officially been picked up for a TV show deal. Well I’m proud of Viv for making her dream a reality. However, unless I see an update on Viv on how she wants to handle the process of commissions owed or were in the Patreon, this post is still staying up. But now that she’s gonna be playing in the big leagues, please don’t commission her until she cleans up her mess. It’s better for her sake and yours!

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/the-weird-science-of-lakeith-stanfield-sorry-to-bother-you-and-the-batman-villain-hes-determined-to-play-deadline/

The Weird Science Of Lakeith Stanfield: ‘Sorry To Bother You’ And The ‘Batman’ Villain He’s Determined To Play - Deadline

Dan Doperalski

Lakeith Stanfield is headed home. That is, if he can remember where he lives. “I forgot my street,” he chuckles to the driver. He snaps his fingers once, twice, three times, and like magic, summons his address to mind.

To be fair, he hasn’t been living there long. Since his career started to click, the 27-year-old actor hasn’t been rooted anywhere for long. Yesterday, he was in Boston filming Rian Johnson’s all-star murder mystery Knives Out, alongside Daniel Craig, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans and Jamie Lee Curtis. Then a red-eye flight to Los Angeles, a day of photo shoots, and finally, the back of this car on the way to his new house in the Valley, not far from the crowded apartment he used to share with a bunch of dudes just three years ago when he was still that bit player who would pop up in a movie and make it sparkle, but vanish before audiences remembered to Google his name. Selma, Straight Outta Compton, Short Term 12, Miles Ahead, Dope. Finally, he got two supporting roles that carved him into the public consciousness: as the stoner sage Darius in FX’s Atlanta, and the mind-zapped kidnap victim in Get Out who made a straw boater hat look diabolical. And then, the capper on what feels like an inevitable climb to stardom: the lead in Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, a bizarre and breathtakingly ambitious film that feels like a roadmap to the future of Hollywood, a place where creative talent like his isn’t just a detour, but a destination. 

Annapurna Pictures

Stanfield adjusts the brim of his pink Captain’s cap and smiles. He owns the same hat in a half-dozen colors—pink, white, red, blue, teal—to match, or clash, with his outfit of the day. “Always sailors, because I like that idea: Riding the waves of life.” He’s ridden them from Base Line Street in the Inland Empire, where he navigated addicts and needles on his way to school, all the way to this one-story wooden house with a backyard stuffed with trees and bushes and rustling critters where he can sit outside and feel “kinda Snow White”. 

The outdoor noises creep out his guests. Maybe his home is haunted, he muses. “There very well could be ghosts because it was built in the ’30s,” says Stanfield. “It was an actor before me. I wonder if he’s still alive, though, or if he’s haunting me through my walls, giving me actor juice.” 

Sure, his new neighbors have cluelessly asked if he’s a rapper. “Lemme make these people some cakes or something just to introduce myself and quell all those worries about my tattoos,” Stanfield jokes. “But yeah, I love it. I’m here, I worked hard to get here.”

Sometimes his compass is off. When he first read the script for Sorry to Bother You, Stanfield didn’t like it. “It was a weird, twisted, crazy thing,” he says of Riley’s furious and funny anti-capitalist screed. A telemarketer named Cassius falls through ceilings, adopts a white voice to boost sales, catches the eye of a smarmy techbro (Armie Hammer), becomes the fulcrum of an office strike, gets turned into a meme, and then gets transformed into a half-man, half-horse—all to learn not to sell your soul to corporations. The misadventures of Cassius Green were like Pinocchio on peyote. “It turned me off initially,” Stanfield admits. “Then I picked it up later, and after the second time, I was like, ‘OK, we have to do this.’” 

Annapurna Pictures

His hesitation is surprising because Sorry to Bother You feels like a tailor-made showcase for Stanfield’s specific kind of strange. His Cassius is vulnerable yet manipulative, a straight man in his world and an emotional dervish in ours. He’s a victim and a villain, a money-grubber with a noodle for a backbone, which embarrasses his activist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson). Clashing with Hammer’s Silicon Valley tycoon Steve Lift, Stanfield would get so riled up that, “when they said cut, I almost forgot we were doing a movie.” In the film’s most uncomfortable scene, Lift pressures him to entertain his fancy party with a rap. Cassius reluctantly grabs the mic—and what comes out is so offensive, we can’t tell if the shocking joke is on him or the crowd. 

“You don’t want to feel safe,” Stanfield explains. Not only did Sorry to Bother You take huge risks, its low budget set definitely teetered on the edge of disaster. “It was ghetto fabulous,” he laughs. When Cassius’ desk drops into people’s apartments, Stanfield really fell nine feet, steadying his phone and computer monitor and continuing the scene. On the day his character discovers a monstrous equisapien in an underground bathroom, the stunt man in the homemade horse suit fell to the floor and started flailing as planned. “I’m just like, ‘Oh he’s a good actor,’” says Stanfield. But then he started to smell something burning, and when a plume of smoke streamed out of the horse mask, he realized the internal mechanics were on fire. “They take him out and he’s like, ‘Let’s do it again, let’s go!’ I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re a G, man.’ If I almost burnt to death, I would definitely not just do it again.”

At the film’s Sundance premiere, Stanfield was sanguine. “If it’s a mess, it’s a bleeding mess of authenticity. And if it’s a great piece of artwork,” his voice arching into posh frippery, “then whatever. This is the world’s now and I’m going to let them have it.”

The timing was perfect. The current news cycle, notes Stanfield, strikes the same tone as the film. “It’s been kind of like its own horror-tragedy-drama-comedy,” he says. The night of the election, Stanfield was on another plane as the results came in. Passengers sobbed in the aisles. “Although at that moment they were scared, they felt something, they felt engaged,” says Stanfield. “Hopefully this drives us to realize that we’re all stuck in this together, black, white, blue, purple, man, woman or anything else.”

Annapurna Pictures

Increasingly, progressive voters seem clued-in to Sorry to Bother You’s impassioned politics. Writer-director Riley, a former community organizer from Oakland, hasn’t held back from linking the ideas in his film to a larger crusade to wrest control back from the 1%. 

“Yeah man, let’s burn this b*tch down,” says Stanfield. “I’m optimistic in a sense that I still have hope. I get up every day and I’m like, ‘OK, it’s going to be a nice day. I don’t think everything’s going to self-destruct.’” He pauses. “But I kinda do.”

The numbers are on his side. So far, Sorry to Bother You has made back its budget six times over. That’s fantastic, but what most excites Stanfield is the people who dressed up like Cassius on Halloween—the true sign of a character that connects. He even saw a few photos of folks who’d turned themselves into equisapiens.

“I want people to dress up as me as black Joker, when that inevitably happens,” says Stanfield. He’s not kidding. Earlier generations wanted to play Hamlet. Today’s true artistic coup is landing the part of Batman’s lead villain. “I just think there are so many things that haven’t been touched yet in terms of how the performance can be delivered,” he says, adding, “When I make the movie myself.” 

He wants to direct. “All directors are so different, they all have their own approach,” says Stanfield. “They all wear hats.” But really, he wants to do everything, even, “like, a really bad movie, that’s just horrible.” Boom-mics-in-the-shot-horrible, something totally unselfconscious—which, in a way, is its own kind of impossible mission. “Bad transitions, weird stuff going on. Just like an unfolding mess of balls being dropped everywhere,” Stanfield beams. “I’d love to be in one of those.”

Wherever he’s headed next, Sorry to Bother You has put wind in his sails. “The sci-fi world meets black people—I think that’s a beautiful juxtaposition. To be fully realized, interesting characters, not always having to be, ‘Hey man! I just come home from choich!’” he says, adding a rasp to his throat. “Now, we can play a little bit, too.”

But for today, it’s finally time to relax. Stanfield’s car has found its way home. There’s only one problem: he doesn’t have a key. “It’s all good!” he shrugs, making himself comfortable on the porch. “I’ll figure it out!” No doubt he will.

Source: https://deadline.com/2018/12/sorry-to-bother-you-lakeith-stanfield-boots-riley-interview-1202518973/