Ryan Pickles greets me with a self-assured handshake and a pearly white perfect smile, like he’s just stepped straight out of his orthodontist’s brochure. On the face of it he is a smart, pleasant young man, but not far beneath the surface lies a seething resentment towards the country he blames for prematurely ending his visual effects career.
“I mean, Hollywood is here.” He announces, almost as soon as we have sat down outside the trendy coffee shop in Glendale. “All VFX should be done here. It just should. It’s our birthright”. He glances across the street to check his Japanese car is not about to be ticketed by a Mexican parking inspector, adjusts the collar on his Chinese made imitation designer shirt and takes another sip of his Costa Rica grown, Italian roast cappuccino as he continues to rail against globalization. “Why should I be expected to go where the work is when I can just throw a tantrum about how unfair life is?”
“If I moved to Canada tomorrow I could barely make $150k” he says dismissively. “I made more than that in my first year out of school. Ok, so my employer went bankrupt because they paid people more than they could afford, but that’s not the point. Seriously, how can I be expected to live on only twice the average family income? That’s just exploitation. Do I look like a nurse? Or a teacher? No, I’m an artist, what I do is important for society”
“…and why would anyone want to live in Vancouver?” he continues like a petulant little kid who’s just been handed a toy that isn’t his favourite. “Where the air is clean, the people are friendly and the mountains and ocean are unobscured by the smog from millions of idling cars. What a nightmare. To have to ride a bike or walk for about 10 minutes to get to work, when I’d far rather be in LA sitting in a traffic jam breathing exhaust fumes for a couple of hours each day”.
It is a sad reality for Pickles, and many more like him, that the gravy train they once considered infinite turned out to be short lived. The greed and short-sightedness to think that the cash would keep flowing no matter what, instilled in them a sense of entitlement that is hard to move on from.
Pickles got his first break in the industry as a roto artist on the highly acclaimed “Death of Cake” at the now shuttered Rock and Hole Studios. “Rock and Hole was an amazing place to work. Sure they didn’t have a workable business plan but that’s the point. It was creative. Unconstrained by all that crap about not spending too much. These days all the talk in the industry is of efficiency, contingency planning, sustainable business practices. Visual effects is starting to be treated like it’s actually a business, and that makes me really mad. It’s all Canada’s fault.”
I point out that prior to their bankruptcy, Rock and Hole had actually opened up a facility north of the border in Vancouver. “Well they had to” Pickles explained. “Everyone else was opening up in Vancouver so they had to follow. They had no choice really. That’s my point. Think of the added expense of renting the space, buying the furniture and computers, hiring the staff, all for them to just sit there not working.”
“Why couldn’t they have worked? I enquired. Pickles looked at me astonished. The kind of look I would expect had I just exclaimed some lurid innuendo about his Grandmother, a tub of vaseline and a donkey. “Visual Effects belongs in LA.” He states in a slow, threatening tone. “How could you even suggest it could be done anywhere else?”.
At just 25, Pickles has retired from Visual Effects, and from all work. He survives on a modest 6-figure income from a trust fund his parents provided while he plans the legal action he will take against certain Canadian provinces for their forward thinking investments to create vibrant, successful creative hubs in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.
“Visual Effects is not like any other industry. We’re special. So is LA” Pickles concludes. “I don’t care if people who moved to Vancouver are happy there. I don’t care if the innovation and talent is world-leading. I don’t care that they’re serving clients in ways that we never could. We’re LA, and the world needs to wake up and realise that they owe us. Fuck you Canada. Fuck you.”