Sausage Party Controversy

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Shrykespeare
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Sausage Party Controversy

Post by Shrykespeare »

Cut and pasted this article I saw online today. Do you guys put any stock in this?



No matter how you feel about the raunchy animated hit Sausage Party, at least it's nice to see a cartoon theoretically aimed at adults making bank. Or, it would be nice, if a bunch of people weren't dicked over making the movie.

CartoonBrew's recent interview with directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan features a pretty positive chat... until you get to the comments. Below the same article in which Tiernan brags about Sausage Party's miniscule budget (rumors have it at an insanely cheap $20 million), anonymous animators are coming forward to talk about the piss-poor treatment they endured at Nitrogen Studios.

Their stories are shocking and infuriating.

The production cost were kept low because Greg would demand people work overtime for free. If you wouldn't work late for free your work would be assigned to someone who would stay late or come in on the weekend. Some artist were even threatened with termination for not staying late to hit a deadline.

The animation department signed a petition for better treatment and paid overtime. When the letter got to Annapurna they stepped in and saw that artist were payed [sic] and fed when overtime was needed.

Over 30 animators left during the coarse [sic] of the production due to the stress and expectations. Most of them left before the paid overtime was implemented. This was met with animosity and was taken as a personal insult to the owners. Their names were omitted from the final credits despite working for over a year on this film.

Criminy, Nitrogen makes the video game industry look good. Telling people they're working for free is terrible enough, but taking someone's name out of the credits out of spite is beyond the pale. From the sounds of it, this happened to a lot of people.

Almost half the animation team was not credited. The team believed in this film and poured their hearts and souls into it. Despite this, more than half of it was not credited. You can see the full team on IMDB, which contains 83 people (and I am certain there are some missing). The film's credits, however, contains 47.

There's no excuse for this. You're dealing with people's livelihoods here. People spent a year or more of their lives making this movie -- they need proof of that experience on-screen to help them get more work, preferably not at swirling shit vortex like Nitrogen Studios.

Understandably, nobody wants to put their name out there and risk being blacklisted by the industry. But all the commenters seem to agree on three things: The people they worked with were great, they're proud of the finished product, and Greg Tiernan is a huge asshole.

Working with Greg and the Nitrogen production was a nightmare for any artist, we believed in that project and stayed despite that fact.

I personally know & witnessed many other incidents during the production; such as an "Open Letter" to the clients, and how Greg threatened artists for it.

Right now we don't have any names to attach to these stories, so all we have is hearsay written by anonymous accounts that can be made by anyone. A Pixar artist did link to the article on Twitter and pointed to the comments; Nitrogen's reviews on GlassDoor also line up with the Sausage Party horror stories we've seen so far. At this point, these allegations are just allegations, even if they're so depressing they're believable.

Hopefully word will get to Seth Rogen and the rest of the higher-ups so we can clear up this mess and get the credits restored for the home release.
Happy 60th birthday Jet Li! (4/26/23)

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numbersix
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Re: Sausage Party Controversy

Post by numbersix »

Yeah, saw this too. I've heard animation films are horrible to work on. Lots of late nights for long periods. Not paying overtime is shitty (though not liek I've every been paid it on a production).

Credits are unforgivable.

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Spectre
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Re: Sausage Party Controversy

Post by Spectre »

Yeah I saw this too. The credits thing is a low blow but I'm not surprised about the animation aspect of it... I've read long before this that being an animator is a brutal slog.

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