Rodeo FX Reviews

Pipeline Development: - No management ( only micro management from top executives ). - Terrible communication across all levels of the company. - They abolished sprints and agile management in favor of one man show coordination and verbal + random task association. - Development team is under the mercy of artists/supervisors who don't really know what they want. Makes the developer work impossible. - No followup / feedback. No one takes the time to test the tools made specially for production, but everything is urgent when they requested it, and they make sure to put the pressure on. - No Ticket management or filtering. Production complains on everything to devs regardless of the nature of the issue ( most of the time, it's lack of experience on the production floor ). A sample ticket is 99% of the time a one sentence saying "It's not working" and Support and Devs have to figure the rest out. - Dev have to support artist's scripts and tools, regardless of their experiences and the quality of the code. Overall: - No mid and long term goals, on a employee, team nor department level. - Lack of seniors artists on the floor. - Some great and experienced seniors are kept quiet and silenced when it comes to Technical Direction for show/shot. - No knowledge of Department TD's for support of day to day artist's requests, all the production requests falls in the Dev's hands, even the simplest scripts. - Arrogance in many employees with favoritism coming from top executives. - Production have preconceived ideas about developers, issues that they are dragging behind for years now. - Many coworkers have specialized experience, and have been silenced and asked to do what they are told regardless of the outcome. - Depressive work environment. - They will make you feel like you are less valued than you really are.

I've never had my seat moved more often for seemingly pointless reasons, I'd argue that the constant shuffling costs more time and money than someone not sitting in an ideal spot and needing to email, call or walk over to someone else. This wasn't just myself but entire departments or projects would move on what felt like a monthly basis. There was an overall feeling of frustration from everyone I spoke with about this, it was definitely one of my main reasons for leaving. Certain people promoted as seniors or supervisors are anything but a senior and would definitely not last in a senior role at a competitor like ILM, Double Negative or Weta. The company takes on too much work for what it can reliably do, every department seemed stressed out and not able to keep up. Pipeline was putrid and the worst I have seen in 10 years of VFX, in fact calling it a pipeline is an insult to a real VFX pipeline because it is junk. Favoritism for certain people. Some projects are so poorly managed and the amount of OT needed is not sane, other projects seem to run smoothly.