I’ve seen other examples where the art in question could fall into the ‘Homage or Ripoff?’ category, but today it hits closer to home than I had suspected it ever would. A good friend of mine works in the cinematics division at Blizzard, and today I got these two images in the mail from him. The first is a print ad from Vancouver Film School, in which they seem to be using some student art, and the bottom image is a still frame from the Burning Crusade cinematic (Burning Crusade being the first expansion pack for the ever-popular World of Warcraft MMO). This print ad is from the SIGGRAPH edition of Animation Magazine, no less. And you can bet your ass these images are already making the rounds at the Blizzard offices down in Irvine.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that student homage is great and studying other people’s work is a great way to learn, but the usage in this instance is just wrong. I graduated from VFS back in 2003, and unless things have changed radically, students still need to show their source material when they’re creating their work, and plagiarism is highly frowned upon. Whether or not this instance qualifies as plagiarism could be debated, but the fact that VFS are using this work in an advertisement strikes me as really stupid and insulting. “Oh, hey Blizzard, thanks for your hard work, we’re going to use this to round up a few more students, is that okay?” except not so much with the asking or the legitimacy.

This is either the student’s fault for not disclosing all sources of inspiration like they were supposed to, or VFS’s fault for not giving a shit about who they make money off of. Let the student put it in his/her demo reel at his own risk, sure, but for christ’s sake don’t use it to make money for your school when it’s so very obviously someone else’s work.

VFS, I hope you’re listening. I really want to be proud of my vfx alma mater, but this puts you in a very poor light.

Edit: I realize that this is a strongly worded post, so I want to add that there are definitely good people working up there at VFS, but stupid things like this overshadow that good work and make the school look it doesn’t have any idea what it’s teaching or producing. Obviously something broke in the chain of events that lead to this advertisement, and whatever it is that broke (or was broken already) needs to be fixed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 1:05 pm and is filed under general news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.