I’ve been busy for a while, this is why there are no updates. Anyway, I’d like to write a couple of lines (well… maybe something more) about the Light Motion affair. At the beginning of July in several computer graphics-related forums on the internet appeared a job offering from an unknown company LightMotion.
In the ads, LightMotion claimed to be a corporation with studios and partner studios everywhere in the world, with headquarters in a small town in Southern Italy (Minervino di Lecce). Going to their website you were welcome with an impressive portfolio of movie titles to which LightMotion pretended to have contributed either for CG, SFX, or other services.
As soon as we discovered this company site, here at UbiSoft, I started doing some investigation. If the company was as large as the site pretended to be, then the Internet should be full of references… hardly big things like this go unnoticed these days 🙂
But googling for references to LightMotion or key employees cited in the site yielded no results.
Then on RenderGlobal an Italian CG forum, a thread appeared on the topic, with people posing questions about LighMotion and its credibility. Soon a new user joined the forum claiming to be the LightMotion PR. In his first post he assured that the company was created in Italy, but in Italy just kept a small advertising studio. The real company HQ had to be in California. In closing of the message, he declared that the company was about to open some videogame development studios in Milan and that forum users could mail him an invitation to a conference in Milan for the event.
At this point, many had already sent their CV and some started to ask for invitations. The answer to all these emails asked for a CV, a color picture of the applicant, and his/her identity card (or other document) photocopy.
If the site and the internet search made me suspicious, the ID card request triggered a lot of alarm bells. Why on earth they would need such a document for a CV submission or a conference invitation? More likely it could be about faking ID cards or other frauds I can’t imagine of.
Anyway, the forum was plenty of skeptical people, too. The street address reported on the site wasn’t precise and the PR attempted to produce some clarifications. Also, the lack of information was motivated as the company was renowned in its industry and didn’t need to advertise elsewhere. And the board of directors was composed of lawyers and accounts that didn’t want visibility. Nonetheless, in every post, the LightMotion PR required people to send them CVs and invitation requests.
As time passes, the forum grows hot. More and more people are interested, and many are skeptical or dubious about the company. LightMotion PR attempts again to clear things up, declaring that the site is somewhat ambiguous because it has been developed by an external studio, and that for movie contracts often they turn the deal to one of their associate and therefore it is the associate names to appear in the movie credits.
I decided to enter the arena by posting in the forum that ‘often’ is not ‘always’ and therefore should exist at least one movie with LightMotion cited in the credits.
A while after my post, the LightMotion site was replaced with a disclaimer page stating (in Italian) that the lmfx.com website was a part of a school project, without commercial purposes and it’s not a company website; they took no responsibility for names reported in the site and that someone was speculating on the school-project claiming the company was real.
At this point, a new user enters the forum and claims himself the LightMotion website author. He confirms basically what the replacement page declared. Anyway, he adds that the site may be restored online again with some precautions to avoid similar abuse in the future.
That’s not the end… still, many questions were opened, and doubts were still there. Who received the emails, why the replacement page was in Italian only, which school was involved, and so on. One thing that smelt badly from the beginning was that every piece of text coming from LightMotion had been typed with spaces before commas and dots. That’s quite an unusual mistake, it could be just a coincidence, but it was odd that many people sported that typing feature.
On Jul 15th the LightMotion PR user dropped the mask and claimed to be a 16-year-old boy just willing to challenge his ability and confirm the school-project nature of the website. Many apology messages follow from the two users (the website author and the 16-year-old boy). Forum users were quite upset by the story and many of them menaced legal actions against the two users.
The story is going to have another twist. The website author posted another message declaring that everything could be solved by turning LightMotion into a real company, with a web design studio and hiring one or two artists.
The story was really getting crazy! Not only because many questions weren’t still answered, but also because the two guys were pretending that the forum users should feel in debt with them because they were trying to settle the thing.
Shortly after, the forum moderators locked the discussion since it seemed no longer related to the forum topic. Also, the moderator confirmed that they tried to ban the user’s job offerings, and the LightMotion user insisted and menaced not to harm his business.
The story was not over yet.
The site was brought online again, again with no disclaimer or warning sign. Some coworkers who had sent their CVs were contacted via email from LightMotion. Another thread in renderglobal started with the objective of warning people about LMFX/LightMotion dubious activities. In this thread, you can also get a recording of a phone call made by one forum user pretending to be an ILM lawyer and asking to remove the ILM name from the site.
In another thread, this time started by someone in LightMotion, they claimed that now a company was constituted by the name of LightMotion, and now everything was legal, they were preparing a game concept to propose to a publisher, they were hiring artist (!), and that every defamatory message should be quit to avoid consequences.
When I started writing this I thought that this affair was over, but I got some news during the blog update. What is certain is that it is not a clear situation. Even if the site has been made by a boy as a joke, then converted into a real company with the help of his teacher, I won’t recommend anyone to join this company because of the lack of transparency and clear answers. The other relevant thing is that unfortunately, the Italian workforce is “hungry” for this kind of company. There are bright and great professionals in these advanced fields (Computer Graphics, Video Games, … ) but there aren’t opportunities for them to express their skills. Most of the time they are forced to work underpaid for some small and dull company.
If LightMotion were for real then I bet that they would have the chance to conveniently hire a lot of excellent people and to create CG and VG Dream Teams.