Luma Pictures Reviews

Immature and cliquey. It's like a frat house. Your work has lower value if you dont entangle yourself in office politics boozing to popularity. Luma culture is all fun and games. You have to fit into Lumas fun mould to get ahead. Some artists political and culture play are hardcore. People change their support of AFL teams to be same as their supervisors. Radical changes from hating to loving TV shows, certain foods, golf, sports, opinions just to get close to supervisors. I on the other hand was a schmuck for believing good work would be enough. Low pay, they dont negotiate salary for most people you will have one shot to put in your salary and Luma will take it or ignore you. For whatever reasons they negotiated for others. Luma hardly ever gives raises and with the fear tactics of non negotiation their salaries low in the industry. Just months after leaving my salary increased substantially. Luma aint all bad, you get good shots for your reel but you will have a lonely time if your on the wrong end of the social spectrum. Contracts are short and no sign of renewal or end until last minute.

It's been a few years since I worked at Luma, but I've been keeping an eye on the reviews and it doesn't sound like that much has changed, so i thought i'd add my two cents. At the time, I didn't have many other studios to compare it to, but now that I have I can say with certainly that Luma was...unique?! The culture was bizarre....imagine.. ...mandatory shots (i.e. tequila/vodka) at 9am on Mondays, mandatory 12.30-1.30 lunch break (a gong is rung to signal this and you must leave your desk), enforced 'team bonding' activities on weekends (not mandatory but frowned upon to miss), 'school register' taken at 8.05am (i.e. 5 minutes after you're meant to be there) and a record kept of whoever's more than 5 minutes late. There was some kind of penalty for being 5-minutes late more than 3 times, can't remember what it was. Weekly staff meetings where someone might get 'made staff' and get a prize, and the boss gives a speech about how great they are. Everyone claps and wonders 'when will it be me..?' 'How do i get this honour?' Then Employee of the Week will be announced and another person has to play a weird game in front of the whole crew (like throw a bowling ball) to win another prize . You get the idea.... Most companies have a little staffpolitics going on, some favouritism..but i've never seen it more flagrant than at Luma. Super high staff turnover as a consequence, and even the favourites leave after a few years. Nearly everyone who I saw get 'made staff' has left by now. The staff was mainly made up of people they'd brought over from the US (most of whom had been promoted in the process so didn't have a very good grasp of their roles), and local graduates who were clearly being paid the minimum. The favourites of these were hastily groomed to fill senior roles. Overtime was bad, as many other reviews have mentioned, and they're not honest about how much will be expected. Pay wasn't terrible, but again there's this weird element to it - they tell you after interview 'make us an offer and we'll either accept it or not. We don't do negotiations'. So obviously most people go in a bit low. Ironically I then got haggled down, and later heard quite a few other people did too. So basically they only negotiate one way?! Having said alllll this....Luma has, over the years, given a lot of inexperienced artists their 'foot in the door' of an otherwise very competitive industry. This is perhaps their saving grace. So you're new to VFX and fancy a few crazy months in return for a feature film credit, I'd say go for it!