Luma Pictures Reviews

Beware the dangling carrot! I think Luma is the worst in the industry when it comes to empty promises. They dangle the carrot of "Just try harder, you can do it, you can become staff, you can get a raise, you can get benefits, you can become family" over and over again, but that carrot is always just a step or two away. They even make a public spectacle, bringing the entire company together to announce who just got made staff, who gets to go on a company trip for free, etc. so that you're always aware of what's just outside your reach. I think the upper management and the owner have such history together that they have become blinded to the talent coming in to work for them. Growth in the company is rarely about the individual's talent (extremely talented is the bare minimum in this case) but about how willing you are to change your identity to be that of the department heads. Prepare to spend a lot of time going out to party if you are interested in career growth. Many times I was thrown into difficult situations so they could 'test my capabilities' but then after the shot was done they would tell me that I didn't preform well enough to get to do more of it without really ever explaining why or helping me develop my skills so that I could be an asset to the team. I even had a conversation with the owner asking what I could do to be more value to this company and his response was to 'do some tutorials and build my skills after work and on the weekends'. What?! Despite having an entire floor of people who I could have been easily paired with and taught all I needed to know, the way to be a better artist was not to receive feedback from my co-workers but instead watch internet tutorials?! I decided not to partake in all the parties and 'culture building events' despite them being strongly suggested. Luma tries to make its employees like family. Which I get, that's just a style of doing business, but I already have a family and I want to spend time with them outside my work--I spent 9 hours a day, 5 days a week with those people, it's not unreasonable to turn down the opportunity to party if I have a life outside of my job. Because I chose to not attend all their events, I was outside of the 'family' and I believe this to be one of the contributing factors to the impassable wall of career growth at Luma. I wasn't willing to change who I was to be more like them, and therefore there wasn't much future for me at all. I spent almost 2 years at Luma. Despite the cons it was a decent first place to work, get some experience and credits under your belt, and then move on to bigger and better things. And that's my advice. If you're looking to work at Luma, just go into the job aware of the dangling carrot. Work hard, develop yourself, ask lots of questions, learn from your talented co-workers, and then leave when your contract is up and go work for a better studio, a place where work doesn't pretend it's your family.

Like others have said the company culture is the worst part of the whole experience. Loud and obnoxious behaviour is encouraged and it's looked down upon if you don't partake in the ridiculous "fun" activities. There is constantly loud music playing in the entire office and people yelling over it without any kind of awareness for the rest of the artists trying to work. On top of that all the supervisors have not a lot of experience and most of them never worked for any other big studios and lack the relevant social skills to actually deal with artists and motivate them to do great work. Artists are encouraged to work against each other and be competetive by giving individual people a shout out in front of everybody and not putting a focus on actual team work. Communication between artists is almost non existent. The pipeline is almost non existent and a lot of stuff is just being done on the fly. So a lot of days you spend more time trying to fix stuff than actually working on your shots.