Zerply goes dark at 16:00 UTC on Monday 28 September. The notice is up on the site now, CG Channel carried it on Monday morning, and the dates in it are tighter than the headline suggests.
Two of them matter. Export requests have to be in by 21 September, because a human processes each one by hand and there is no promise anything sent after that gets done. And whatever you want your profile URL to point at afterwards has to be set before the site stops — after the 28th, zerply.com becomes a static page and your old address forwards to LinkedIn, IMDb, Framerate or Vimeo, whichever you picked. Those redirects are promised for at least a year, which is a deadline of its own.
User data goes from Zerply’s systems, and from its providers’, within ninety days of the shutdown.
The reason given is two sentences long. “We ran out of time and resources to make it work. That’s the whole story.” Sixteen years of Zerply, twelve of them serving high-end VFX and animation.
What a VFX profile has to carry, and why that is awkward
Losing this one stings in a way that losing a general portfolio host would not. If you are a concept artist or an environment artist, your work is a picture. ArtStation was built for exactly that and does it well: a grid of images, your name under each one, done.
Most of the industry does not work like that.
A lighting TD’s contribution to a shot is a set of decisions that the shot then absorbs. Matchmove, roto, cloth, crowd, pipeline — the better it is done, the less there is to point at. The unit of work is a credit: this role, on this production, on these shots, for this stretch of months. Zerply’s structure was built around that. Credits attached to productions, roles attached to credits, and enough people from the same facilities on the site that a listing carried some weight.
Look at what it offers you as replacements and the shape of the problem falls out. LinkedIn holds the employment history with no work in it. IMDb holds the credits with no frames attached. Vimeo holds the reel with no indication of which parts were yours. Framerate gets closest, being built for reels with breakdowns. Four destinations offered to replace one profile, and you would need at least three of them running in parallel to say what a single Zerply page said.
Who this lands on hardest
The artists most exposed are the ones already looking, which this year is a lot of people. Polyarc shut on 11 September with twenty-nine people out, and the closure notice came with a shared document listing every one of them — names, titles, contact details, portfolio links. Those links are the thing. A few weeks earlier Bit Reactor furloughed most of its staff. Multiply that across a year of it.
Somebody in that position has a URL in their email signature, on their CV, in a dozen recruiter inboxes and probably in an IMDb bio. That URL has been the same for a decade in some cases. It now has a two-week fuse on it, a one-year redirect after that, and then nothing.
The boring week you should have
Do the export first, today or tomorrow — it is queued behind a person, and a queue that closes on the 21st will not get faster as the 21st approaches. Then pick the redirect target, which for most people is Framerate if the reel is the pitch and LinkedIn if the credits are.
Then the part everyone skips: change the link. Signature, CV, IMDb bio, the about page on your own site, the pinned post. The redirect buys you a year of grace for the links you cannot reach — old emails, forum posts, someone else’s crew list from 2019. It is not a migration plan.
And if you have been meaning to put the reel somewhere you own, this is the argument for it. Sixteen years is a long run for a free service built for a small industry, and it still ended with a fortnight’s notice on a Monday.