After spending the evening with friends and industry acquaintances at the VES Awards, Rick Kerrigan talks about how the industry’s rapid change means vfx professionals must adapt and evolve or get pushed aside.
True Grit fits into the Coen Brother’s expanding body of work. Their scripts are not scripts of painful labor, deadlines, script-writing programs or marketing demands but of self-amusement. At the end of their day, they can be satisfied not only with the product but the process undergone. To sit and watch one of their films is to lean forward with a combination of bemusement and apprehension. True Grit does not disappoint. It’s a lot of fun.
The first imperative for a producing company is that a film be profitable, preferably obscenely profitable, but for a viewer and lover of films the most important criteria of a movie is to transport us to other worlds and into the lives of other people in an entertaining fashion. An American film director once said: “a film is an immensely likable group of people doing an impossible task”. The producers of TRON: Legacy failed to embrace any element of this quote.
I go to the piazza every day to get an espresso or use one of the only two Internet connections in town. There is a dog that wanders the piazza and being a dog person I make an attempt to get to know him. I call him and he looks at me but makes no effort to approach me. I step closer. The dog doesn’t move an inch but keeps an eye on me. I approach closer still and he holds his ground while considering me only indifferently
I came to Paris to reset. Thoreau once wrote that it is best if one moves every seven years. If life consists of doing the same thing as a matter of habit over and over again, perspective is lost and the opportunity to truly know oneself never realized. In adversity is truth. Thoughtless patterns are numbing. Time to re-discover. It’s good to be uncomfortable. Good to be uprooted.
Many great adventures start with a journey of some sort. Not much happens when one stays in his rutted path and hopes the phone to ring. The visual effects business has been quiet for me these past two years and frankly I must consider that after thirty-two years in the saddle this horse is no longer prepared to carry me. This is something that many are currently facing worldwide. I’m not alone in this nor are you. One must also consider if the battle to remain within is ultimately worth the struggle required as wages spiral downward and competition becomes more extreme in its willingness to make any sacrifice to compete.
Many great adventures start with a journey of some sort. Not much happens when one stays in his rutted path and hopes the phone to ring. The visual effects business has been quiet for me these past two years and frankly I must consider that after thirty-two years in the saddle this horse is no longer prepared to carry me. This is something that many are currently facing worldwide. I’m not alone in this nor are you. One must also consider if the battle to remain within is ultimately worth the struggle required as wages spiral downward and competition becomes more extreme in its willingness to make any sacrifice to compete.
A call to arms for filmmakers to implement a large scale letter campaign to bring the work back to California. Business is controlling the economy (and the government) and is satisfied to let the American worker scramble on his way down to match the standards of living of our competitors. Letters to the governor, our senators and state assembly seem to be the most powerful tool in our arsenal. The greatest power we have is in awakening ourselves, then awakening our representatives to the missed opportunities that exist and giving them the incentive to make changes.
A discussion of some of the ways various visual effects artists fill their time and their wallets while waiting for the current shortage of entertainment jobs to be over.
The Previzion system allows the user to pre-composite on set thereby greatly reducing the labor required for post production compositing. This will prove a great asset to editors as they will have clean, possibly final versions of green screen shots that they can rely upon while cutting the film.
CafeFX going on hiatus is just another example of how the state of California sits by and watches a great and green business fade into the sunset.
Film and television particularly are the paramount mediums of abandonment. Despite our best efforts sometimes our work is connected to a film or show that sinks like a bag of kittens. It’s all part of the whole picture. Blessed is he who goes unscathed. You have to just learn to let it go…
A friend of mine once showed me a little blue book he owned that contained the hand-written visual effects budget for a film his grandfather made in the 1930’s. . The overall budget for the particular film that he showed me was under five hundred dollars all in. If grandpa could only see us now.
Robert was the father of one of my eldest daughter's best friends at school and this relationship became the basis of being friends-by-proxy with Robert Culp. When someone with whom you have shared time and experiences passes away, one half of your shared story dies with them.
The most popular film is often the one that plants the largest fist in the eye. The images are full of “sound and fury” and signify little. Our art has evolved from tricking the eye to accurately duplicating the real world in the computer and merging the imagery with captured footage. The computer is Aladdin’s lamp made real.
Currently a lot of our colleagues are involved with “dimensionalizing” conventional 2D films into being stereoscopic or so called 3D movies. While most of the artists I spoke with tended to mumble something about “colorizing Shirley Temple” all are glad to have the work.
At The Eighth Annual VES Awards Show Dr. Ed Catmull was rightly presented with the George Melies Award for Pioneering. His contributions to computer motion graphics and the entertainment industry as we know it today are myriad and foundational. Dr.Catmull gave a thoughtful, moving and understated speech while accepting the award. At the end of his speech he softly expressed that the best part of the journey had been the people that he had gotten to know. This brought to my mind two very special people that have since moved on.
Digital artists need to start creating their own films. To the degree we hold ourselves as servants rather than visionaries we will always be begging for our suppers.
The major hurdle with the unionization of visual effects artists is that we would need to gain support within the walls of the studios. Unfortunately the studios have long since written off our welfare.
I recently witnessed a conversation where a young fine artist told a Flame artist to his face that he did not consider him an “artist.” Obviously things heated up. As films employ hundreds of creative contributors, who among them do we really consider an “Artist?”
Last Thursday night was the annual Visual Effects Bake-off held at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Theater in Beverly Hills. For your ninety bucks you could attend the pre-event party at Kate Mantellini and get packed together in what was called by my drill instructor during boot camp as “balls to butts.” Plus eat crab cakes.
January 7th I was fortunate enough to (once again) see James Cameron’s Avatar on the big screen, projected in the Stag Theater at the Skywalker Ranch in Dolby 3D Digital Cinema. There’s nothing like a state-of- the-art theater to really set the hook for the 3D experience. The film also proves that improving image quality is perhaps the easiest goal to accomplish in this day of technical marvels.
Several years ago an article in the Los Angeles Times an unnamed producer was quoted as saying “If I don’t put a visual effects house out of business, I haven’t done my job.” Visual effects folks all over the business found themselves searching for the name of this offender and a rope.
