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.

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. 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. At some future date this period of filmmaking like all others will be assessed as to its qualities and intents. Despite my preferences I think these times will be heralded as a golden age of fantasy films.

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 held in the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza last Sunday 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. At the podium 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 through working with them. This brought to my mind two very special people that have since moved on.

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 Hill.  This screening was open to the public and has increasingly become more popular over the years. However, the toughest ticket traditionally has been for the Kate Mantellini’s Before Party.  Wildly popular among the visual effects set this party has progressively grown more expensive as the years pass. This year it cost a mere ninety dollars to achieve entry. For your ninety bucks you can expect to be packed together in what was called by my drill instructor during boot camp as “balls to butts.” That’s very close. There wasn’t even standing room.

January 7th I was fortunate enough to (once again) see James Cameron’s Avatar on the big screen. The major difference between my first viewing and my second was seeing the film projected in the Stag Theater at the Skywalker Ranch in San Rafael, California 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.