The Ninth Annual VES Awards held at the Beverly Hilton this year was a wonderful evening. The men were dressed in fineries ranging from the most formal to interpretations of Edwardian garb all the way to elegant Goth. The women were all pretty and covered, sometimes barely, in shimmering golds and soft greens. Fresh faces sat at each table woven in among the time-tested faces of the pioneers and near-pioneers of our business. If the VES performed no other role other than to bring us all together as a family once a year then they would have had reason enough to exist.

We are now engaged in a great change that has swept our old notions of our business out the door along with a fair number of ourselves. While the volume of visual effects work worldwide has increased a very large portion of the work is done overseas and unless we can find some way to stop electricity from being produced in China we can expect to face a continuing drain of the work - certainly out of California and largely out of the U.S. in general. Unionizing will not help unless the state and local governments put into place a large and sustained incentive program to keep the work here, mirroring what our competitors are doing. 

Certainly we must do what we can to adapt but realistically, only a certain number of us will be able to make the transition successfully. Others will drop into the visual effects past uncertain as to whether they jumped, were pushed or simply let go.

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.

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.

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 piazza in San Donato, Italy is about 800 feet long and exists on a saddle a mere 75 feet wide. A road passes through it and it marks the divide between the old part of the village, located higher up the hill and the new part, which lies below the plaza. Along one side of this plaza is the small market, a butcher shop, a newsstand, a few coffee shops and a cigarette machine that is open to the elements so that smokers can access cigarettes 24 hours a day. Throughout the day the locals come and go. The older citizens move from one end to the other in steady conversations that can have only been held thousands of times before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.