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. The honesty of the statement combined with the fact that we could not register our offense at this statement face-to-face with our assailant only oiled the injustice. Of course he was only saying publicly what producers have been saying amongst themselves for years. The visual effect group finds itself weaker every day. The lack of a union combined with the low cost of entry into the visual effects arena has conspired to pith our business locally....

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.

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.

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…

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. Within this body there is a consistency of world-view. 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.

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 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.