Wednesday, February 17, 2010

More VFX wage issues

There's been more posting and other things around the web regarding the state of VFX artists.

Here's a couple more related links:

Some Inconvenient VFX Industry Truths by Richard Kerrigan

A Visual Effects Digital Artists Guild? from the Animation Guild blog.

This just added:
Poll regarding VFX Union


I haven't had a chance to sift through all of this yet but hope to make more of an in-depth posting some point in the near future.

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Open Letter To James Cameron: Fairness For Visual Effects Artists

For those who haven't seen this yet, Lee Stranahan has posted an open letter to James Cameron regarding the state of the VFX artists working on today's movies.

Click here to read.

There seems to be a consistent theme these days.

Monday, February 01, 2010

Commotion

Matthew Ingram has written up a great posting about Commotion here.  [Update: I think this site is gone so may re-post it here if I can]
Thanks Matthew!

Commotion was a software packages I wrote for myself while at ILM.
It started as 'Flipbook' and allowed realtime playback of images on a Mac II. (This would later be used as a design basis for other tools at ILM.) It also had a flowchart compositing system. You could actually setup multiple composites all types of other things.
(yes, before After Effects, Shake, Nuke, etc)

ILM had an SGI tool that did image processing but the command line interface made it less than useful for the artist. I created a Mac app that provided and interface and send the commands onto to the SGI. I had also written an app that would control Photoshop so it could be used on multiple frames. I was an VFX supervisor at ILM, not a software developer, so all this was to provide me tools so I could do my work without fighting the system and getting proper software written.

The originally released product was a bit different (roto, paint and playback) and certainly when the compositing was released it was aimed more at AE style than the original

[Update: fxGuide has an article entitled The Art of Roto: 2011that discusses the history of rotoscoping and some of the currently available tools. It also includes an interview with me talking about Commotion.]