Bam you'll know →

Shawns Hendriks Via Twitter:

Telling the guy painting your house that you don't know what color you want but just make it like BAM! you know #treatedlikevfxartists

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Working nights is werid. Your times are all screwed up. You shop in the middle of the night and you are going to work when most people are driving home. Good thing was I was were I wanted to be.

I was greeted by Phillip Hoffman. At this time Phillip was a coordinator. I filled out all the paperwork and was led up stairs to the comp closet. A narrow room which had a door on the far side that led to the art department. 4 cubicles lined the right wall and 3 desks on the left wall. I was to share a desk with Craig Mathieson. Craig is a really good compositor and wasn't afraid to make mistakes and laugh at them. Everyday I would come in and Craig was chuckling about something crazy yet obvious he had screwed up in some way. I wish he was around longer, I feel I didn't learn everything he had to offer. Jim was to my left. On the night shift. There was a group of painters that were brought on to help with the heavy paint work that needed to be done. Delores Pope, and two other artist I never saw again after the project was over and for the life of me cannot remember there names. Down the hall was a additional room that had the other compositors that were all on the day shift. Brad the lead compositor on the show help me get setup and showed me rush and how the network was setup. Also setup a e-mail account so I could communicate.

Phillip sent me my-first assignment. All you could get was a scratch removal. There was really hard, hard, medium and easy. There was smoke in almost every shot. Tanks and gun shots make a lots of smoke. To help speed things up we only worked on the right third of the frame. The scans were 4k but we worked on a 2k cropped image. If we needed other parts of the frame we could ask. We used a 2k playback machine called the framethrower that you could load your image sequence and play it back realtime.

There is a reason you start in paint and roto. This is some of the hardest compositing I have ever done.

Dark Side of the Earth →

RadioLabs:

200 miles above Earth's surface, astronaut Dave Wolf -- rocketing through the blackness of Earth's shadow at 5 miles a second -- floated out of the Mir Space Station on his very first spacewalk. In this short, he describes the extremes of light and dark in space, relives a heart-pounding close call, and shares one of the most tranquil moments of his life.

The black in space is a complely different animal to here on earth. Have a listen.

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After finishing with Synchroneon pictures I went back to the production world. Back to set lighting. I needed a job. There wasn't work at that time for artist with no experience. I bounced around working as a set lighting tech. I worked I on music videos and feature films and television. Learning all the gotchas of production.

I was contacted by a producer at Pacific Title and Art Studio and the decision was made that I didn't have the experience to do what was asked. Jim had put my name in the pool of artist for hiring. That's a big step. Jim trusted me to do a good job. He new that i would do whatever it takes.

About 3 months later I got a call from the same producer asking if I would be interested in a job.

I remember the day clearly. Location was Long Beach at a harbor hotel. It was 5:30am. I was acting bestboy for the day. I pulled into crew parking set the parking break and made the call. I left the message of my life. Joe and I agreed on terms and I went to work.

The job was a restoration. There was a scratch on 41,000 frames of Battle of the Bulge . I would be working nights.

AMPAS reaches initial funding goal for new Museum →

Jeff Heusser writing for fxguide.com

BEVERLY HILLS, CA – The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it has reached its initial goal of $100 million toward a $250 million capital campaign to fund the upcoming Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Concurrently, the Academy unveiled its vision for the first major U.S. museum dedicated exclusively to the history and ongoing development of motion pictures. Designed by award-winning architects Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali, the non-profit museum which will be located in the historic May Company Wilshire building in Los Angeles, is slated to open in 2016.

NUKE 7.0 File Formats on Vimeo →

Watch the second installment of our NUKE 7.0 new feature and upgrade videos. In this 2min video we showcase the workflow improvements made possible thanks to Alembic, OpenEXR Deep data and ARRIRAW support, as well as FBX improvements.

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Watching today’s DNeg’s layoffs it reminded me if what a different world it is to even 8 years ago. If was a sad day when the producer pulled you into his office to discuss the future. When you find out that you aren’t part of it. Good times are shared in the rooms of visual effects.

My first Shake job was turning night into day. It was a low budget feature that someone agreed to do the post and visual effects for. There was no budget. The job post was on the shake list and I responded. I interviewed with David Troy. He agreed to pay me a weekly rate for rotoscoping. I was not called a roto artist but that’s what I was. The scene need to take place in the day but the shots where shot as the sun was going down. If you have ever worked in production you know how many times this happens. Its not called tragic hour for nothing. The idea was I would roto talent and we would then place a daytime background in place of the fading to night one that was shot. Lets just say I got very good at roto really fast. How the body moves. Lower arm, upper arm. Even single bones of fingers if need be. There was also simi- transparent clothing. Which was very dark. If I had the experience to know that was going to be such a problem I would have run. As I remember it I had 3 weeks.

After I had completed the roto for all the shots the supervisor sent me plates that were to be place outside to make it seem like daytime. All of a sudden I was a compositor. This was exciting. This was what I had in mind. All the that hard work payed off. This was fun. I can do this.

The other artist was Jim. He was a compositor newly back from a trip around the world. Finding his way back on to the grid. Jim was a seasoned compositor by this time. Working on Paintbox and the inferno at places like Charlex in New York and Editel in Los Angeles. He was tasked with the other 20 or so shots in the this movie. He used all he basic tools. Clean plates, 2d tracking and most of all his brain.

After that job ended. Jim found himself at Pacific Title and Art Studio.

Truth about the Dneg layoffs →

The internet vfx community exploded with rumors today over massive layoffs at Double Negative. This is perhaps a sign of the times, but unfortunate as it is not true – at least not to the extent that has been mentioned in forums such as Twitter. Talk of 200 + layoffs is just not based in fact. At fxguide, we too know of people who have been made redundant – but this is true of many companies from time to time, but for some reason this move at Dneg has been amplified in the ‘internet echo chamber’.

​Mike, thanks for clearing things up.