Mike Seymour:
Mike Seymour discusses the quality and variation seen in LED lighting
I have said this before, If you know everything don't bother. If you want to learn more about light have a look. I can't tell how much I learned from being a Set Lighting Tech before my compositing career really got going. One of the best moves I made.
I haven't written anything in a long time. I have been kinda down on visual effects.
I'm tired of being worried about my job. I'm tired of being worried how I will be screwed over next. I'm tired of hearing about how the visual effects business is hard and the only way is to pass that along to the people lower down. I'm tired of really good artists not being paid. I'm tired of hearing that this business can't turn a profit.
It's been 5 months since the world almost found out about all the dirty laundry that the visual effects industry has kept in the closet. From where I stand nothing has changed.
If your a business owner you should have thought of that before you jumped in. It's not my fault you didn't know. I don't care that there is language that maybe states that you don't have to pay overtime. You know how I know because California says so. I cannot agree to different terms. The only way I know of of giving up your California labor rights is to sign some paper work. I have never signed anything that says you don't have to pay me overtime.
It's not our(artists) problem. If your business is suffering its not because of the artists. You not turning a profit is your problem as the owner of the company. Soon there will be change all we have to do is follow the rules and do the right thing. This will work. We don't need a binding agreement to do the right thing. The world has shown that doing the right thing spreads fast. It's the smaller shops that will go first. Then the larger ones will follow. It just takes longer to turn a bigger ship.
Fight for your business. Don't let them push you around. They called you because you can do something they can't.
Michael Zhang:
Schmidli first spent hours exploring Google Earth, searching for the perfect location to shoot the image. He needed a hill in the distance that would allow his subject to be framed by the moonrise. Schmidli ended up deciding on this hill:
So great.
I hope everyone is having a good weekend. If you are working have a look on the next render.
For the record Phil has run a profitable visual effects company. We may want to listen.
By Mike Seymour:
Spherical Harmonics are an invaluable tool for production rendering, and also a common device used in games, but few really understand them and how they are used.
I love when Mike goes all nerd on us.
Jennifer Wolfe:
SIGGRAPH accepted 115 technical papers (out of 480 submissions) to showcase this year representing an acceptance rate of 24 percent (one percent higher than 2012). The selected papers were chosen by a distinguished committee of academia and industry experts.
Thanks for the link Myong
I love the fact that these guys had to do something amazing and insightful to get amazing and insightful images. No greenscreens here.
Scott Squires:
Finding problems with proposals and criticizing is the easiest thing a person can do. How about people actually make suggestions of a solution?
I'll bite.
How about California enforces there own labor laws. How about the people who start there own visual effects companies follow the rules.
This really is about rules. Rules are set in place because some idiot doesn't have common sense. And the state or country has to say "sorry you can't enslave people, so here are some rules to follow".
It's easy to say what should be done after the fact. Anyone can do that. It's what we are going to do going forward.
I had a little birdy ask if we hated the studios. I said no. It's not the studios fault a vfx house agrees to the terms.