So “Avatar” has been out for a few weeks now and I’m sure many of you have seen it. If you haven’t, I highly suggest checking it out – especially in 3D. Director James Cameron envisioned a lush world populated with rich texture and detail and used an army of visual effects artist to create it. The story isn’t something new, but the experience of “Avatar” is.
There is however one key plot point that I’d like to talk about and a related evolutionary story, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you may want to wait to read this.
NASA has officially told the gullible “no, the world isn’t coming to an end in 2012″. As if they really needed to say that; it should be obvious to anyone with even a slightly skeptical mindset. Of course there’s been a long history of doomsday scenarios being spread by word of mouth from ancient times up until even recently. Remember Y2K? Doesn’t it make you wonder why people still fall for this shit when every single one of those predictions has been wrong? The pervasiveness of the Internet seems to have made the “word of mouth” part a lot faster and easier to propagate internationally. The latest doom and gloom scenario involves the last day of the Mayan calender, predicted to be in December of 2012. “The Mayan calendar ends so the world comes to an end – the Mayan’s knew something we didn’t!” On this date countless maladies have been predicted by people who haven’t asked one simple question: how does the Mayan calendar work? Because if they had they’d know that like our Gregorian calendar, when you get to the last day of the year – you just start over again.
Now Roland Emmerich’s new disaster blockbuster hits theaters this Friday and the subject is just that: the end of the world in 2012. First off, I want to congratulate my friends Marc and Volker for producing and supervising one hell of a visual effects movie and to the many artists I know who have worked on this effects animator’s dream project. Okay, with that out of the way I’d like to ask you if you think there are lots of people who actually believe the kinds of things you see in this movie are going to happen in 2012? Yes, people really are fucking idiots and will leap to the most unreasonable conclusions while dismissing the conclusions drawn by experts (aka the scientists).
It’s so bad that NASA has put out a press release basically debunking the whole notion that the world is coming to an end in 2012. No, there is no crazy planetary alignment and if there were it wouldn’t do anything special. This reminds me of the bullshit CERN had to go through with the LHC, calming people’s fears that it wasn’t going to destroy the Earth. No, there isn’t a rogue planet zooming by us any time soon. No, the magnetic poles flipping wouldn’t cause widespread catastrophe. I guess people really want to feel like they’re in on something no one else knows about? Or maybe they want to feel like they know more about something than the average person? This is a perfect case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect but could easily be remedied by a little science education.
Sigh.
Now, please go see “2012″ this weekend and support the visual effects industry
There’s something oddly masochistic about working in the visual effects industry. It’s very much a “work hard, play hard” environment with lots of intense long hours but also playful aspects you just don’t find in other industries. I suppose this is what we should expect when a group of creative, passionate people get together to make art. But sometimes it can really wear on you. For instance, I’ve found myself working over five months without a day off at times, hundred hour weeks or working through the holidays. When you’re passionate about what you do and your craft is your priority in life, this isn’t such a big deal. However, eventually you start to have a personal life and have to find a balance and for many of us that’s been the biggest challenge of them all.
When I worked in the Commercials Division of Digital Domain, I worked with a handful of very creative characters who would spend off time making short films. This is one of them made in 2007.
They’ve done a great job of showing the intense pressure of having not enough people and not enough time, the bizarre level of kiss assery and catering to the clients and their bi-polar behavior of loving something like their child to suddenly focusing on the smallest, most inconceivable detail that no one will notice and acting as though you’ve now killed your child.
Over this past weekend the Visual Effects Society held a conference billed as a Visual Effects Summit of sorts here in Los Angeles. In many ways it was a meeting of the minds in the industry and while the three key areas discussed were Pre-Production , Production and Post-Production, the overriding theme that permeating the entire event was the general downturn in the industry here in California (traditionally the epicenter for decades) and the rise of outsourcing to not only Canada and the UK but India as well.
Ten years ago there was outsourcing going on, particularly in Canada and the UK, but it was limited in scope. Sure, both locations had visual effects studios cranking out work, but few Los Angeles film studios were hiring them to do the bulk of work on a tent pole film. That has all changed as tax incentives have aided studios in those countries by allowing the film production to write off more of the post production cost. And now that both Canada and the UK have studios that have evolved to full capacity A-level work, they are able to compete dollar for dollar with LA-based studios and then take 30-40% off the cost via tax incentives. This has made competition really difficult for the LA-based companies, digging further into their already slim margins.
At this point it appears that to be an effective player in the vendor-based VFX industry here in California, you need to differentiate yourself in one of the following ways:
Have a unique niche technology that studios need but can’t get anywhere else
Have a unique relationship with the studio so as you take on some of their financial risk
The first one used to be quite common in the industry a dozen years or so ago, but the democratization of commercial software has made it easier for even small studios without R&D teams to handle niche effects. ScanlineVFX is a good example of this factor, with their Flowline software being uniquely capable of complex fluid effects. They’ve essentially branded themselves as “the water effects house.” The second one is a bit murky and less common, but we’ll probably see more of it in the future. Don’t ask me how, but if a VFX studio partners with a film studio on the financial side they can take on some of the risk and hopefully reap some of the reward for a change. Of course this could easily sink a studio just as much as make it profitable.
This situation has been building for some time and it’s now at the point where London-based studios are booked all through 2010 and Canadian studios don’t have a large enough talent pool to draw from to meet demand. It’ll be interesting to see how this combined with the fact that close to 30% of all LA-based VFX artists are on foreign visas (my own estimate, BTW), will effect the VFX industry here in Los Angeles over the next year.
Sometimes I fall behind with posts – things often hit me in waves and I write about them profusely at night then release them one by one throughout the day. This blog is partially a way for me to expound random thoughts on things but I’ve always intended it to be a way to inform people about interesting tid bits they were in the dark about. As I write more things that pop-up throughout the day, I’m really all ears if you have questions about all things related to Science, Visual Effects and Warfare.
So please, if you have a question you’d like me to tackle, challenge me in the comments section…
Amanda pointed me to this 100 year retrospective on visual effects. It’s pretty amazing to see how far we’ve come in that time, especially how the introduction of computers into the process in the mid-70s began a series of amplified jumps in capability. Namely, computer controlled cameras (Motion Control) was used for the first time in “Star Wars” in the mid-70s, then rendered computer graphics make another leap with The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park(1993). I’ll go into detail about aspects of these milestones in future posts.
So “Avatar” has been out for a few weeks now and I’m sure many of you have seen it. If you haven’t, I highly suggest checking it out – especially in 3D. Director James Cameron envisioned a lush world populated with rich texture and detail and used an army of visual effects artist to create it. The story isn’t something new, but the experience of “Avatar” is.
NASA has officially told the gullible “no, the world isn’t coming to an end in 2012″. As if they really needed to say that; it should be obvious to anyone with even a slightly skeptical mindset. Of course there’s been a long history of doomsday scenarios being spread by word of mouth from ancient times up until even recently. Remember Y2K? Doesn’t it make you wonder why people still fall for this shit when every single one of those predictions has been wrong? The pervasiveness of the Internet seems to have made the “word of mouth” part a lot faster and easier to propagate internationally. The latest doom and gloom scenario involves the last day of the Mayan calender, predicted to be in December of 2012. “The Mayan calendar ends so the world comes to an end – the Mayan’s knew something we didn’t!” On this date countless maladies have been predicted by people who haven’t asked one simple question: how does the Mayan calendar work? Because if they had they’d know that like our Gregorian calendar, when you get to the last day of the year – you just start over again.
Over this past weekend the 
Sometimes I fall behind with posts – things often hit me in waves and I write about them profusely at night then release them one by one throughout the day. This blog is partially a way for me to expound random thoughts on things but I’ve always intended it to be a way to inform people about interesting tid bits they were in the dark about. As I write more things that pop-up throughout the day, I’m really all ears if you have questions about all things related to Science, Visual Effects and Warfare.