Let me start off by saying a big THANK YOU to all the artists I’ve been hearing from over the past few weeks that this little series has been running. It means a lot to hear that these ramblings of mine are being appreciated. And since my brain is pretty much mush right now thanks to long production hours, it makes it so much easier to keep this ball rolling with your help. So…thank you.

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This week I got a big thrill, because I heard from one of my favorite artists working today, Aruna Iversin. Now for those who are just hearing his name for the first time, Aruna has worked at a ton of great studios and on a ton of great shows. I’m talking “The Matrix: Revolutions”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”, “Star Trek”, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, and Hugh Jackman’s upcoming rock ‘em sock ‘em flick, “Real Steel” to name just a few. He’s also a long time blogger writing under the name, DigitalGypsy. Which is a name he lives up to since he wrote in saying that one of the thing he loves about visual effects is , “Travelling around the world, meeting new people and places, and sharing that with friends and family.”

Thank you so much Aruna for sending that in man, but before we dive in here let me just first say that this is going to be a harder post to for me write and find something positive in it all. Not because I disagree with you about this being a great part of our jobs. It’s just that the longer I’ve worked in this industry, the more I’ve found that there are two definite breeds of visual effects artists out there. The “Traveler” and the “Staffer”, and I am most definitely the latter. So I’m a little biased right off the bat, but like always in this series, I’ll do my best to find the positive angles. But to do that I guess the best place for me to start is probably at the beginning. So hear we go!

Right after I graduated from SCAD, work was hard to find. You know how they always say that the first gig is the hardest to get? Well they say that because it’s freaking true. At least a good one that is. You see I had already gotten a couple unpaid intership and apprenticeship offers from really great studios like Zoic and Rhythm & Hues before I graduated. Both of them I could easily call my “dream studio”. However, call me crazy, but something in my gut just told me that a move to L.A. with no real income and shaky job security was just a bad idea. Especially considering that my now wife and I had just started dating at the time.

This desire to try and act like a responsible adult made me do something very hard. I called them up just to turn each of them down. It then quickly became clear right that I was going to be taking a much different road than most of my friends were taking at the time. Which was a terrifying thought, but I was excited about it.

It was Christmas time and I was going to start the first year of my new career as…a Freelancer. A word that just seemed to be backed up by the sound of a steel guitar riff every time I told someone what I now did for a living. Images of Lorenzo Lamas walking into a biker bar wearing a duster jacket danced in my head. And before long, I had gotten a PAYING job working for a couple months up in Quebec, Canada on a film about Dinosaurs of all things!

“I’m a Freelance Compositor.” TWANNGGGGGG!!!!

Ok, ok, if I’m honest I was actually pretty on edge about the whole adventure. In my head I was trying to act 100% bad ass, but in reality I remember more than few nights spent being upset about having to leave Jess for two whole months. It was a scary thought being all alone in a entirely new country for that long too. But we both knew it was a step we had to take. So I paid for rush processing on my new passport, got my plane ticket, and head up to Canada.

Two layovers and 2,000 miles from Savannah later, our stewardess came down the aisle handing out embarkation cards as the plane prepared for landing in Toronto. I had always heard about these things, but never actually filled one out before. What can I say? I’m an Indiana boy. So just like in grade school when I wasn’t too confident about the quiz I was taking, I decided to try and steal a look at the person’s card sitting next to me.

The old lady to my left seemed pretty nice. I guess she could just sense my eyes on her paper too, because she quickly looked up and asked me, “Are you visiting family?”

“No Ma’am. I’m here for work.” I said. “Oh that’s nice, what is it you do?” I had been waiting for this moment! “I’m a Freelance Compositor…working on a movie.” TWANNGGGGGG!!!!

Never one to tell the more embarrassing parts of a story, lets just say that I didn’t really get the “Ohhhh” and “Awwww” reaction I was looking for. Instead she just politely smiled and the conversation was over. Looking back now though, this really should have been my first clue that this night wasn’t going to go exactly as I had planned. But being a dumb kid with the “Renegade” theme song playing in my head, I just went back to my card and checked the “Traveling for Business” check box. A few minutes later we touched down in the tundra that is Toronto in late December.

Never being out of the country before (again…Indiana boy) this was my first time dealing with Customs too. The first thing I noticed was that it looked oddly similar to a scene right out of the movie “Children of Men”. Which was part of my personal DVD double feature that I watched on the plane ride up. The other movie was of course…”Canadian Bacon”. This similarity to a post-apocalyptic world was making me pretty uncomfortable. But I pushed that out of my mind and got into line with everyone else, inching closer and closer to the glass customs booth.

I studied the people in front of me to see how this whole process went down until finally it was my turn. I handed the man my passport and papers, he looked it over, compared my face to my id, read over my embarkation card…and then wrote a little squiggle on it with a red marker. He hadn’t done that the other passengers cards. What did that squiggle mean?

I was directed over to this other line that was moving much slower in the corner of the concrete room. It had a bunch of fold out chairs lined up in rows, a big “No Cell Phone Use!” warning tacked on the wall, and a overhead sign that just read, “Work Permits” above one those long DMV style counters. There were businessmen in suits, musicians carrying guitars, and then…me. All of us standing in this really uncomfortable little line. The whole process repeated as it did at the regular Customs line, only this time the person actually spoke to me.

“So you’re here for work?”, she asked. “Yes, ma’m” I said nervously. “And what do you do?” I perked up a little this time and said again, “I’m a Freelance Compositor” (…twanngggggg…) “Well your work permit here says that you’re a consultant.” she said. “Come again?”

Long story short, the Quebec immigration department doesn’t apparently have a “Freelance Compositor” job title in it’s big book of jobs. At least not back in 2006. Also when I say “big book of jobs”, I’m speaking literally. It’s a giant red leather bound book with every job listing that their government recognizes as legitimate. I know this because the officer pulled this monster out, flipped to the “C” section and showed me where I wasn’t listed. Apparently when my new employer filed the application for my work permit to get into their country, the title “Compositor” was defaulted to the closest title they could find in their system which was, “Consultant”. This however didn’t stop them from still printing the invalid “Compositor” title on my permit however. A job that technically doesn’t exist in the eyes of her Majesty the Queen.

“Oh…ya, that happens sometimes.” The border official, who did NOT resemble a mounty in the slightest, said.

I, of course, only learned about all of these details much later and had no clue what was happening at the time. All I knew then was that the Immigration officer classified me as an “illegal” and corralled me into my very own immigrant detention cell. Where I was told, with the door swinging closed, I was going to be spending the night until the immigration office re-opened in the morning and a corrected work permit could be issued.

I felt like a quarter that’s fallen in between the couch cushions.

I’m not ashamed to say that I then proceed to cry. Ok, maybe I’m a little ashamed. But because of that less than manly display, I am happy to say that I didn’t end up spending the whole night in that cell. You see that evening I learned the power of a man’s tears and $150 USD when it comes to getting on the good side of a Canadian border official and greasing the wheels to get a corrected work permit faxed out in the middle of the night.

A few hours later, I was set free and spent the remaining hours wondering around a completely empty Toronto International airport. Killing time looking for food before my 6am flight to Quebec and learning that there’s actually an all Eskimo airline called Inuit Air. I had just always thought that that was just the punch line to a really not funny joke. Who knew?

My months spent actually working in Quebec are other tales in themselves…and for another time. But this is how my first experience as a Freelance Compositor started. So hopefully it’s now much easier to understand why I became a happy self described”Staffer” in my later years and why the freelance traveling life style quickly lost it’s luster.

This, like all the stories I’ve been writing on the site, is all not to say that all the friends I’ve met in this industry are the same way though. I have many who are most definitely “Travelers” and love every single minute of it. In fact one comes to mind who just spent the last 6 months in New Zealand working on “X-Men: First Class” and writing an awesome blog about all the food he ate. And man oh man, did he get some great food! In fact one of the biggest draws for him when choosing a gig isn’t what the project is, but whether or not he’s been to that part of the world before and eaten their food. That’s just an awesome way to live and probably ones of the reason he’s such an awesome guy as well and not as boring as I am.

But which either side of the coin you feel like you personally fall on after reading about my own experiences , the traveling that’s required for most of us, especially early on in our careers, really is invaluable. I wouldn’t trade all the things I learned or the perspective I was given during that period of my career for anything. The places we get to see and the people we get to meet give us a hell of a lot of great stories to tell down the road, and even the most negative adventures, are positive in the end. Because they only make us more grateful for what we now have. So whether you’re a “Traveler” or “Staffer”, no matter what…it’s good to be a visual effects artist.

TWANNGGGGGG!!!!

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Now do you have a story yourself that’s similar to mine? Or do you have something that you love about being a visual effects artist that you’d like me to write about next? Well then let everyone hear it in the comments below people!

The hardest song for any musician to write is always the next one. That’s kind of how I felt after I wrote the first post of this series. There are so many things I love about this industry, but what should I pick next to write about? Blame it on mid-production brain fry or just my naturally fickle nature, but I was getting stuck. Luckily for me though this question was quickly answered by artist, and fellow Hoosier, John Einselen who was gracious enough to take up this challenge of mine and write in something that he loves about our jobs.

“The feeling you get when you’re presented with a seemingly impossible problem, and then you solve it with a completely unrelated solution.”

It’s something I think every artist, but especially CG artists, are very familiar with. That daily struggle between man and machine. It gets so bad sometimes that I’d swear there are gremlins inside of my computer just pulling random wires! A thought most sane people probably wouldn’t automatically jump to, but when you’re in the middle of a show with a deadline looming on the horizon, it’s as good a reason for some of the strange things a render farm will do when your supervisor “needs that shot now!” At least that’s what it feels like in the moment.

WARNING: This is about to get a little techy.

It was a problem I tracked down to how our horizontal and vertical apertures were being calculated. Which was a big headache on the composting side of things. Because without the correct aperture value our backgrounds were prone to “slipping”. And the only way we found to fix them was to go in manually and nudge the values in our cameras inside of Nuke until our skies would stick to the CG plates we rendered.

Not a very efficient way to work, but it was just how it was.

Now we weren’t just settling for this mind you, the problem was that the numbers just weren’t making sense! The .chan file, the format our camera data gets exported out of our 3D software in, had numbers that just were way too low to be correct. I was expecting to see values of 20 or above, just like a normal film camera would have. But instead I was getting ugly little numbers with ugly decimals values like 0.825.

It just didn’t make any sense! So I did what every good nerd does in times like these, and pulled out my calculator and notebook.

I started trying to remember what little I had retained from my Sophomore year High School calculus class and began jotting down conversion equations.

This is the actual page from my notebook

There just had to be a formula out there that I was missing! But hope was starting to fade fast. Much smarter friends of mine from ILM, Sony, Digital Domain each came back to me with a completely different fix each. But none actually worked on my end when it got down to testing the math with our pipeline.  So I decided to take a walk.

Somewhere in between my desk and the soda machine, while I was fishing inside my pocket for a quarter, it just hit me. It was my Jeff Goldblum moment as I like to call it.

I felt smart and dumb all in the same moment. There WAS an equation to solve this problem. And it was one I had learned in third freakin’ grade when learning how to convert inches…to millimeters.

(.825) * 25.4 = 20.955

That’s right. I discovered that day that Maya calculates camera apertures in inches despite the fact that they are always displayed in millimeters everywhere else in the world. Why this is I have no clue. But it probably has something to do with the damn metric system. Which is one more reason for me to hate it! Just kidding…(not really).

Now this is little quirk of Maya’s is probably old news to most of you. But this was a real eureka moment for me! All I had to do now was code that little conversion inside of our camera import tool and Wahla! I now had a camera importer that worked right out of the box. It was like magic. And that’s the point.

That’s one of the great feelings you get when you’re a VFX artist. And it’s probably even a better than the feeling you get when you see your name, or a good friend’s name, up in the credits of a movie you just watched honestly. Because it gives you this fleeting moment where you remember that anything is actually possible, and there isn’t a problem out there that can’t be solved given enough time and mental focus.

But then like everything that moment is gone, and you’ve got another problem on your hands waiting to be figured out. And what a great problem to have.

Until next time…pass it on. It’s great to be a VFX artist!

There a lot of perks to our job besides the obvious.

Being able to write off DVD’s on our taxes during the years we freelance since it’s “business research” is one of course. Or for those in the VES or members of the Academy, that wonderful little box that arrives each year full of all the film screeners up for awards. It’s like big kid Christmas! But nothing I think compares to those days when you get to meet and possibly work with other artists who worked on your favorite films. Maybe even the film that made you want to become a visual effects artist in the first place.

I’ve had that experience more than I ever thought I would so early on in my career. When we first got down to Dallas to start work at Reel FX, one of the first people we met was our supervisor on Looney Tunes, named Jay Redd. He had just started not too long before us, and his temporary desk was right next to ours. Our heads were just spinning on that first day from the sheer awe of the studio and all the names and faces of the other artists we had met so far. But Jay just stood out. Not only for how welcoming he was right off the bat, or his desk full of Apple Gadgets, but also for his amazing red beard. And when I say amazing, I mean amazing. Think a Captain Hook level of beard awesomeness. That was Jay.

We really hit it off with him while working on the Wile and Road Runner shots. And one night at the studio while we were reviewing shots for delivery, Jay started telling me a little bit of his story. Which started with a little movie called, “Contact”.

Now before I go on, it’s important for you to know that this movie was a HUGE influence on me back in the summer of ’97. Jurassic Park had just recently come out on VHS (remember the days when movies took YEARS to come out on home video?) and packaged with it was a great documentary on how ILM developed the tech to bring Dinosaurs back to life.

I studied that tape like it was the Rosetta stone. At the time I really didn’t know why, because back then my dream was to become a Disney animator. But I guess deep down I just knew that this was what I wanted to be when I grew up. Thus why I practically broken the magnetic ribbon on that tape from playing and rewinding over and over.

So when my Mom and I went to see “Contact” in theaters I was well versed enough in computer movie magic that my mind was primed to see behind the curtain. But try as I might…I just couldn’t. Not only was the movie good story wise, but the visual effects are still to this day regarded as some of the best ever filmed. Especially for all the invisible fx. Case and point, the hallway sequence where Ellie was running to the medicine cabinet for her Father’s medicine and the camera pulls out of the mirror as she opens it creating one continuous shot? Improvised on the spot and executed seamlessly. Doesn’t get much better than that.

You also can’t forget that iconic opening shot to the movie, where the camera pulls all the way back from the Earth, through the known Universe and out Ellie’s eye! For a space nerd like me, that shot blew my little mind. And this was one of the shots that I came to find out that night…Jay worked on at Sony.

I tried hard to maintain my cool and not let my smile go from ear to ear like it was trying to do. I kept reminding myself that I had worked with other amazing artists from big power houses like WETA and ILM before too. But it was just no use. I didn’t care about being cool in that moment. All I wanted to know was what it was like to work with Zemeckis and how that shot was done!

Now a days, there would have been very a simple answer for that. But back in ’97 this was a relatively new shot conceptually. He told me about how that shot was surprisingly more of an after thought than most realized. And that it was much smaller in design. But Jay, being a huge fan of Carl Sagan and his book “Contact”, made it his personal quest to find the money in the production budget to really do this opening sequence right. And find it, he did.

Those are the moments when I really love doing what we do. Because as easy as it is to see a shot as just a series of notes you have to address when you’re in the middle of production, those chances you get to meet someone who worked on a movie that had such a big influence on you personally gives you a second to remember that you just might be working on a shot that’s going to do the same thing for some kid out there in some small town like I was from.

There are very few careers that you can say that same thing about. And we get to do that for a living. How cool is that?

Now this was obviously only my personal story. But it’s by no means a unique one. I’ve heard from countless other friends of mine working in visual effects with very similar experiences. So if you want to share one of yours, please feel free to leave it in the comments on this post. I love reading them, and I’m sure others will as well.

Until next time…pass it along.