For the past couple of days the site has been down, but if you haven't visited during that time, good for you! Apparently my domain registration expired, and I didn't get a notice like I usually do, so it went lax. However, since you're reading this, I'm up and back! Never fear, I'm still here.
Wow! It's been almost two months since my last post! And yep, it's been pretty busy. During those months, I've finished a 9-1-1 show, taken a three week vacation, and started a new website. Over the past couple of months, a friend and I decided to start an online company. We approached our current employ, to make sure that what we did was at least legal, and segmented from their own revenue stream.. We received exemptions on our contracts to allow us to work on this website. That was in June/July. We then talked to a CPA about corporate formation, which we are in the midst of doing. I've also touched based with a finance lawyer and have legal counsel, so we're starting out protected, especially in this day and age of frivolous cease-and-desist and random lawsuits.
The website is VFXWages.com. We have started a private beta, to allow professional and freelance users access to add job titles and companies we may have missed, and to get in on the ground floor of something big. Hit the link above to read more about it, but here's my description, in a nutshell.
We aggregate wages and salaries from users, both freelance and professional, and allow them to anonymously compare themselves to their peers. We don't show individual salaries or wages, and the salaries and wages you do put in are encoded and used as part of a whole (so no one sees individual wages, ever). While this is similar to what some other sites do, notably salary-scout.com, salary.com, payscale.com, glassdoor.com, simply-hired.com, et al., none of them have someone that has been in this industry for a while that knows your needs. We cater exclusively to the creative arts community. I've got a lot of tools planned that relate to wages in our field that will help immensely, from CPI comparison, trends, standard of living, and more! We also have a job listing mapboard which is in its infancy, but it's going to be much more powerful than the current ones out there. We will be going public, that is, a general open beta with no activation keys, in January 2009. So we have a lot to do in our spare time away from real vfx work. If you have any comments or critiques, check vfxwages.com out, and contact bothofus at vfxwages.com with your comments or inquiries!
I spent most of my time during my three weeks off working on this, but when I wasn't doing that, I was relaxing! We ended up going camping for the first time in ages, up at Leo Carillo State Park, north of Malibu. We could almost see all the stars! We're going camping again later this month in Joshua Tree, that'll be great. We also had a chance to hit the Wild Animal Park just outside of San Diego. I had never been, but it's a short drive, about an hour and forty, depending on traffic. We ended up getting a year pass for two for $79 (for SoCal residents)! That's for both of us, to both parks, the SD Zoo and the Animal Park, for the next year. It's a great deal, especially since a one time entry into one of the parks is around thirty bucks.
Over the weekend the Creative Arts Emmys were held here in Los Angeles. Like last year, Battlestar Galactica took the Emmy. This time around, it was not the local Vancouver team that won. Here were the nominees.
Battlestar Galactica • He That Believeth In Me
Heroes • Four Months Ago
Human Body: Pushing The Limits • Strength
Jericho • Patriots And Tyrants
Stargate Atlantis • Adrift
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles • Pilot
Congratulations to all the nominees and winners! For the category of Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Movie, Miniseries or Special, the team that completed John Adams won. Here were the nominees.
John Adams • Join Or Die
Comanche Moon • Part 1
Life After People • History Channel
The Company • Part 2
Tin Man • Part 1
Unfortunately this year I was not able to help narrow down the selection nor choose a winner from the final five! Hopefully next year I will be available.
The last day of the week for some of us, the first day of a work weekend for some. It's been a hectic several weeks, and I've been neglecting my blogging duties, but I'm back again to give you what you want. This week has actually been a short week, with Labor Day on Monday. The kids are back in school, so the streets are a little busier. It's still taking me about the same time to get to work each day, around 10 minutes.. I can't see how some of my coworkers do it, commuting in from Pasadena or Ventura County, spending 30-45 minutes in a car, on a light traffic day!
Next week will be an interesting week as well. On Tuesday my business partner and I will be heading to UCLA for a presentation by Amazon of some of their web services, which we will hope to incorporate into our upcoming website. We're also discussing an alpha group which will be able to help us debug and add items into our database. We have a tentative schedule to go beta and public by the first of next year, so the alpha group will be helping us from probably the end of September to December of this year, but I'll be sure to send an invite out on this blog, but most likely some of the folks on VFXTalk will be the lucky recipients of an alpha pass. Trust me when I say that this will be an industry-shaking site.
I've been hitting the gym in my free time (what free time? The free hours from 6-7am), and it's been paying off. A little bit of more weight lifted, a little bigger I've become. When I started this transformation I was 169 pounds in May of 2007. Now I'm 187 in September of 2008. Not too bad for 16 months! Almost a pound put on per month.
Not a lot has been happening since I posted last week. I'm on another show, which will remain unnamed for now. It's another 9-1-1 show, similar to The Dark Is Rising and Golden Compass from last year, and I'll only be on it for the next four-five weeks.
Sometime in the coming weeks I'll be at Gnomon to give a small presentation about the work we did for The Mummy. It will most likely be a rehash of the Siggraph booth presentation, but we may add on some more relevant bits depending on time constraints. I'm hoping that the other presenters that were available at Siggraph will also join me, but it all depends on show production.
My partner in crime and I will be headed over to the UCLA campus early in September to partake in a networking function for Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services, is that redundant?), where we'll be able to mingle with some start-up founders and bounce ideas off of each other. We're hoping it will be a great opportunity to see if we can use their services for our venture, and it's possible that we may meet some VCs that are interested in funding us. Of course I'll need to formally type up the business plan. Right now it's in a rough state that I should definitely get an NDA made and a plan written up properly. Maybe I'll do that this weekend, since I really don't want to fight with the kids and the lines and the crowd and the mess that will be this Labor Day weekend. And yes, before you ask, we did have to get an exemption written up from Digital Domain. These sorts of things are vital if you want to do any work outside of a company.. If I recall correctly, ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks have the same sort of requirement. Anything you do outside work may end up being the property of the company unless you get an exemption that stipulates the work you do is outside the realm of visual effects, and won't effect the company's IP rights.
The iPhone has been out for some time now, and many of you are wondering, have I taken that step? Well, maybe you haven't been wondering, but I'll tell you anyway. I'm still using my dinky old Samsung e105 that's four years old. It has an antenna and no camera! How archaic is that. It still works though, but I'm wary of the battery, since it can only be on standby for about 3 days before it dies. To give you some idea, almost every artist that has a phone at the company, has an iPhone or iPhone 3G. I don't use my phone that much, it's mostly for emergencies, so spending 200 bucks plus a two year plan of at least 100 a month, eh... It's not so tempting. Maybe I'll upgrade to the Blackberry Bold or the Experia X1 when they come out, but do I really want to? I'm pretty easy to reach, be it via phone or email!
But all the above brings me to the next topic, needs versus wants. On the whole, All I need has been taken care of. Food and shelter. Everything else is what I deem a want. From cellphones, to a new motorcycle, to a plasma TV, to a new car, to whatever you desire. The work that I do in visual effects enables me to gain those material items in a timely manner. This enables me to narrow down my living expenses (especially living in LA!) and also save for a huge item in the future!
So what does Aruna want? Here's a list. The only way to get everything on that list is to work my butt off on my ventures, which I've occasionally mentioned on this blog.
- Buying a home.
- Buying a car.
- Learning to fly a plane.
- Learning to fly a helicopter.
Learning to ride a motorcycle.- Having a family.
- Becoming financially independent.
I've checked the digitalGypsy hit log, and I've just surpassed 300,000 page loads as of this week since I've been tracking them! Here's what it's been in the past..
Fancy! That's not too bad given the subject matter on this blog and the limited audience!
On the recreational front, I finished Braid and am pretty close to completing the achievements inGeometry Wars Retro Evolved 2. Braid is an excellent puzzle/platformer, and the game mechanics are pretty sweet. You can't die in Braid, and the puzzles will make you want more! Evolved 2 is just a very pretty shoot-em-up game that is a huge step up from Evolved. I like the XBL Arcade games, simply because I can pick up them up at any time and play.
