Percy Behind the Scenes

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Check out this interview with some of the crew from Percy Jackson to see what we did on the show! Hydra, water works, and lightning!

Mini Lathe

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I received a nice addition to the Aruna Hobby Collection yesterday.

Sherline 4000 Lathe

This is a Sherline 4000 Miniature Lathe. It has a 3.5" by 8" working area, and is convert-able to a mill setup. It's pretty solid construction, all the pieces are well made!  I ended up getting a package deal, which comes with the lathe, and starter tools and bits. I've got a bunch of things to build on it, but of course I'm going to start small. The Sherline system has a decent upgrade path as well, so I am able to swap the handwheels out for stepper motors and upgrade to CNC in the future!
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We March on.

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Can you believe it's March already? Wow.  Two exciting months into 2010. I had a small number of donations for the month of February, and am sending out The Art and Science of Digital Compositing to Marc L., from PA!  Thank you, and the three other donations for the month of February.  I've decided to keep the donations open, but I won't be prize giving until the end of the year, I think.The month of February was an experiment!

Work is progressing slowly on my current show. This is a summer release, so I'll be working for a while up to its release in August (I think?). Slow and steady, for now!  Did you all catch Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, in theatres now! It was a decent kids flick, a little more sunshine than a Harry Potter film, since that franchise has taken a turn towards the dark side.  Percy is a little more sunny. Who knows if it will have a sequel, but that's the hope, I hear. VFX were good. Everything seemed to tie together well.  The shots that I worked on include a couple of the Hydra breathing fire shots directed at Percy (but not the waterwall stuff), as well as a decent chunk of sky replacements while the crew is up on the Empire State Building. Trivia: NY is all CG projection for a majority of the shots. The big stuff that I worked on was the water exploding sequence on the rooftop with Luke and Percy.  One was the initial water explosion and the subsequent helicopter pan of the water around its environs. Environments were, again, projection within Nuke.There's a lot of detail that I put in that you can't see on one viewing, which is a shame!  Once the BluRay comes out, I'll be putting those shots up for your scrutiny. The interns that we had last year are credited in the final roll at the end, which was great to see!

Back in the Saddle

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City of Vancouver

Image via Wikipedia

It's that time again, back to work on another show!  This time it's of another old Television show from the 80s. It's a small crew, about eight compositors, for a short run. I just got back from a nice vacation in Vancouver, where we got a chance to see how the city copes with a massive influx of people from around the world for the Winter Olympics. While most of the snow events took place in Whistler, there were a number of events in the city at Canada Hockey Place (formerly GM Place) and BC Place, where the opening ceremony and medals ceremonies are being held.  The picture above is of Vancouver during the summer time, and is missing a large amount of the Yaletown high rises which have been built up over the past ten years!

The Olympic Flame downtown is really nice to see, but the crowds were another matter entirely!   It was pretty insane. I'll hopefully have pictures up from the trip sometime this week. During our time in Vancouver we had a chance to see some figure skating practice and a womens US vs. Finland hockey game.  Prices were pretty affordable, $30CAD for the figure skating and $68CAD for the hockey game. Both were bought the week of the events at the official Olympic ticket office! Of course, there were your typical scalpers out there trying to sell more tickets at outrageous prices, but we didn't buy those.

The month of February is slowly drawing to a close. It's an amazingly short month!  In addition to being in Vancouver and seeing the sights and sounds of the Olympics, I've spent a large amount of time cutting a new 2009 reel. This reel will contain everything up to last year. I had a test reel with no sound that I showed to several VFS students when I was up there last week. I also noticed that one of the students had one of my scripts that I use as a background for my Twitter account up as his desktop background!  Pretty cool. I saw several short clips from the latest term students doing their thing. The work has progressed so far in the last decade! I hope to have my 2009 Reel in its final glory up online before the end of the month. Stay tuned!

If you haven't checked it out in a while, head on over to VFXWages and take a look at some of our Wages. They've been pretty accurate over time. I've included a graph here that shows the overall compositing wages. The red line is the one you want, which stretches from around $20/hr USD for a starting wage, up to a median of about $63.50 for 14-16 years of experience, before heading down to $52/hr for 20+ years experience (this is most likely a drop because those rates could be salaried). Who says that wages couldn't be quantifiable? 

compwages.jpg
This data is aggregated from 545 compositor wage points from around the world, and include freelance rates as well, as you can see from the blue high line. I'm going to be writing another article on rates on the VFXWages News section later tonight, so I hope that'll be up for your reading pleasure tomorrow!
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Donations and Prizes!

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Recently I've changed a little about how content on this blog is displayed. I've removed links to reels and the bio and filmography, and while the content is still available if you bookmarked the specific page, there is better, more recent content located at the root structure, which is located here. I've also decided to add a Paypal donate button, which will help run the site (It costs about 300USD/yr to run this thing, with all the bandwidth that I use). I also have an idea to give back to you loyal readers and those who donate.  My idea is to give an item away to a lucky person with the funds of the complete donation for the month. This item will be physical in nature, maybe a book if the funds donated are small, or a software package or larger electronic item if the funds are larger.

Don't be misled, all content on the site will remain freely accessible! From the Tips of the Weeks (which I need to get back to creating), to what professional artists are doing in the vfx industry.

So on this note, for the month of January which has just passed and I didn't have any donations (of course), I am giving away a new copy of The Art and Science of Digital Compositing: 2nd Edition! Eligible entrees are any donations to the digitalGypsy fund for the month of February. Donations can be of any amount. Funds received during the month of February will help decide what I give away to a lucky contributor at the end of this month! So you get two chances to win something this month! I'm going to try this for the month of February and see how it goes, and hopefully I can have small prizes given away during the year and at the same time, keep digitalGypsy up and running for you guys and girls.

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