Happy New Year and VES Happenings
Happy 2007 everyone.. Welcome back to the daily grind. It's Friday. Unfortunately my day doesn't stop just because it's the weekend. A lot of things are on the horizon! Tomorrow is the VES Awards judging, which I'll be attending over in Burbank somewhere. Keep in mind, this will narrow down the plethora of entries to only three. The VES members will be able to vote online for their choice out of the three starting sometime mid January.
Next weekend is the VES Show & Tell, where those three nominees have an opportunity to present their work to their peers. I'll be attending that as well, and will be able to give a summary here at DigitalGypsy. It's at the Skirball Center here in LA, so if you're local, check it out to see your peer's work! It's free for VES Members, $10 for students, and $20 for general admission. It's a full day, and lunch is provided.
We also finally received the results for the 2006 VES Survey. This was survey given to the VES members, and I'm sorry to say that not that many members contributed to it.. Only a paltry 324 out of 1500 or so members. So given these results, take them with a grain of salt. Click below to see some of the pertinent results which may interest you.
The VES survey contained several multiple choice questions, covering things from health care, to our private VES forum and more. Here's a sampling of the results and what I think about them.
Most of those surveyed are fulltime, and several, like me, are fulltime/freelancers. These are people that are at a facility yet are project based. Many have been in the industry for quite a while, which makes sense. You must have at least five years of professional experience to join the VES. I fall under the 7-10 year category, and will hit 10 years in sometime next year (wow, has it been that long?). Want to how many hours many of us work? Check out the image below. It looks like a majority of us work 41-60 hours a week. Ever since moving to the states, I've worked a consistent 45+ hrs a week.
Contrary to what I had thought, the majority of those surveyed work on Windows machines! I work exclusively under Linux, and I'm assuming that those working under Other are working on Irix. And last but not least, here's another survey result that may tempt or surprise you.
I'm in the lowest age range, and that will change over in two years (that makes me 29, for those counting). The female to male ratio could change. My first place of work (GVFX) was mostly female. I think there were two male compositors, and six female. As well, most of the production staff was female.
There were a number of other survey questions; what is your primary source for vfx news, how well is the VES staff supporting the membership, VES has a member database, etc. Hopefully next year there will be a larger number of survey results! One result which was quite interesing was the question on wether you've worked abroad in the last five years.. 44% said yes, 56% said no. The top countries for working abroad were Canada (46), UK (40), Australia (24), New Zealand (24, go WETA),
Make sure you visit here early next week, when I go over the experience of judging the VES Award submissions! Hopefully it won't be as strict as the ATAS voting last year.
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