Disappointment

Boy.. Am I disappointed. It's been more than a week since I've placed an entry here, and I have no excuse. However, I thought I'd start off again with a rant. Today I attended the ATAS Visual Effects Nomination Voting, where we whittle down the entries to the top five which will ultimately be represented in the fall at this years 59th Annual Emmy Awards. This was held at Dolby Laboratories, just like last year, in Burbank.

<rant> The reason I'm disappointed is two fold. Again, we had less than 30 people show up to vote (seems like a regular occurrence though), but more importantly, most of the quality of the work was really quite bad. Maybe I'm getting spoiled while working with film, but I know that comps can get very good on the TV side! The majority of what I voted on was pretty bad on the comp end, save for a few outstanding entries that deserve to be nominated. I really don't understand the mentality of submitting something that you know is broken to be voted on as a contender? It's just like making a demo reel.. Put your best work first and foremost. There are things we do to pay the bills, and those things aren't necessarily the ones we but on our reels! Simple things, like make sure the green edges aren't green when removing a greenscreen, don't have crunchy edges on key pulls, having skin become purple after pulling a key, making sure fire and explosions light up their environment, having interactive lighting on the inside of vehicles, simple things like these. I was just shaking my head in the theatre at some of these obvious mistakes, which comes down to; no time and less money. It sucks that the powers that be mandate that whatever they need has to get done in less than two weeks, in HD no less, and for less than what you did two months ago.. My goodness. The other disappointing thing is that all the footage was either on Digibeta or DVD. I think it's imperative to show the work as it was worked on, be it HD or SD. All the wonderful details and nuances that artists put in at HD resolution are lost when you downsize to DVD and DBeta. As well, the conversion to such a lower quality medium blurs all the errors, making many things look soft on a 30 foot wide theatre screen. </rant>

Argh. And how is everyone else's weekend coming along?