What do I do?

After a plug on CGTalk pointing to this thread which currently numbers over 5000 views, I've gotten a huge number of hits in the last couple of days. This has forced me to reorganize the pages which are listed. If you hit the gallery section, you'll notice it's been broken down into individual show pages. This should ease the load and make navigating a little easier. Let me know what you think. In addition, I've attached a hard link to my latest reel on the Reels page, which should hopefully prevent browsers from crashing on people if you don't have QT7 installed within your browser.

But this post isn't just about my latest reel. It's also about what I actually do. Last week on New Years Day, we were over at a party, and someone, an older gentlemen not in this field, asked what I did for a living. How do you explain what a compositor is? Wikipedia has a lengthy definition of what one is. But it's a bit too extreme for a general description of what I do, and when I start to talk, my audience glazes over. Basically it's

...the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene.

Digital compositing is still very new, and trying to elaborate on the above results in tears and confused looks. The gentleman I was talking to had a friend in post-production as well, in ADR. That's a profession which has a simpler explanation, it's a shame compositing really doesn't.

In a nutshell, the work that is shown in my reel is a combination of live action and 3D plates which I assembled together, applying color-corrections, shadows, depth of field blurs, warps, dissolves, some 2D lighting effects, some 2d dynamic effects, and often lots of look-development. As you can see, my job is a bit more complicated than putting A over B. I mean, just look at this script.