BACK.

Well, I'll be. It's a new year, a new show, and a ton of new stuff has happened since the last time I posted 6 (SIX!) months ago!  Wow!  If you've been following the blog for a little while, you might have noticed digitalGypsy going down for most of December, right around the same time that VFXTalk was having a little meltdown/fiasco.   didn't know about the craziness that was happening until I was contacted via Twitter and told of both my website being down, and the fiasco on VFXTalk.

Let's recap what's been happening in the world of visual effects, and how we fit into it.  During late summer there was a number of recent discussions concerning freelance wages, unions, committees, you name it. There have been a plethora of blogs out there that are decidedly more appropriate, and there has been momentum on that front.  I've removed myself from speaking about it, simply because of the time constraints I have, and there are people way more eloquent than me discussing and organizing things.  I'm going to link o them here. Both VFXSoldier and VFXLaw have been good for the community, way more so than I have, and while they both choose to remain anonymous, I heartily recommend their blogs for reading!  Often, anonymity is the smart choice.  There was recently an IAMA on Reddit entitled 'IAMA vfx artist for 14 years, and it sucks and I don't care anymore' or something to that effect.  Professionals can often get stigmatized for what they may post online, even if it's unrelated to the company they work for!  Personally, I'm not anonymous, anyone can contact me, and I have received flack for posting opinions here, on CGTalk (most definitely, banned from there for talking about salaries and wages!), and on VFXTalk.  

Since July/August of last year, I've been heavily involved in the next big show (well, one of the next big shows!) that Digital Domain is doing, Real Steel. There is a production website for this, steelgetsreal.com, where you can see the trailer for the film, released last month, mind you, full frame Flash content on that site. I'm one of four lead compositors on the show, which encompass a number of amazing effects, several of which you can see in the trailer.  We have a pretty big compositing team, almost 30 or so, and roughly seven of them under me. The robot names have not been released yet, so I'm not going to mention them. However we are doing a fair number of robots! And no, this is no relation to the fighting robots of Rock'Em Sock'Em.  I think some other company is trying to get that off the ground. From what I've heard and read, this is more a story piece than a film about robots fighting.  I'm hoping it does well.

For this show, we ended up getting another comp intern. Well actually, two!  One of them is working directly with me, while the other is working with another lead.  This time around there was less instruction, and more production.  The interns are actually having to complete production shots! Shouldn't be too difficult, right? :) Time will tell.  They've been extended to the end of the show, very similar to how Tom, my intern from last year fared.  Speaking of Tom, he's now back at Digital Domain in our roto/paint department, proving his worth. 

On the outside vfx side of things, you may have seen my machine shop from the previous post six months ago.  I'm currently working on a aluminum puzzle cube, similar in fashion to a Rubiks Cube. There are several differences of course, one being that mine is made of metal. The other being that it's see-through. What? You say?  Check out the other website I created for it, Skeleton Cube.com. I put the website up last week in about an hour, and will continue to update it with pictures as the work progresses.

I am hoping to update the blog a little more frequently! Keep visiting, or click that RSS feed up there on the right.