The website is VFXWages.com. We have started a private beta, to allow professional and freelance users access to add job titles and companies we may have missed, and to get in on the ground floor of something big. Hit the link above to read more about it, but here's my description, in a nutshell.

We aggregate wages and salaries from users, both freelance and professional, and allow them to anonymously compare themselves to their peers. We don't show individual salaries or wages, and the salaries and wages you do put in are encoded and used as part of a whole (so no one sees individual wages, ever). While this is similar to what some other sites do, notably salary-scout.com, salary.com, payscale.com, glassdoor.com, simply-hired.com, et al., none of them have someone that has been in this industry for a while that knows your needs. We cater exclusively to the creative arts community. I've got a lot of tools planned that relate to wages in our field that will help immensely, from CPI comparison, trends, standard of living, and more! We also have a job listing mapboard which is in its infancy, but it's going to be much more powerful than the current ones out there. We will be going public, that is, a general open beta with no activation keys, in January 2009. So we have a lot to do in our spare time away from real vfx work. If you have any comments or critiques, check vfxwages.com out, and contact bothofus at vfxwages.com with your comments or inquiries!

I spent most of my time during my three weeks off working on this, but when I wasn't doing that, I was relaxing! We ended up going camping for the first time in ages, up at Leo Carillo State Park, north of Malibu. We could almost see all the stars! We're going camping again later this month in Joshua Tree, that'll be great. We also had a chance to hit the Wild Animal Park just outside of San Diego. I had never been, but it's a short drive, about an hour and forty, depending on traffic. We ended up getting a year pass for two for $79 (for SoCal residents)! That's for both of us, to both parks, the SD Zoo and the Animal Park, for the next year. It's a great deal, especially since a one time entry into one of the parks is around thirty bucks.

Battlestar Galactica • He That Believeth In Me
Heroes • Four Months Ago
Human Body: Pushing The Limits • Strength
Jericho • Patriots And Tyrants
Stargate Atlantis • Adrift
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles • Pilot

Congratulations to all the nominees and winners! For the category of Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Movie, Miniseries or Special, the team that completed John Adams won. Here were the nominees.

John Adams • Join Or Die
Comanche Moon • Part 1
Life After People • History Channel
The Company • Part 2
Tin Man • Part 1

Unfortunately this year I was not able to help narrow down the selection nor choose a winner from the final five! Hopefully next year I will be available.

Next week will be an interesting week as well. On Tuesday my business partner and I will be heading to UCLA for a presentation by Amazon of some of their web services, which we will hope to incorporate into our upcoming website. We're also discussing an alpha group which will be able to help us debug and add items into our database. We have a tentative schedule to go beta and public by the first of next year, so the alpha group will be helping us from probably the end of September to December of this year, but I'll be sure to send an invite out on this blog, but most likely some of the folks on VFXTalk will be the lucky recipients of an alpha pass. Trust me when I say that this will be an industry-shaking site.

I've been hitting the gym in my free time (what free time? The free hours from 6-7am), and it's been paying off. A little bit of more weight lifted, a little bigger I've become. When I started this transformation I was 169 pounds in May of 2007. Now I'm 187 in September of 2008. Not too bad for 16 months! Almost a pound put on per month.

Sometime in the coming weeks I'll be at Gnomon to give a small presentation about the work we did for The Mummy. It will most likely be a rehash of the Siggraph booth presentation, but we may add on some more relevant bits depending on time constraints. I'm hoping that the other presenters that were available at Siggraph will also join me, but it all depends on show production.

My partner in crime and I will be headed over to the UCLA campus early in September to partake in a networking function for Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services, is that redundant?), where we'll be able to mingle with some start-up founders and bounce ideas off of each other. We're hoping it will be a great opportunity to see if we can use their services for our venture, and it's possible that we may meet some VCs that are interested in funding us. Of course I'll need to formally type up the business plan. Right now it's in a rough state that I should definitely get an NDA made and a plan written up properly. Maybe I'll do that this weekend, since I really don't want to fight with the kids and the lines and the crowd and the mess that will be this Labor Day weekend. And yes, before you ask, we did have to get an exemption written up from Digital Domain. These sorts of things are vital if you want to do any work outside of a company.. If I recall correctly, ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks have the same sort of requirement. Anything you do outside work may end up being the property of the company unless you get an exemption that stipulates the work you do is outside the realm of visual effects, and won't effect the company's IP rights.

The iPhone has been out for some time now, and many of you are wondering, have I taken that step? Well, maybe you haven't been wondering, but I'll tell you anyway. I'm still using my dinky old Samsung e105 that's four years old. It has an antenna and no camera! How archaic is that. It still works though, but I'm wary of the battery, since it can only be on standby for about 3 days before it dies. To give you some idea, almost every artist that has a phone at the company, has an iPhone or iPhone 3G. I don't use my phone that much, it's mostly for emergencies, so spending 200 bucks plus a two year plan of at least 100 a month, eh... It's not so tempting. Maybe I'll upgrade to the Blackberry Bold or the Experia X1 when they come out, but do I really want to? I'm pretty easy to reach, be it via phone or email!

But all the above brings me to the next topic, needs versus wants. On the whole, All I need has been taken care of. Food and shelter. Everything else is what I deem a want. From cellphones, to a new motorcycle, to a plasma TV, to a new car, to whatever you desire. The work that I do in visual effects enables me to gain those material items in a timely manner. This enables me to narrow down my living expenses (especially living in LA!) and also save for a huge item in the future!

So what does Aruna want? Here's a list. The only way to get everything on that list is to work my butt off on my ventures, which I've occasionally mentioned on this blog.

• Buying a home.
• Buying a car.
• Learning to fly a plane.
• Learning to fly a helicopter.
• Learning to ride a motorcycle.
• Having a family.
• Becoming financially independent.

I've checked the digitalGypsy hit log, and I've just surpassed 300,000 page loads as of this week since I've been tracking them! Here's what it's been in the past..

Fancy! That's not too bad given the subject matter on this blog and the limited audience!

On the recreational front, I finished Braid and am pretty close to completing the achievements inGeometry Wars Retro Evolved 2. Braid is an excellent puzzle/platformer, and the game mechanics are pretty sweet. You can't die in Braid, and the puzzles will make you want more! Evolved 2 is just a very pretty shoot-em-up game that is a huge step up from Evolved. I like the XBL Arcade games, simply because I can pick up them up at any time and play.

It's easy to get set up, just plug in all the bits, and away you go! It even comes with a USB keyboard and mouse. No network cable included, but it's got 802.11b and n! It also has a 10/100base-T port (can't tell if it's GigE). The hard drive comes split between two partitions; when you check Windows Explorer, the C: drive is 39.9GB (8 used / 32 free) and a D: drive (31.3GB free). I quickly installed Quicktime 7.5, Firefox, and Opera, and I think I'm done for now (I might fool around with flock), but will continue to play with it as time goes on. It does only have 1GB of RAM, but I think I'll pick up another 1GB SO-DIMM and just toss it in, especially for XP. So far it'll play 720p QT movs. I haven't had a chance to toss any 1080p footage its way, but the monitor that I'm using for it is only 1280x1024, so it would have to rescale the footage down.

I'll probably toss some Python tools on it, as I'm starting to learn Python, all over again. Especially now that Nuke 5 can utilize python, I think it would be a smart move. I can also use Python to generate web pages, so I will use the eeeBox as a web development machine too. The django framework looks pretty promising.

One thing that sucks so far is that the VESA mount to attach it to an LCD panel only works if your LCD stand does not block the VESA attachments! Case in point, check the image below. Check your LCD panel, and tell me if its like the image below, or if the stand mounts and covers the VESA area. Seems like slight oversight there. It would have been nice to invert the bracket so you could attach the box over the existing mount.


Looks like I'll have to rig something up in the meantime!

I also ran into my VES student from earlier this year! She's doing well, on course to graduate later in the year. I also got a chance to catch up, albeit briefly, with some Tippetteers, and ex-Tippetteers. They have moved far and wide, from Blue Sky, to ILM, to Image Movers!

I not only got a chance to catch up with friends and coworkers, I also got to know my fellow DDers! Several I have never met since I started here two and a half years ago.. Most of them were in commercials and recruiting, but some were in features. How strange! Needless to say, Siggraph is definitely a place to network and make yourself known, and thank you guys for coming up and introducing yourselves. Here are some pictures of the booth, blatantly taken off of Flickr. The white circular banner is a remnant from last year, they may change it to black next year.

Until next year!

On the tech side, there seems to be a significant display of stereoscopic options, both anaglyph and polarized, and some 3D panels with no need for glasses. I was approached while at the booth by a vendor who had developed a stereo technology that didn't rely on glasses at all.. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to see a demo, since this was the first year they were there. I met a couple students from VFS, some from Gnomon and Expressions, so there was a good student turnout so far as well. I also got a chance to actually meet new people at DD that I had never met before! Mostly from the commercials side of things. We're a big studio, so naturally we don't get a chance to meet everyone.

I was pretty excited to have my first presentation at the DD booth yesterday at 2:30.. We had a great turnout, and if you were there, you'll remember the spill over into the aisles! Digital Domain had a great location as well, right at the entrance to the convention, so pretty much the first thing you see is Vicon and Digital Domain. One of the big drawbacks is that Vicon is so loud. Hopefully that will change as the exhibit goes on. Today, at 3:30pm, I'm doing the same presentation, but this time with more footage tacked onto the end, which contains all our sweet work on the show.

Drop by and say hi!

I'll be periodically updating the website here with my thoughts of the stuff on the floor, so be sure to check in!

I thought it started well, at least all the stuff before the title came on. It's similar to the other ones, with a short exposition of the story, and how it would unfold. Unfortunately, that was about it.

Here are some choice quotes from RT.

Nothing special, nothing risible, nothing memorable, nothing that's going to last long at the cineplex. It just sort of evaporates on screen. And that's almost worse than being a bomb. At least you'll remember the bomb.

Parts of the movie are fun, mostly due to Fraser's and Bello's winning attitudes. But there is too much slapstick, too much infantile humor, too much messy editing and an overload of special effects.

But the script frankly sucks. It lifts from sources that were themselves tired liftings from other sources. The funniest lines don't appear to have been intended to be funny.

So on that note, on to the next film!

DD's got some cool presentations scheduled, from Speed Racer and The Mummy, to some commercial spots. We're also in a pretty good spot on the show floor, immediate in front of one of the main entrances! Here's the direct link to the Siggraph exhibit layout. Or you can click on the image to the left to see a small portion of the floor and where we will be located. The current times for the exhibit are:

My experience with Ubuntu was less than troublesome. I had heard good things about Ubuntu, and I don't have as much free time as I'd like to experiment with different flavors of Linux, so I settled with it. I installed it from within Windows (instead of straight from CD), and it recognized every piece of hardware that I had in my machine, without even prompting me! It set me up on my internal DHCP network, downloaded all the updates, and I was surfing with Firefox and Opera before you'd know it. It was EASIER to run the Ubuntu install program than XP. What a change from a decade and a half ago! All my music and video files can wonderfully, and package system is a breeze to update software with. After fiddling around with it for a day or so, I installed the Compiz FX kit, which basically adds some sweet visual effects to the windows and desktops of Gnome, and it's slick. Really Slick. Useability is through the roof. I can read all my PDFs, movies, images, my TTF fonts, MS Word docs and spreadsheets. It's great. Unfortunately I don't think I can stick with Ubuntu on its own, as I still need Premiere and Photoshop to do editing and painting work. But for general day to day surfing, document editing, movie watching and the like, it's a great OS. I'd love to be able to get my parents hooked on it!

Siggraph is coming up in several weeks, from August 11th to the 15th, right here in Los Angeles. I'm still expecting to show up and hang out at the booth, at least once during the exhibit hall period, see some familiar faces, and meet new ones. Digital Domain has got some great presentations planned covering the past couple of shows we've done since the last Siggraph. I am still not confirmed completely on my next show, so I won't mention anything just yet. It does, however, possibly give me the chance to complete three shows this year. Last year I completed four, two of which were pretty short, The Dark Is Rising and Golden Compass.

Over the weekend I took in the new Hellboy film, and I thought it was excellent. The Golden Army was badass, and the characters and sets of this Guillermo film were quite good. The only thing that didn't really fly for me was the first 10 minutes, of an adolescent Hellboy. I could have used a different introduction to the creation of the Golden Army. DNeg did a sweet job on all the effects, I can't complain. They do some wicked work these days. Hellboy II, The Dark Knight, Harry Potter, Casino Royale, Children of Men. If you haven't seen Hellboy II and are a fan of the first one, I definitely recommend this one.

The Dark Knight came out this weekend as well, which I haven't got a chance to see yet. I'm sure it'll do great! I'll probably catch it next weekend.

Now it's time for some relaxing R&R. Next week I'll still be on the show for a short time, tying up loose ends. Stay tuned for the next big show! Siggraph is actually coming up very shortly. Hopefully I'll meet up with some of you there!