New Horizons

Wow! It's been almost two months since my last post! And yep, it's been pretty busy. During those months, I've finished a 9-1-1 show, taken a three week vacation, and started a new website. Over the past couple of months, a friend and I decided to start an online company. We approached our current employ, to make sure that what we did was at least legal, and segmented from their own revenue stream.. We received exemptions on our contracts to allow us to work on this website. That was in June/July. We then talked to a CPA about corporate formation, which we are in the midst of doing. I've also touched based with a finance lawyer and have legal counsel, so we're starting out protected, especially in this day and age of frivolous cease-and-desist and random lawsuits.

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.