It's hot, or it was

An unusually hot last couple of days here in the Los Angeles area. It's only April, but it feels like late summer. I've been fortunate enough to spend the days inside an air conditioned building. The commute via motorcycle feels like I'm trapped in a spacesuit on the sun. There's no cool breeze, just a warm flow of air that continually warms me in my leathers. Ick. Sitting at a traffic light melting is kinda not fun.

Work is going well. Not much else to say! We're hitting our deadlines and doing our shots. The film comes out in a couple months, so we're just working away. I am working on the weekends now, it seems to be a sort of regular occurrence in this business. Not sure why. When I was working in Canada, we rarely worked weekends. I'm not sure if that is because it was visual effects for television, Canada, or a combination of both.

Recently there was a post on CGtalk about VFXWages. Like the thread on FXGuide, it was mostly a discussion on whether it would be worth it. Of course, I have my rebuttals and assurances of anonymity. In the past three, almost four weeks, we've quadrupled in size. We're very close to hitting 3000 users (we may hit that this weekend), and while this is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of artists working, the numbers we are seeing within the graphs look very promising. There's more data to browse, more date to interpret, and more data to toss out and disregard (shame on you for adding your wage of 0!). We're in the progress of revamping the wage entry page to make it a little more...effective. During the next several weeks we'll be rolling out some new items, and I'm hoping that we'll be putting up our first set of job postings, which will be another very powerful part of our site! We're also starting to do advertising for our site, right now through Google Adwords, but will hopefully strike a deal with CGSociety, AWN, and a couple others. Of course, it's going to be expensive, so I'm in the process of evaluating our finances. I'm also in the midst of cleaning up a business proposal which will be shot out to, hopefully, some interested investors. This would allow us to grow much quicker and provide better tools for our users.