Three weeks ago

Three weeks ago was the last time I had posted anything up on this site! My oh my. Let's recap, shall we. I've caught up with a lot of movies over the past three weeks, Wolverine, Star Trek, and Terminator Salvation in the theaters, and Takashi Miike's Audition at home. I enjoyed Terminator Salvation, and while I felt that Christian Bale did a good job, I really enjoyed Sam Worthingtons portrayal of Marcus Wright, a fallen man. Some of the effects were top notch, some, not so much. But that's like any popular film these days, with the time crunch that we are given, it's so tough to sometimes pull off quality work. Wolverine was, meh. I enjoyed the actors portraying the characters, but the story as a whole was kinda, blah to me. I'm not familiar with the Wolverine Origins comic, and am not sure how that would have affected me. A couple of the VFX shots were meh as well, but like I mentioned above, that's what happens when you have a short time frame and complicated shots to pull off.

On the vfx front, we're wrapping up Transformers, with a release date of June 24th, about a month away. I'm sure you've seen the trailers for the film, which showcase some of our work. I've lost count of how many shots I completed, I think around 14 or so.. Up from the original 4 or 5 I was slated for. But these numbers always change, artists move on to other shows, contracts finish, and so forth.



Yesterday I met with my student over at OTIS, to go over some Nuke keying methodology, as well as some preliminary discussion on potential senior projects that she might tackle. Overall, it's a good match, she knows what she's doing, eager to learn, and is receiving opportunities at various facilities around Los Angeles to intern! We've got another couple of months together for the VES Mentoring Program, so I think we'll be able to hit her marks and deadlines.



Also in the past three weeks, a topic came up about my extension into visual effects. Basically, it seems, anything I do outside of work at Digital Domain is visual effects related! VFXTalk, VFXWages, VES Mentoring, this blog, and so forth! Yes. It does seem so, doesn't it. I guess when I get into something, I really get into it. While VFXWages is vfx related, I don't spend the majority of my time managing it.



VFXWages is just a subsection of the larger parent company Industry Wages Inc (IWI), which is established as a California S Corp, and has actually nothing to to with VFX at all! VFXWages is just the start of something bigger, a way to get some good feedback and iron out the bugs for a larger database. Recently I've prepared a pitch for VCs that will hopefully give us feedback on the company as a whole, and possibly future financing, to extend our reach into the industries we want dominate. I've been doing a bunch of research on labor forces, foreign markets, and exactly how we can make money doing the site. WolframAlpha was an excellent way to figure out the labor forces of certain countries! Amazing, even better than Google, which I used for my first attempt. After doing some quick research, our market potential for IWI is approximately 1.8billion people, in the following countries; the US, the EU, India, China, Australia, and Japan. That's the number of people that can possibly be employed or are employed in those countries, which might benefit from the services we have to offer. The challenge now is to get them to use our services! I also have a pricing model in mind, but we must wait until the bugs are all worked out and we reach our milestones.