Back in the Saddle

The Olympic Flame downtown is really nice to see, but the crowds were another matter entirely!   It was pretty insane. I'll hopefully have pictures up from the trip sometime this week. During our time in Vancouver we had a chance to see some figure skating practice and a womens US vs. Finland hockey game.  Prices were pretty affordable, $30CAD for the figure skating and $68CAD for the hockey game. Both were bought the week of the events at the official Olympic ticket office! Of course, there were your typical scalpers out there trying to sell more tickets at outrageous prices, but we didn't buy those.

The month of February is slowly drawing to a close. It's an amazingly short month!  In addition to being in Vancouver and seeing the sights and sounds of the Olympics, I've spent a large amount of time cutting a new 2009 reel. This reel will contain everything up to last year. I had a test reel with no sound that I showed to several VFS students when I was up there last week. I also noticed that one of the students had one of my scripts that I use as a background for my Twitter account up as his desktop background!  Pretty cool. I saw several short clips from the latest term students doing their thing. The work has progressed so far in the last decade! I hope to have my 2009 Reel in its final glory up online before the end of the month. Stay tuned!

If you haven't checked it out in a while, head on over to VFXWages and take a look at some of our Wages. They've been pretty accurate over time. I've included a graph here that shows the overall compositing wages. The red line is the one you want, which stretches from around $20/hr USD for a starting wage, up to a median of about $63.50 for 14-16 years of experience, before heading down to $52/hr for 20+ years experience (this is most likely a drop because those rates could be salaried). Who says that wages couldn't be quantifiable? 

This data is aggregated from 545 compositor wage points from around the world, and include freelance rates as well, as you can see from the blue high line. I'm going to be writing another article on rates on the VFXWages News section later tonight, so I hope that'll be up for your reading pleasure tomorrow!