FMX 08, Day Two
Recruiting day for me! Yesterday I was too tired and lacked of motivation getting some of my demo reels to the important representatives of Some Great Company. And I even shook hands with one of the people who got me into VFX at all.
The Plan
The day started by waking up from some weird dreams in my hotel room. I had breakfast downstairs where a very talkative woman mistook me for some Formula 1 pilot I don’t know, probably because I was wearing my leather jacket. I enjoyed a yogurt and some coffee along with buttered bread.
After looking for a cheaper place to park my car I ended up again in the most expensive parking garage that was so comfortably close to the FMX building. But I was too soon, so I stopped by at Starbucks, got myself my beloved caramel macchiato and spent the rest of my remaining time looking at the day’s program.
A Double Negative on Internships
I felt a little alone that morning (not that it bothered me much but I just needed somebody to chat with) but nobody showed up. So I sat myself into the small room with the recruiting presentations of Pixar, Trixter and Crytek – the room was cramped with upcoming character animators and people crazy for Crysis so there was much expectation in the air. The nice lady of Pixar showed some photos of the site located ten miles west from the Golden Gate and that they were looking for technical directors and was done after about ten minutes.
Trixter is a Munich based animation company looking for animators too but their demo reel really looked humble after Pixar. Crytech was looking for “anybody passionate about games” for some upcoming and secret project“ and that was in fact the first hour of recruiting presentations. I talked a little with the lady from Pixar about what kind of TDs they were looking and it turned out that Pixar was in need for anybody interested and talented and that I should drop by at their recruiting table.
The following hour Double Negative and Pixomondo Studios were holding their presentation. Kerschy, a fellow student, classmate and friend interested in shading, lighting and rendering sat next to me in the first row when two ladies and a gentleman all from the London based VFX facility Double Negative showed off their portfolio and some breakdown of the Cloverfield compositing which was mainly a rotoscoping and matchmoving hell because it was all hand-held camera with actors against an all green background – even the ground they were walking on was green. It just looked impressive in the final. When Pixomondo started their presentation Kerschy and I left into the recuiting room when Adam Donavan called with some news about his game Frontiers. Kerschy was getting more and more impatient because other people dropped by and took the seats in the Double Negative booth. Finally I managed to finish the call quickly and Kerschy and I talked to the very nice and very sexy Hannah Acock about a possible internship at Double Negative.
Now you know why I am always sitting in the front row whenever possible: People feel like they already know you but mostly can’t exactly tell why. This is a good way of making a subconcious first impression.
she said, a polite way of saying that Double Negative wasn’t looking for green interns. However she told us about career opportunities, Kerschy interested in 3D, me in compositing, as always.
She gave us her private email address, kept our demo reel DVDs (yay!) and wished us a nice day. On our way out Kerschy talked me into applying at Pixomondo and the lady sitting there all by herself with her iBook seemed rather fond of us showing interest. Kerschy was a little disappointed because he trained himself to a Maya/MentalRay specialist whereas Pixomondo has a 3D Studio Max and vRay workflow. But as a compositor it didn’t matter to me where my render-passes come from. I showed her my demo reel and we talked it through in realtime.
I said, noticing instantly a subtle change in the lady’s eyebrows.
I pulled my head out of my statement and it was fine. We shook hands, thanked each other and off we were. Nearly.
A student from the University of Applied Sciences in Ludwigsburg approached me with some nice words about my demo reel and where Kerschy and I come from. We had a little chat about our colleges, shared some advice but then it was 12 o’clock: It was time for Curry!
Old Spice
Dan Curry was holding his presentation VFX for TV” in the big room and I managed again along with Jonny and Kerschy to get seats in the front row. Dan, who reminded me a little of a short Dustin Hoffman was a VFX supervisor at one of my most favorite childhood TV series: Star Trek: The Next Generation and also did the shots on Deep Space Nine and Enterprise. I haven’t seen a single episode of it and from what Dan was telling, the writing was terrible.
I couldn’t help feeling a little “too grown up” for (cheap!) sci-fi where aliens were wearing Nazi and gestapo-uniforms and a a big futuristic gun labeled with the Nazi-cross fired green plasma at the spaceship. But Dan also showed some old school matte paintings from Battle Star Galactica and an effects shot of a river with a waterfall he composed with an optical printer from a still image. For example: The waterfall was soap powder running in slow motion down a wrinkled gaffer’s tin foil. At the end Dan set out a prize, a poster of his famous painting of the Klingon anatomy.
Dan asked the paralyzed audience.
I thought to myself. For an old trekkie like me it was so obvious that I really felt too insulted to shout out “NCC 1701″ so I missed out on the prize. Why wasn’t he asking for the Voyager’s number? I bet not many people would’ve known the answer, NCC 74656.
If I had any fear of public speaking left I would’ve died in that moment because I really wanted to know how the transition from old-school optical printing to 3D evolved for Curry. He answered me that the crystal (I guess in the first Season of TNG) was done in 3D because they couldn’t figure out any other way to do it.
Afterwards I walked up to Curry and told him that I want to shake the hand of the man who got me inspired to work in the field of visual effects and that I was really grateful for that. He looked a little surprised but flattered nevertheless. I would’ve liked to talk to him a little longer but DreamWorks were holding their presentation in another room again.
DreamWorks seemed to consist solely of a couple of middle aged women looking for people to join them in their new facility in India for their upcoming stereoscopic 3D films. Their sneak previews 1 Kung-Fu Panda, Train Your Dragon and Monsters vs. Aliens which I really enjoyed and recommend to you fun loving readers of my boring blog.
Without any breaks I headed straight into Ethics in VFX by Van Ling and Gene Kozicki but had missed the first minutes. It was a really good and entertaining presentation about what can and what has been done with image manipulation an its effects on society and politics. Makes you really think about your profession where you try to have everything as convincing as possible.
More Curry?
VFX: Problem Solving on The Run was replaced by a presentation of Sony Imageworks (which seems to consist of even older ladies who seemed like a weird lesbian couple to me at first) telling that they move their facilities where the talents are. Just like DreamWorks they have opened up a site in India and were making their first steps in stereoscopy – just like DreamWorks.
Every major company seems to outsource to India because its cheaper. They are looking for Europeans willing to move there too where the salary is above Indian average (so you could pursue a rather wealthy lifestyle there) but probably below American average (which effectively means you have to stay in India until/for your retirement because you couldn’t afford living in the US or the EU again). I was a little pissed and walked out to see any of the DreamWorks ladies.
They were swamped by interested applicants clenching nervously their demo reel DVDs, eager to put them onto the growing pile in the middle of the table. DreamWorks isn’t looking for interns at the time because they feel their effort and time wasted on somebody who’s only there for a couple of months. Still I handed Shelly Page my portfolio DVD, recieved her card and off I was – to Starbucks for another tongue-sizzling caramel macchiato and a mango chicken wrap.
Render, man! Please!
I skipped Adobe’s Computational Photography for Pixar’s RenderMan’s technical magic, a presentation a little out of the ordinary. It was held in a small and far off room on the first floor — you only would find it if you’re really interested. Although it was highly technical it never got bored. Perhaps thanks to the little giveaway the Pixar folks placed on every chair: A walking teapot along with a RenderMan demo DVD and a survey sheet you could trade for a Pixar poster when leaving.
I guess that was one reason why nobody left early: greed.
Ziah Fogel talked about how they managed to integrate Massive into their RenderMan pipeline via Marionette: The animators animated a couple of loops and action, e.g. rats squeezing themselves under a door, or just applauding. The data from Marionette would then be transferred to Massive where the facial animation still existed invisibly. After doing the crowd animation they bounced the data back to Marionette, even though it was possible for Massive to produce rib-files 2 but they wanted to be able to make changes to the crowd-animation when needed. Of course, there needed cleanup to be done because Massive
made every frame a keyframe.
The second part of the presentation was a hands-on tutorial by Dylan Sisson in Maya how to create an Über-Sprite: It was a plane with the texture of a rocket, that he displaced via the z-Depth information of an already modeled rocket. It rendered quite fast for that, but it was hollow when seen from behind. No problem! Dylan added a “Double Shaded” attribute to the sprite and it was a full 3D rocket out of a sprite that looked exactly like the modeled rocket.
Dylan said and hit “Render” on his notebook, and after 22 seconds RenderMan was done. That was real fast for thousand displacement maps!
Kerschy, who sat next to me in this presentation, and I knew: 3D motion blur takes
Kerschy was eager to know. Not without a little pride Dylan explained to us that RenderMan knows what details that the eye won’t see in motion and omits these in the rendering.
The little surprise after the presentation was a plush toy from the Pixar short “Lifted”, a RenderMan baseball-hat for the person who had a key chain taped under his or her seat. Of course, the key chain was a present too. Pixar obviously makes good money to spend. I traded my survey sheet for a Ratatouille poster at the exit and went with Kerschy for an espresso and a blueberry muffin at the lounge. I have to add at this point that Pixar really grew close to my heart in the two days.
Rising opportunities
Kerschy, as it turned out, had spent most of the day applying and showing off his showreel to various companies and talked me into applying at rise fx.
I took a sip from my espresso that was really good and not that expensive either.
Sounded as if he was really serious about it, so I said that I would try it and finished my beverage. I wanted to drop by at Adobe’s presentation of Computational Photography but neglected the idea of spending the last fifteen minutes of a presentation and so I was perfectly in time for Technologies Invented at ILM Through the Years by Christophe Héry.
I wanted to take my favorite seat again, front row, third seat from the left on the right side. But Kerschy looked at me from the third row, pointed at two people in black shirts, chatting
The guys from rise fx! We switched seats and I rummage around in my bag for another of my demo reels and got one. Then I turned to them.
My shortest application ever, nearly ten seconds. Haven’t heard from them since, though…
Of Calamari Pirates and Car Robots
I don’t remember much of the presentation because it has been an exhausting day and the clips Christophe showed from the various stages of production were completely silent, so it wasn’t hard to doze off just after learning about the problem of having more polygons than pixels in the final frame in Pirates of the Caribbean 2. I guess that’s what happen when you let your artists go crazy in ZBrush.
ILM likes to work with dirty footage, which sounded a little stupid at first: What kind of compositor likes having smoke, rain and fog already in the raw footage? But on the second thought it’s much better than e.g. adding some cheesy particle effects in the post, because real fog looks real and behaves real. And convincingly adding a digital character into a real smoke tail is not as hard as creating the perfect smoke tail in the computer.
I will not go into detail about the giant maelstrom they created for Pirates of the Caribbean 2, only that it was impossible simulating the whole thing completely. Instead they just used a planar water surface but applied the gravitational and centrifugal forces in different angles so the simulation got it right despite the very shallow water. Clever!
A anecdote Christophe told the audience was about the transformers movie directed by Micheal Bay. The CG-artists did quite a neat job wit the first design for the transformers (that looked much slicker and not as dirty and detailed as the ones seen in the movie). Why? Because Micheal Bay expressed his opinion out the designs. I suggest you make it your desktop wallpaper, so you always stay as motivated as me.
I don’t know exactly about how ILM pre-rendered most of the lighting data so the lighters could work because the rendering times even for previews were just extraordinary, because I simply fell asleep. Oh well… maybe tomorrow will be a better day.
What remains as item on a list of impressions:
- A long chat with Martina at Starbucks, trying to cheer her up after she showed her reel to Aardman.
- An odyssey for the cute horse and some black tea
- A stroll though nightly Stuttgart, the Ratatouille credits and a short trip to the fmx party.
- That I lost my beloved Pixar poster somewhere along the way that night.
- No warm water for taking a shower and my everyday insomnia.
What I have learned today
- That I look like some Formula One pilot
- That sitting in the front row makes people feel like they know you from somewhere
- That my demoreel should have the final shot first and then the breakdown when dealing with invisible visual effects
- That applying there at the end of May is a good time
- That every three months I should let them know where I am, what I am doing and send them an updated demo reel
- That sometimes a back-to-the-roots approach can help you with things that are digitally hard to achieve
- That I have no fear of talking into the microphone asking a stupid question in questionable English in front of a very large audience.
- What Dan Curry looks like.
- That a long history of small conversations (e.g. at conventions) can get you the job
- That a crapload of recommendation letters helps getting a visa; big movie names do too
- That only your best stuff should be in your reel, even if you feel it’s too short.
- That you can trust no image, even if moving
- That including easter eggs in your invisible VFX compositing can be used to prove that they arent reality
- That you can trust no image, even if moving
- That something like too much cream in a beverage can exist
- That RenderMan is one fine ass renderer
- That shooting “dirty” footage (= with live action special effects) is harder to handle in the post-pro but conveys a much more realistic feeling to the VFX.
- What Maultaschen and Saiten are in Stuttgart: Swabian maccheroni and wiener sausages.
- That I am too nice which I can’t help.
- That I am too shy in some respect which I can’t help.
- That I definitely feel too old for parties
- That Stuttgart is the capital of traffic lights. Traffic lights that never sleep.
- That writing blog entries until 2:32am just isn’t the best exchange for sleep.
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