Ketchup

The last time I posted here I was working on The Golden Compass, the recent winner of the Visual Effects Oscar. That was in June of 2007. There’s been a long gap in time here, so here's a quick catch-up.

The sequence on which I was working on Compass got cut from the movie because the focus testing revealed that it wouldn't be such a good idea to have a child die at the end of a movie. As movie endings go, I agree, this was probably not the way to go...but not based on principle. ...Based on cheese-factor. If you kill a kid in a movie, he has to go in a gentle way and you have to invoke heaven in some way to reassure everyone that there is something after the tragic. Invoking heaven means all kinds of light imagery, flashbacks and soft-focus. It has to seem peaceful and like a better place. The writing that would feed such a scenario would undoubtedly be crap, since it would be a re-write by a team of replacements to the replacements after the original screenwriters finished their contracts and washed their hands of it. It's the kind of thing an executive mandates and takes out of the director's hands and instructs the editor to put together just as an alternate test for shits and giggles. Then it shows up in theatres and we're all left wondering, 'how does this shit get onscreen?' Good riddance. As for the studio I was working for, Rhythm and Hues undercut my rate, put my ass in a seat working on a pipeline that is geared towards lighting, not compositing. So I got lots of web-surfing done and a couple weeks of severance pay which was a nice thing to do. No one does that. Not in this industry. I liked working there, but I like not working there more.

After that, a web-thing for Scion. It was After-Effects compositing and motion graphics but I was well-paid and short-term.

Then in late October, with a writer's strike looming, I took the first job that became available, which was working on an HBO mini-series about John Adams up in Santa Maria, California, for CafeFX. It's really a great company and they do good work, but they are in Santa Maria. And I soon found out that two-and-a-half hours away is a long way away when you have to make the drive a couple of times each week. It gets tiring. Anyway, my friends are here and there's a lot to do in L.A., even if it is just meeting up for coffee, or seeing a movie at the Arclight Theatre, or having a good meal that is not steak. There's a lot of steak in Santa Maria. There are a lot of Latinos. All that is fine and good, but I'd rather have topography and the potential to have friends who don't have three kids and are overweight.

In the middle of John Adams, Cafe got awarded Speed Racer, the Wachowski brothers' movie, which I desperately wanted to work on. Cafe wouldn't release me to work on it, even though it was within the same company. I was a little miffed because the job was happening in L.A. and wanted to get back to L.A. Also, it was being done in Nuke, Digital Domain's compositing software, a package I really enjoy working in. Meanwhile, everyone around me was getting calls from DD about working on Speed Racer after John Adams. I didn't get the call. I poked and prodded my friends at DD, but nothing.

I stayed on for the John Adams run and helped finish up on Nim's Island fixing the tracking on a pelican with a CG beak and then turned down The Battle of Red Cliff, John Woo's next film. Though I didn't have the next project lined up, I didn't want to be in Santa Maria any longer, certainly not for three more months, so I politely excused myself. That day I got a call offering me a month of work on Ironman for CafeFX South, which I accepted. And the next day, DD called, asking me if I was available to work on Speed Racer. Reality Check, another former employer also called to make an offer. The weird thing about all of this is that even though I'm in high demand right now, all of these places still want to hire me for less than what they used to. They're on tighter budgets and compressed schedules. I decided that my rate needs to go up. It's nice to feel like a rockstar with people clamoring for your attention and trying to book you, but at the end of the day, if you're still just a working-class Joe, who the fuck cares whether or not someone polished our ego for a second.

Now back in L.A., Ironman consists of me and one other compositor working on fifteen shots. It's spill-over work from I.L.M. (Industrial Light and Magic) and it has turned out to be more of a headache than I would've imagined. Last week, the Syndicate, Cafe's commercial division offered me a job working on an oil company commercial. Although I considered taking an ethical stand on working for an oil company, I realized that I still drive a car, purchase energy, and use petroleum-based products, so rejecting it would be hypocritical. That, and I need the money. So I agreed to do it. The next day, I got another call from Reality Check, offering me a few months work, which I had to turn down. A couple of days later, the producer on Cafe's Speed Racer shots offered me a couple of weeks of work at twelve hour days, seven days a week. Gee, that's an attractive offer...jumping out of one shit-storm into another. No, thank you. Besides, no matter what happens, after I finish Ironman, I'm going to Guadeloupe for a week with my friend Carrie, who just graduated law school and took the New Jersey Bar exam. We both need to decompress in an island setting. This week, I'm looking for work somewhere else so that I don't have to do the oil company gig, but don't tell them that. There's a lot of work out there right now, so I'm not too worried about the outcome.