Where’s the break-even point? Potentially project-defining decision… is the render time win and quality loss worth the extra time needed to create the lo-poly assets? Methinks not.

Find out my opinion of time tracking over at AWN.

Great companies need to balance art with economics. Tension isn’t necessarily a bad thing if it leads to a great product in the middle.

The need to control and know everything as a manager can stifle innovation. Having great people you trust is a far more scalable method.

Playing it safe doesn’t lead to long-term, consistent success; staying in the middle — the “unstable” place where new ideas are formed and art, economics, time, and technology are all being balanced — does.

Catmull paraphrased by mashable. Thanks to Heribert!

Physical exercise is not only crucial for someone who spends the majority of his life on a chair in front of a monitor, its also a good way to get in touch with your mind. As opposed to one-on-one competitive sports, thoughts are free to wander. I find that every time I go for a run, my thoughts drift about subjects of production management. And since the recent job posts here have apparently triggered an inordinate amount of interest, I thought I’d deal with issues of project management more specifically.

And to view all the posts as they come together, just click on the category.

I’m a freelance cg artist, as are many of my friends. Yet we have in part diametrically varying experiences about working the market. The reason is that many are hired-gun type freelancers. They hire on at a day-rate and work as long as requested. This is low-stress  in some very important ways. Decisions are relatively easy – is the job interesting, the company well-structured, the project high-profile? Its more stressful in other ways, as you have limited influence on larger processes and have to keep a keen eye on job market fluctuations.

I sometimes work in his way as well, generally in long-term assignments in varying roles of production management. But usually I work as a freelance subcontractor. The difference sounds simple… instead of quoting a day-rate, I quote a job. Simple, right? As you may suspect, no. Even a  job calculation for relatively simple tasks can easily take a week of work – and that’s hard to stomach if the job doesn’t come through. Should the job takes 2 months instead of one, I’ll per default be expected to foot that bill myself – so I have to 1) be able to show why it went over budget and 2) communicate this eventuality in advance. And this is the crux of making yourself desirable, no matter what mode of freelance you work under… participation and communication.

Participation means thinking along. This means being a generalist and stepping back from your own specific task on a project, keeping the larger goals and priorities in mind. In my experience, artists are initially completely engaged in this bigger picture but we have a finely tuned awareness for the receptiveness of our observations within the management. If management views its artists as operators, that’s a key signal for how much feedback is welcome. Communication means more than vocalizing issues to management, it means availing yourself to colleagues and management… signaling an understanding of concerns beyond your specific task will increase the chances of you observation being received in context. For example, understanding the importance of a production’s look for marketing might play an important role when suggesting that another 3D pass would smoothen process in compositing.

As a subcontractor, these things take on an existential meaning. If feedback loops aren’t  designed to take place within a specific time frame, animators will be sitting idle instead of working productively. This eventuality has to be clearly established in the beginning of a a cooperation. If communication is smooth – defined as sign-offs by a specific person within a specific time frame – costs are lower and the self-same client is happy. Likewise, you also need to have an understanding of the issues your partner is dealing with. I consider an ad agency a partner, not a client. They have a hard time themselves, trying to tailor a message in a specific visual for a client that may or may not know or appreciate what it is that they want, in a poorly paid pitch in which they compete with numerous competitors. So I often contribute to their pitches, demanding only for expenses to be covered and in the understanding that if they win the pitch, so do I. Its a win-win situation: they are able to present their ideas in a more sophisticated visual package  and I have a chance to create my own jobs. The icing is that certain cooperations – such as mine with Etwas Neues – we exchange ideas, and contribute mutually to each other’s work… so that technical innovations can be sculpted to fit a campaign and vice versa. This works for other realms, and I’m currently exploring what this means for publishing – as animation techniques flow out to enhance a realm that is rapidly becoming digital. I’m sure we’ll be seeing some very cool partnerships in the near future.

Also see:
Jobs; specialization vs generalization
Jobs; where to find ‘em

A large part of presenting yourself to the industry as a potential employee or resource is defining yourself. What am I, what do I have to offer and how might I fit in to various types of teams. That’s basically what you’re doing when you apply for a job. (Its also a good way to explain that no one should take a job rejection personally – a top talent doesn’t do an employer any good if that talent’s abilities don’t compliment those of the existing team. Nor will a less experienced applicant get a chance if the basis skillset and interests don’t match – or if the time isn’t right.)

One of the most decisive ways of defining yourself is in terms of being a generalist or a specialist. This will seem obvious in the context of direct skillset… an animator that can’t find a slider if the rig’s interface hasn’t been prepared ‘properly’ is a specialist, a technical director that not only rigs, programs and shades but also animates is a generalist. Both have advantages and disadvantages and fortune or misfortune when looking for a job.

But there’s another way of viewing this distinction that has no direct correlation to skillset. Content. Take a hard-body nurbs auto carriage modeller – there’s a classic specialist based on techniques and task. But then there’s the specialist that models, textures, rigs and animates sauropods. And only sauropods. Or intestinal lining. Or criminal reconstructions. Animation technologies are currently overflowing into countless other industries – its truly a golden age. The more generalist your scope in skillset, the more likely you’ll be able to fill one of these niches. You’ll also make yourself attractive to cooperations with that theropod animator over there, or that heart visualization expert – just in case a client calls and wants something beyond the range of your offering.

And there’s a third specialist/generalist distinction; you can be a specialist or generalist within the production workflow. A specialist will shrug his or her shoulders when confronted with the “bigger picture”. A generalist will tend to be aware of how his or her work integrates not only with those directly before and after him or her in the pipeline, but with the film as a whole. A generalist is usually a better communicator because of this, though not necessarily so. A pipeline generalist will be more capable of assessing priorities and consequences and therefore tends to make the better supervisor. They also make the better subcontractor. In contrast to the day-rate freelancer, the subcontract freelancer assumes part of the risk that a job contract proposes by putting a fixed price on it, and therefore appeals to a much wider range of employer. Sounds good, and it is – but this breed of employer is the most difficult of all – the partner.

Next: jobs as partnerships
Also see:
Jobs; where to find ‘em

I was recently asked where one finds jobs. That’s a bigger question than it may at first appear. The most obvious answer are the job sites where vacant positions are posted – differentiated between employees and freelancers, but always a fairly clearcut service relationship. Here are some I can recommend:

Deutschland:
http://www.crew-united.com/
http://www.cgheute.de/
https://www.xing.com/jobs

Europa:
http://www.cgjobs.eu

International:
http://jobs.awn.com/
http://www.vfx-recruit.com/
http://www.mandy.com/
and for Australia the unsurpassed mailing list, the digital laborer’s federation.

But while a solid list, it’s is an unsatisfying answer. All of these jobs will be limited to very clearcut roles, largely at an entry level and often form a  sort of minefield. You have to watch where you step and keep in mind what the possible motivations of the hiring companies are. Many startups will be among the offerings… to be enjoyed with caution. They can boost your career, shred your nerves, or both. Publicly financed institutions are required to advertise their positions search, so they might be authentically searching for qualified personnel. They may also be going through the ropes in order to hire their already determined candidate.

The human element is paramount and your network of colleagues and acquaintances is of course the greatest asset to finding a job. It comes right after a polished skillset. So its logical that fairs and industry events are great opportunities to build your own network. Online networks are… not there yet. I wouldn’t rely on them. They do seem to be a good compliment to the wetware networks of the real world, though – and are becoming more and more usable.

All of these are passive, however. Not that the applicants aren’t working their butts off to get a job, but rather the applicant is fitting him or herself into a job description as presented by the market. If you design your job search exclusively in this way, you may find yourself suddenly lacking access to the markets. The cg industry is young and things shift occasionally and dramatically; new techniques, new technologies, new production markets.

The most promising way of looking for work is by creating it. Call it proactive of you like, I call it “pursuing the passion of why you are working in the first place”. And passion has a great nose. It won’t necessarily steer you away from pitfalls, but it’ll lead you to job opportunities that balance out the stress of deadlines and man-handling technology with fulfillment and – hopefully – residuals. And residuals – the payment of percentages for rights held on a project over time -  are the payback for creative participation. That’s what will accompany you to a non-panicked retirement. More later.

Visual effects houses can be the best, most fun and high-tech sweatshops on earth.

Lee Stranahan writes to James Cameron in a bid to raise public awareness of this issue that will – unfortunately – be nothing new to anyone working in the industry. I have to praise Lee for leveraging his own considerable reputation for this cause. Not convinced this is an issue? Listen to another industry giant Scott Ross.

The artist perspective is rosy. The producer / company outlook is very bleak.

Well – that’s a catchy soundbyte to motivate you to head on over to fxguide and take in the whole thing because it exudes hard-earned knowledge about this tightly calculated business. Whether you’re a novice or expert: this is required reading.

To paraphrase: the business is eroding down to a mass of freelancers, while the films are increasingly being sold by wham-bam effects orgies that can only be delivered by the management capacities at the big five. Interesting observations and solid conclusions.

I say ‘small’ as I consider polish getting a system from 90 percent to 100 percent. But really, that last 10 percent takes just as long as the first 90. Polish is no small task; it is just about small unseen things.

Fine-polishing an animated sequence is an often underestimated expenditure, and so adversely affects many an ambitious project. Read the rest at Gamasutra. There’s also an interesting mention of the dangers of meandering, another issue I often badger my students about.

The year has gotten off to a devastating start, with 2 1/2 weeks of flu and a commensurate backlog of work now nagging to be dealt with. No matter, I’m going to start my new year’s resolution of doing 5 speed paints a week. What is a speed paint?

Well, its painting something within a limited amount of time. Usually 30 minutes or an hour, usually digital. There are lots of variations within that open-end definition – like painting from a reference, from memory of a reference or from your imagination and variations within each of those themes (more in future posts). The talented animator Goro Fujita has some great tutorials if you’re interested. (Check out his blog too. And… please suggest any other generous tutorial makers in the comments.)

I encourage my students to do speed paints regularly. They’re great for learning color and lighting or for polishing communication skills. Among other things, painting a light mood over an openGL screen grab saves enormous amounts of time as opposed to just jumping in and lighting a 3D scene. Because you select colors manually from the color picker instead of from a source photo, you learn to see the colors themselves and appreciate the effect that surrounding colors have. You also learn to see the relations that receding distance, subsurface scattering and specular effects have on light values,  intensity and saturation. Highly recommendable for students, td’s, active artists.

But I like to ponder the speed paint as a metaphor for the production process.

There are important strategies to follow if you want to produce an acceptable image in such a short amount of time, and these seem to apply universally. I’m convinced that speed painting holds valuable lessons for artists, but also producers, managers and of course independent film-makers. First off….

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