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Visual Effects Companies in NY and Elsewhere
Meghan Eckman asks: "I am wondering what Visual Effects companies there are which strive to bring filmmaking up to the cutting edge of technology. Particularly, I am interested in the visual effects similar to those used in 'The Matrix' (such as the virtual camera set-up). I am a fourth year University student with Linux, programming, and digital media experience, but with a strong desire to go into the filmmaking industry, particularly in New York. I'd like to combine my technical and media skills to create stunning visual effects for the next generation of filmmaking. Where should I look?"
Australia's a nice place too - I don't know about NY, never been there.
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Wasn't Titanic a bunch of FreeBSD machines running Linux Emulation? Not that it matters to me in the slightest (both operating systems are excellent).
And it was the oil in the car, which was done in the 90s. But it may have been done in the 80s.
Look either AT the production studios, or behind them. Watch the credits for the name of who did the visual effects.
.AU (along with the filming)
Some I know of...
Image G - They did most of Star Trek.
ILM - I'll give you 2 guesses as to what they did. And they're pretty big.
Most places like this will be out in california, probably because the movie studios are out there. But don't think just in New York. Or much less just the US. Like a poster above said, the FX for The Matrix were done in
Pixar is the equivalent of DreamWorks, rather than ILM. They'll produce movies, rather than just do visual work (The benefit of this is that they develop techniques for digital manipulation that they license to other "Digital Media" companies).
Ahhh... I too want to be an effects animator. The primary Special Effects house that was called into service for The Matrix was Manex, formerly MVFX. The special effects team was headed by the mighty master John Gaeta.
In New York, which is where I believe you said you wanted to work you will find Click 3x, among a host of others. They are the fellows who worked on Breakfast of Champions.
The best resource on the internet to find out about Special Effects is www.VFXpro.com
There are job postings, articles on techniques and tools, locations of major houses, and interviews with famous artists.
Good Luck! It's a harsh and challenging world out there!
Well, probably the 2 most famous are Blue Sky Studios and R/GA Digital. Blue Sky has worked on "Joe's Apartement", "Alien 4", "Star Trek: Insurrection", "Armageddon", and many others. R/GA mainly does commercials now, but they were responsible for the FX of the Predator movies. Another one on the East coast is Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company who worked on things like "Clear and Present Danger", "Stargate", and the Spiderman ride at Universal Studios.
Also check out http://www.ecdc.org/ for a list of companies. Other good places are VFXPro, Visual FX, and VFXHQ.
Keep in mind that most companies in the US are in California, after all they have to be close where the business is. And if you are thinking about jobs, better start saving and planning for SIGGRAPH 2000.
No really. I'm being honest here. Ad's are ever increasingly using computer graphics for one purpose or another, and begining to do really complex scenes with it. And ad agencies are all over New York.
From all I understand, getting into the big time movie houses requires a lot. Joining a smaller group, and doing well with something like tv ads, should allow you to advance into other genres a few years down the road. People watch tv everyday. Imagine walking into an interview and having your future boss say, "you did that? wow."
Maybe ad agency's don't do the work themselves, but sub contract. So find out who they subcontract too, and apply.
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Side Effects Software has ported Houdini to Linux. Houdini has been used to produce the special effects in The Matrix, Armageddon, X-Files etc.
Of course Houdini costs about $17,000. But this does mark the beginning of a graphics industry that's migrating towards a top quality and affordable OS.
There's an article about this in the October issue of Linux Journal.
L.A. is actually where the majority of special-effects producers for the motion picture industry exist. Think about it for a second--where are the studio headquarters located? Where would you expect post-production facilities to be located? Even after location shooting in some cheaper place like Canada or Florida (no slam intende to either place--it's expensive to shoot in LA), the studios like to bring things back to L.A. for post-production. It's a fact of life, however sad that might be for you. There are areas of Culver City, Burbank, and (yes) Hollywood with block after block of such companies, including literally dozens of digital effects houses.
Pixar and ILM are the exceptions (though still on the Left Coast), along with the Video producers in NYC. But if you want to do motion pictures, I'm afraid that L.A. is still the place, much as the above AC may try to deny it.
I used to work on one of the best digital post production programs in the world, Cineon from Kodak. Unfortunately Kodak's bean counters couldn't see that film is going to be obsolete in 5 years and decided that film is profitable *now* and digital isn't, so they pulled the plug.
Cineon was a very cool piece of software.
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I wouldn't necessarily limit yourself to film. I do think filmmakers play with the neatest newest technology, but perhaps you might want to get your feet wet first. Most companies worth their salt won't look at a newly graduated student without some production (as in making a finished product, not producing film) experience.
The company that I work for has a wonderful graphics department full of lots of toys. They've done some stuff with basic animation tools that just blows my mind. Who ever thought animating engineering designs was so sexy.
Using 3D Studio Max, they downloaded a 3D map of an area they want to build a bridge on. Then they imported the bridge design from AutoCAD, slapped some cars on there and flew the camera around the bridge for snicks. They do this stuff all the time to show clients what a finished product will look like.
The beautiful thing for graphic designers, especially the ones with some animation in their background, is that dozens of companies are doing this. I'd suggest trying to find a company that makes 3D anims for business development and soak some experience.
It seems odd to me that the locations of a lot of the new up and coming Special Effects firms are in areas not traditionally noted for their technology. Look at the Matrix FX, done in Sydney (Australia) and Hercules & Xena's FX are done in New Zealand.
IMHO I think this is because the governments of these smaller coutries are realising how to get ahead in the ever changing world and are promtoing technology and so there are a lot of talented people coming through with new ideas - and these are being noticed by film companies.
Getting into that field is really hard. There are immensely talented people in the field, and many more entering it. The problem you're likely to find in getting work at any of the cutting edge shops is they are essentially meatmarkets. At the cream of the crop companies, you'll work extremely long hours for pay that will make you jealous of people with McJobs. There are pleanty of people willing to work for the big name places for free, so they are rarely willing to pay well for their positions.
I looked for a long time for an interesting position at companies like that, but in the places you tend to find them (SF, LA, NYC) cost of living is so high, the $25k they're likely to pay won't get you a place to live.
I saw someone else suggest ad agencies, that's a good place to think about, or find smaller unknown companies, you're a lot more likely to make a livable wage.
-A.P.
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You're better off moving to LA, working for a few years, then trying to start something in NY. Visual effects artists don't have permanent jobs that you fill out an application to and everything is cut and dried. You have to pretty much go out and find a client who needs something done like a commercial and show them that you can get it done better than anyone else. There are a lot more clients in LA than NY. Another thing you should do is start working on stuff right now and put it on the internet. Don't put up a jpg but put up the entire movie. You'll also want to get a reset button that you can just click on instead of leaning over and feeling around the case. This kind of work requires a lot of rebooting if you get my drift.
I've got these in 320x480 24fps. 20 megs a pop.
Fortunately, the new PCs are blisteringly fast, and Linux is a wonderful development environment. My company has a slight advantage, when moving to Linux, in that we write all of our own tools; and it's been quite easy to port them to Linux for the most part. SGI has some wonderful hardware and software integration (particularly for multimedia) that I can't match yet; but I'm sure it's coming. In house tools are a slight advantage because Side Effects is porting Houdini to Linux; and I'm sure that Alias and Softimage will follow soon.
I'm desparately trying to promote the use of Linux in the visual effects community -- to the point of giving away free year-long licenses of our in-house tools to anybody who wants them. So far, though, the penetration of Linux in the FX field is so small that I've had relatively few takers.
The next big thing, of course, is the release of the DRI/XFree86 4.0. This will give us hardware-accelerated OpenGL for everybody; and at that point I expect Linux to take off (or crash and burn with conviction :)) in the FX arena.
thad
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Write your own and open it. If you don't like that then you can play around with mine (currently some innovative terrain generation tricks combined with techniques for POV-Ray rendering), but frankly it would be best if you wrote your own. Do the work, and free it. Trying to talk a bunch of IP holders into opening their stuff just because it's a good idea is a very hard sell. It's the whole 'stone soup' concept- you have to start with _something_. What I have may not be much, I think it has potential- anyone who thinks it is crap is invited to GPL something better, please >;)
I would like to see a movie studio dedicated to open content, so people could focus on the stories they are telling. Desktop movie production is coming so soon, and it will be as much a revolution as the cassette multitrack home studio- and there are so many people working on things (such as computer game design and graphic effects) that could easily be applied to home moviemaking. There are GIF animation tools and computer image compositing tools available that do the same thing as the multimillion dollar Disney Multiplane camera used for Disney's greatest animated features.
Rather than going begging to effects houses, why don't we just arrange it so they end up coming to us? If I'm not mistaken, my terrain generation trick is markedly less demanding on CPU than the techniques used, say, for the pod racer scenes in Star Wars TPM. Cutting down modelling and render times is incredibly important in professional work, there's never enough time so it's always a balance being struck between vision and reality. I've GPLed my terrain generator program, meaning that anyone who either uses a Mac, or can port a Python-like syntax to another platform, can use it in movies for nothing. Anyone who really wants that industry's technology to open up would be well advised to do their level best to accomplish _something_ cool, GPL it, and then simply let it be known as such- other stuff that wants to incorporate this can do so by going GPL itself, and we don't need to beg or pressure anybody. Really, IP on these sorts of tools is a bit like IP on brushes or pencils- you don't copyright the brush, you copyright the painting you do with it. The brush is not important compared with what's being done with it...