the fxphd deans blog

So we have started posting more info on the term courses for fxphd - April 07 term…

man so great stuff- we’ll post more here about the courses.. and about the prep.. in fact starting in April this blog will get really busy…

Let the games begin.

If you want to hear all about the courses — check out the fxphd podcast called fxphDOD.
John and I run through all the courses and fun stuff coming

Mike

Jeff from fxguide is quoted in an article in the Washington Times.

Washington times

The ILM filming was brilliant, we spent most of the day there, and we were made so welcome.

A few things we got to do apart from film the interview - some I can share - others we can’t right now… but one was we saw a screening in the Premier Cinema. This is a digital 2K projector cinema - that has to be seen - and hear - to be believed. It was amazing - one of the best cinemas I have ever been in… the colours - the clarity - the image stablity. Even in shots I had seen before - I was seeing detail and aspects I had never noticed. This is where dailies are shown. When we spoke to the animators and artists about this, we discovered that not only can a supervisor or director step frame by frame - but the darn thing has a zoom knob - so doing dailies your work can be zoomed up… this is great - but think about it - you are seeing stuff that really 99.99% of the movie public will never see… wow - that is a real quality hurdle to be jumped each day.

We also met up with quite a few old friends who work there, and a few fxphd students ! One who had already emailed us to say “thanks again for such a great site, I never used Shake before ILM and fxphd.com got me up to speed in record time. ” A foundation fxphd Post-grad, he had applied to work at ILM but had not used Shake - and used fxphd to learn Shake - he now works on Pirates 3 and Transformers comping using Shake!

One other thing we observed is just how artist friendly ILM seemed to be, - the grounds - the child care - just the general working conditions all seemed very artist respectful. I have to say if you thought ILM was stand off-ish or unapproachable - we found them warm, open to serious technical discussions and down right great guys who were just friendly! I think one can forget just how important it is to foster a collabrative environment and in talking, as we did, to people from entry level compositors to 15 year senior ILM veterans - they all appeared collaborative and very open.

We will publish the class soon. But our thanks to ILM for such a great day.

Mike
Let me know and I can post some more happy snaps from our day there if you like…

For this week’s Background Fundamentals we have a very special surprise - we are live in San Fran - to talk to the Oscar winning team of Pirates, in this exclusive fxphd class - we talk to this week’s award winning senior compositing team at ILM about just what it takes to win an Oscar. Should be a really amazing chance for you to gain exclusive insight to the ILM workflow and career path. With 15 Oscars to their name - and a heap more technical Oscars - this will be a really cool chance to talk with members of the most awarded visual effects company in the world.

Mike

PS
This class will be a couple of days late - as you can imagine organizing this in oscar week was crazy !