the fxphd deans blog

Starting with our Sydney offices… Happy New Year. This was taken on fully manual tonight on a DSLR down by the water at Sydney Harbour.

We are really looking forward to 2009 - we have some amazing courses and some new cool productions planned. We will be once again aiming to be global so we have plans for Europe, as well as Asia and the USA.

Keep an eye on fxguide.com now in its 10th Yyear ! Yes, it is 10 years since we started our little web site. In 2008, we provided over 37 terabytes of new, tips, information and news on the fxguide.com site alone, and many times that via fxphd.com (which does about 9 Terrabytes a month). We have some amazing things planned for this year !!!

But all of that can wait - for tonight we just want to wish you a very Happy New Year.

We just wanted to wish you all the very best for the holidays. It has been a great year for us and we feel truly blessed by all the response and support we have had both here at fxphd and at fxguide. This year saw both sites significantly grow in size and we hope in quality. We would like to thank the huge team behind the screens who do so much work - literally around the clock. We also want to thank our brilliant Profs who so honestly and openly share their knowledge with the community - they are inspiring.

And finally thank you — our readers and members - for making this all possible. We love being able to do this work. We think it lifts us all professionally and enables better quality work and more inspired visuals. Please travel safely these holidays and we look forward to seeing you back in 2009.

- John, Dave, Mike, and Jeff and all the team at both fxguide and fxphd.

I have just spent the week at Siggraph Asia in Singapore. We have posted some stories on fxguide and more coming. We interviewed some great people - sitting down with Rob Cook of Pixar was a personal highlight for me, but so too was having time to attend papers. You can get too busy and forget the heart of the conference which is the papers and classes. Without full crew and our usually crammed schedule I got to do things like study Mental Ray Shaders for 3.5 hours with Master Zap - (very cool) and hear some really inspiring papers from researchers from all over the world. The other inspiring event was the Electronic Theatre and it only served as a reminder of how much we lost when they stopped the ET this year in LA. So John, Jeff and I have started a petition for the return for the ET in New Orleans. Please if you love Siggraph like we do - take a moment to sign it . You can find details at
http://www.fxguide.com/qt/550/bring-back-the-siggraph-electronic-theater

And spread the word - we are counting on you guys. People often thank us for fxguide and fxphd - but we are asking for something back for Xmas - please sign the petition!

The flame/smoke master class in Seoul went really well last week — CE Raum had some awesome smoke tips and tricks to along with the flame examples I showed. What’s interesting is that now with the cross pollination between smoke and flame, there was a lot of stuff in our individual presentations that was incredibly applicable to both packages.

It’s always great meeting other artists in the field, and our visit to Korea was no exception. There is a lot of great work being done in the country by hard working artists. We had the opportunity to visit three post houses one evening: Independence Creative, Pan Dora, and Mercury Post. In the “it’s a small world” category, Mercury Post actually had one of our old Onyx2 infernos from Avenue Edit in Chicago.

fxphd members get a tour of a couple of the facilities as well as clips from the facility demo reels in our weekly update “this week @ fxphd”.