2010 Technical Director Reel is Online

After 3 years at PDI Dreamworks I am setting out in search of new and exciting challenges.

Still living the dream

Monsters Vs. Aliens came out on DVD a couple of weeks ago. The DVD extra for the DVD was my 3rd Dreamworks project. The 10 minute short called Bob's Big Break includes a "True 3D" viewable version. The 3D experience leaves something to be desired when compared to a theater 3D screening... still it's pretty cool that this technology is getting introduced into the home. And Dreamworks is one of the biggest promoters of 3D technology - we are going to start to include a "True 3D" version of every DVD release starting with our upcoming feature film release "How to Train Your Dragon".



As a Chracter Effects Artist I simulated and final-ed the cloth on Dr. Cockroach, General Monger and Susan, as well as any other extra who happened to walk into one of my shots. I also animated crushing, crunching and squishing inanimate objects. I did a bunch of character contact type work as well (i.e. making sure feet weren't going through the ground, hands through props or other characters, etc.)

Golden Compass out today

Sep 29th was my official last day on Compass, which came out today. Unfortunately rotten tomatoes has it at a rotten 44%, though the general audience gave it a barely fresh 63%.

To remind my audience, my technical title was: TechAnim TD - which means Technical Animator Technical Director. What I really did was character effects, like hair & fur, collision/s, floppy skin/ears, muscle tensing/buldging, and other such effects. The comopany I worked on worked on the human dameon companions (not the armored bears), and their interaction with the scene and environments.

Working at PDI/Dreamworks

October 29, I started work at PDI, the bay area Dreamworks location as a Character Effects Artist. Or as it's called here CFX. The movie most of PDI is working on is Madagascar 2, though some of us are on Monsters vs. Aliens or Kung-Fu Panda, both of which are mostly tasked to the Glendale Dreamworks location. So as you can see the 2 companies share work across site. And down the line I might help out on other projects that might not be mainly up here but down in soCal.

The building I work in is sick! It's 4 levels of glass and steel, in a corporate office building park, called Pacific Shores Center, that's out on a landfill in the Bay Area. To the south we (on the 4th floor) have a picturesque panoramic view of some salt flats, the bay and the Dumbarton Bridge. And to the north we can see the Pacific Shores Club, with it's outdoor lap pool, grassy amphetheater and pretty landscaping, as well as the Redwood City Port behind the trees.

Besdies working on funny films with other awesome people. Working here has other perks, like free chef cooked lunch, free crap like animated DVDs and Shrek toys. On my floor right by the elevators there is a Wii and Xbox 360 each with it's own 50" screen. And my favorite perk is the gym. The Pacific Shores Club boasts a full gym, free yoga, core, and spinning classes, as well as an indoor climbing wall and outdoor lap pool.

Let's just say that I hope I don't have to blog another job change for years to come.

I Enjoy Change

Soon after Siggraph I had a call back from Dreamworks. And long story short, I got the job! I finally have a long term job near my son. How fun.

So I gave R&H 4 weeks notice. Work on Compass already kind of ended for us tech animators. I have actually been doing a bit of work on the Alvin & the Chipmunks visual effects during my last couple of weeks here.

In 4 days I leave for Israel again. Though not for rest or vacation. My father became disabled earlier this year and I am going back to be with him for 3 weeks. When I return I'll be relocating 400 miles up north and start work on Madagascar 2 asap.

Siggraph 07

Another year, another Siggraph. This year it was in San Diego, easy access for me working in LA. I took the Wednesday off. Though I drove down straight after work on Tuesday. The industry parties are at night, and I had the RSVP phone number for the Dreamworks Tues party. So that was my first stop.

My mission was to land my next job. With 3 months to the end of my contract I couldn't assume I would stay at R&H.

After some schmoozing and meeting some ex-colleagues I have not seen in 2-3 years, I met some actual Dreamworks employees. They happened to be human resource people, and told they were in fact hiring. While taking shots of Petron, we scheduled a meeting the following morning.

The Next day at the convention was a huge success as far as pursuing my mission goes. I interviewed with Crystal Dynamics (makers of the Tomb Raider games), the Orphanage (vfx), Image Movers Digital (new Robert Zemeckis company), and PDI/Dreamworks (CG feature films). All of these companies are located in the bay area, where I want to relocate to in order to be close to my son.

That evening was IMD's cocktail party, where I met some real cool people from that company, including Bob Z himself, director of Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, and Polar Express which was the first film I ever worked on.

Later everyone from Siggraph converged on the House of Blues for the Vicon party. It was packed!! Though it was great to party with some good friends from all the different places I worked at in the past.

At 2am I arrived at my car, and tried to drive back to LA. 2:30 I was already sleeping on the side of the road off the highway. Woke up at 6am, and drove 2hrs straight to work.

The Golden Compass

Even though I had allot of good feedback, interest in my work, and 0-3 interviews a month since Siggraph 06, I remained unemployed for close to 9 months. Yes... the Blizzard job did not pan out- I was crushed.

However May 14th was my first day of work at Rhythm & Hues Studios. I am contracted to work on The Golden Compass for 6 months. It's a movie based on a book. An excellent fantasy story, the first in a trilogy called His Dark Materials - Book I written by Phillip Pullman. As Technical Animation Technical Director (Tech Anim TD for short) I will be in charge of the dynamic look for a big cast of digital animal Daemons. i.e. The fur movement, ear flops, muscle and skin jiggle, and character contact with various surfaces.

Here is an official trailer for the film.

Siggraph 2006 in Boston

After spending July in Israel on vacation with the family I had to return to Cali and join the workforce again. At this time of year, for the VFX industry, the best way to find work is to go to Siggraph. In the last post I showed you my latest reel. I burned it 50 times on DVD, made 75 copies of my resume, packed my bags and set out for Boston.

My child hood friend Alon, got me in touch with his parents, who live in Boston and let me stay at their place for duration of my stay. Alon still lives in Israel and during my stay at his parents place he got called up for reserve duty up in Lebanon. I hope he's okay. His mom, wants me to bring him to the States, permanently. I'll try Eda!

The first day was to visit their beautiful house and drop my bags off. Caught up with Alon's parents, and reminisced about mine and Alon's childhoods. After a short power nap (I arrived at 5am with barely any sleep), I set out for the Boston Expo Center. I spent over 3 hours at the job fair.

My first scheduled interview was with Crystal Dynamics from Menlo Park which is in the SF bay area, makers of the latest Tomb Raider game. It went well. In fact every company that chose to look at my reel then and there on my PSP or view my DVD was impressed and most game companies said I would be considered for lead animator or Technical positions. High Voltage's Art Director asked me for a spontaneous interview.
After giving out most of the 20 reels I brought with me that day I went out to the main expo floor and visited the film post houses I could find. First on the list was ILM since they are in the bay area. They moved into their new complex in the SF Presidio together with the other Lucas companies: Lucasfilm and Lucas Arts. That night I already had a voice mail message asking me to stop by the next day for an interview with ILM for a Creature TD (Technical Director) position. My first ILM interview, yay.
I love Siggraph because every expo night their are numerous infustry parties. Where you drink and eat for free, while shmoozing with friends and aquaintances from the industry. You meet long lost co-workers, past bosses and supervisors, recruiters, clients, 3rd party vendors and even future supervisors and colleagues. You meet all of those and party together, hopefully making friends in the process.
So the first party of this year's convention that I went to was the Vicon party. They are makers of motion capture hardware and software. I ran a mocap studio at my first job, back at Midway Games West - RIP. Vicon baught House of Moves, a top notch mocap studio and makers of Diva, not too long ago, and relocted it's staff from the UK to LA to share a complex together. You can read about the merger here, and see a pic of Hale's stunt double working on Catwoman, my second film credit. The good news this year is that Vicon is going to merge Diva in with their iQ software and create the best mocap software to date. The party was fun. Got to show my reel to 3 people who all had a say in hiring, each from a different division of THQ. Also got to hang out with Dman, the mocap supervisor at Imageworks, also my ex-boss from Polar Express. He's always fun.

Siggraph day 2:
Hit the job fair again, unloaded reels. ILM interview was a little scary but I handled myself well. Scary because I was interviewed by 6 people at once. Later I talked to a girl from Laika who liked my reel and told me I have to talk to the lead TD, Mike C. He really like what he saw and admited that my hair cloth experience is money in the bank. He would love to have me on his team, though they wouldn't be ready to hire me until Sep or Oct.
Towards the end of the day I found the Syflex booth, the makers of the cloth plugin I used on Superman Returns. I sweet talked my way into getting a free personal liscense to use at home. It also turned out that one of their emplyees is an Israeli lady who works from home on their marketing. She was the first VFX female professional I have ever met.
As the expo floor was closing I got ready to hit up that night's parties with Dave F. a friend from ESC and his buddy Mat, founder of Entity FX. First on the list of like 5 parties was the ILM mixer. Which I left early to see a free screeing of Monster House 3D with tix Dman gave me. After the movie I headed for the Framestore party, a London VFX house I applied at. It wasn't so much as a party but another mixer in the bar's basement lounge. There I met a trio of ILM big wigs, one of which was the my FVX Supervisor on Catwoman. He remembered my work fondly and told me to shoot him an email when I get back. Also there were several ex-ESC folks. From their our group which by now grew to about 6 heads, headed to the Cafe FX party. This party was packed. There were half naked go-go girls dancing on the bar. Their show was almost canceled becuase guys were tipping them as if they were strippers. Here I met a cute EA games recruiter who took my reel and continued to hold it for the rest of the night. This time I stayed out late and had to take a 40$ cab ride back home.

Siggraph day 3:
By now I only had about 10 reels left but not much places where I haven't applied yet. I gave out 5 I think, and then strolled through the Emerging Technologies exhibit. Where cool new technologies that are just being developed are showcased. Me and Dman played table tennis with only a table and 2 cell phones. The ball was only visible to us on the phone screens, and it tracked the table using a pattern taped to it and it's built in camera.
Oh yeah that morning I got a message from the Blizzard recruiter inviting me to a drinks and appetizers get-together with the Blizzard cinematic team. Getting that message was the begining of my ascent to cloud 9. Blizzard is THE game company, my dream job comoany. They made the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft games, and most recently World of Warcraft - the ONLY game I have been playing since almost a year ago. Ever since picking up Diablo 1, 10 years ago, I have wanted to work for them.
For the rest of the afternoon I hung out at the Snowball booth and chatted in Hebrew with the Snowball folks. This is the first Israeli VFX house I ever saw at Siggraph. After the Expo ended me and their pipeline TD went to find a place to eat and sit down. We chatted for hours. Until it was time to make my way to meet the Blizzard folks.

At the Ruby Room in the Onyx hotel I met about 10 of the Blizzard cinematic department. Aparently they are ramping up to double the dept size from 45 to 85 heads. I was one of the more experienced perspective employees they invited that night. I chatted with most of them, especially the Technical Lead, the Animation Lead, the Director and the Producer. We drank and laughed, talked about the work, WoW and kids. At one point hours after I got there, while I was chatting with the Director of cinematics, the producer came to us and asked to borrow me for a minute. He took me accross the room to the recruiter and said, pointing at me, "Fast track this guy!". And then, "ok, you're done you can go back to your conversation." Later he even said "Welcome to Blizzard" and gave me a hug. After meeting all these great guys I wanted to work with them more then ever. I am not just going to get a sweet dream job, but friends for life, which is priceless. The time was already midnight and my last T tram was leaving in 30 minutes when the Director says "You know you're coming to a strip club with us now, right?" I said no at first, because of the tram thing. But then I thought, wtf?! How often will I get the chance to go to a strip club with all the Blizzard cinematic leads in Boston?! Needless to say that since that day I am both anxious and extatic about working there. Anxious because it's not final, and I sooo want to work there. Extatic because this would be a dream come true.

Demo Reel 2006

One of the things about the visual effects industry that annoys me is that after pretty much every job/project I work on I need to go out look for work. That involves getting footage of my latest work, editing it together, burning reels, updating my resume, and then finding jobs that need my talent. And if you include airfare to Siggraph the costs can mount up.

So yeah, I am going to Siggraph 2006. After all Siggraph is all about partying, and since it's job hunting related it's tax deductable.

SR is Certifiably Fresh

My grandpa, a retired journalist, called me the other day and said in his raspy voice "You have a hit on your hands". He quoted the New York Times which wrote "Superman Returns isn't super it's Supurb!".

Rotten Tomatoes gave it a Certified Fresh rating.

Cinefex

The Cinefex July 2006 issue #106 has my work on the cover. This screen shot is from the Metropolis Destruction sequence. If you can't tell it's digital Superman, and his hair and cape simulation is my work.

Starslyderz in Variety

During the San Francisco Underground Film Festival, Variety printed this article.

I like this quote: "Cult status is assured"
Check out the Starslyderz home page for more info and news, and a link to our iTunes video store where you can watch it for FREE.

Happy Feet

A week ago I arrived in Sydney. The first day I checked in to what will be my new home for the next month. It's a lovely Old-Terrace style home in a nice part of the city. After that my first stop was Bondi Beach (pronounced bondai in Australian). It's the coolest beach I have ever been to. It's got it all. Sand, waves, boardwalk, coffee shops, sweet skate park, grassy knolls, and even a pool on either end of the beach (2) that are carved into the rock. Last Sunday I bought a surf board and surfed for the first time in over 10 years.
On my 3rd day here I got to see the movie Happy Feet from begining to end. It's pretty good. I am not a big fan of musicals but I really enjoyed this one. I think the soundtrack might be worth getting. Happy Feet, in a nut shell, is a computer-animated-penguin-tap-dancing-musical. The main voices are done by Robin Williams, Elija Wood and Brittany Murphy. It will be the first film to use motion capture on non-human characters. My job is to fix/enhance the penguins motion capture data.
The company Animal Logic is located in Fox Studios. This place used to be a movie studio theme park like Universal Studios in the States. It failed, and about 4 years ago half of it opened for business as a real movie lot, where movies such as Superman Returns and Star Wars were shot. It's funny that I just finished workin on SR in the States and now am working right next door to where it was shot in Australia. The other half of the complex is open to the public with shops, resturaunts, a bowling alley, theater and park. Today, at lunch time, I broke my personal lifetime bowling record: 144.

Here is the latest Happy Feet trailer for your enjoyment.

Superman Trailer

The new Superman Returns trailer just came out. Enjoy :)

Join the countdown to June 30th premiere at BlueTights.net where you can also watch Bryan Singer's video blog.

Animal Logic

Okay, so I just finished up on Superman Returns and unfortunately am not moving on to any shows at Imageworks. Even though they have Beowolf, Spiderman 3, and Surfs Up in production they don't need anyone else on those and are actually letting go of alot of people. I am not stressing though. I got paid some extra pay to cover me until I leave for Australia. That's right, Animal Logic the company working on Happy Feet still want me. I turned them down in favor of Superman late last year. Since my father asked here's some details: they are offering me a nice salary, one month worth of retirement contribution, full relocation expenses, housing for the duration of my stay + a week, and even a sign on bonus to cover my rent back home so I don't have to move my stuff into storage. So yeah, it's basically a paid vacation where I have to work 26 days and get 4 days off (I hope).

I am happy that I got this week to spend exlusively with Noah. I drove up to get him and back home last Saturday. A round trip of over 800 miles. Since I live right by downtown Culver City we mainly walked around. I mean I could have driven him to places like Disney Land and stuff, but I think quality liesure time out and about is better then a couple of hours of driving, commercial madness and hectic time tables. We visited several playgrounds. Noah absolutely amazed me that he remembered how to say playground in Hebrew (Gan-Sha'a'shu'im). I taught him that 2 weeks prior and haven't mentioned that word since. He definitely learned some new Hebrew this week, and showed that he can retain it very well :D

Next week, assuming I get my passport in order, I will leave for Sydney for 5 weeks and do some Motion Editing on the motion capture for Happy Feet. Then I have a week and a half before my '06 trip to Israel. This time Noah and mommy are coming with me. A whole month in Israel, with the family. Should be interesting ;)

p.s. The new Superman trailer is out. And by the way 5 shots in it are mine.

Superman is back

I am back in Culver City. I haven't been here since 2003 when I worked on my first film credit. I was a Motion Capture Tracker at the time on the Polar Express. I moved here a month before Noah was born and worked on PEX for a whole year.

Now I am back at Imageworks and working on Superman Returns. For the first time in my career I am working with hair and cloth. I am simulating/animating Superman's cape and hair, and in some shots Lois' cloth and hair as well. I love this project. Not only is Superman my childhood hero, everyone on my team is super cool.