Tuesday, September 25, 2007

All That Gaming


I'm trying to take advantage of my days of unemployment by catching up on some games. I've been playing the crap out of Team Fortress 2 and will be picking up Halo 3 this morning. I'm usually good for 3-4 days of a single game. I must be a bit ADD.

Little news on the job front. Blue Sky was a no go. I think it was a salary thing but they just said there wasn't a slot available... that was the day after they told me they were drafting an offer letter. :P

Still waiting to hear from Disney. I guess I wasn't a shoe-in after all. We think that they are interviewing everyone (including outsiders) before making a decision, which is kinda a slap in the face to people that were told they would be coming back and took temp jobs to wait for it. So I've scheduled an appointment with Dreamworks and am in new talks with Vanguard and others to cover my bets. In fact, I'm seriously considering an alternative to Disney due to the instability of that position. I'm such a Disney fan-boy, that it's hard to leave them behind but Dreamworks is offering 3 year contracts and Zemeckis' new studio is said to be offering 5 year contracts! That sure beats the 10 months that Disney is offering. I also have a standing offer to go back to the South East and teach... which is probably the most tempting of them all. I'm really starting to miss home. LA is a strange world of tension and impatience. I look forward moving away from here.

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Last Day at Rhythm!


Friday was my last day at Rhythm & Hues. I think I did 8 shots in the five months I was there. Not exactly the pace that I'm used to. I really liked the people out there but Compass wasn't the cool project I thought it would be. All the shots I did were of cg animals that weren't really doing anything exciting. The stuff looks amazing but it kept me wondering... why not just use a real animal? Seems like an awfully expensive thing to do, to place a cg animal in every shot... and at the pace we had to work, because of the crazy complicated pipeline, I can't imagine how much money that movie cost New Line Cinema. This is a strange business for sure.

So now I'm faced with a few options. I'm still planning on going back to Disney but there may be an opportunity for me to go to Blue Sky Studios up in New York for four months before returning. I would be working on Horton Hears a Who. I was suppose to hear back from them Friday but Blue Sky's recruiters are somewhat famous for forgetting things. There is even a story that they forgot a guy at the airport that they flew in for an interview.

It's important that I hear from them soon because if I go, I need to talk Disney into a January hire date instead of November. It's possible that Disney might say no, that they need me in November. In that case, I obviously can't take a short term gig over Disney... even though we are hearing that there will be another gap inbetween Bolt and Rapunzel, which means the probability of more layoffs at the end of Bolt.

Why do I do this for a living again?