Hasta La Motion!

[ALIGN_R=http://cdn3.knowyourmeme.com/system/icons/80/medium/doubt.jpg.jpg?1236004312]http://cdn3.knowyourmeme.com/system/icons/80/medium/doubt.jpg.jpg?1236004312[/ALIGN_R]To the members of VFXtalk,

As you may know, I have taken it upon myself to go to war with the senior members of the visual effects community, and with the vfx artists who make up a large part of the industry in the USA and UK.

While it has hopefully brought a much needed change to the site and I am sure has caused many people to think about the real issues that exist in the industry today, it didn’t work out that well at a personal level and so I would like to officially apologize for the flames, the insults and the attempt to tear our community apart instead of unite it around a common cause.

To understand me before you judge me, however, you need to understand where I am coming form. I suffer form a unique and rare terminal illness at a genetic level that flipped my dna when I was a child and made me, literally, allergic to life on this planet.

Since I was around 8 years old I have had to take really strong medication, the kind that wold stop your heart, on a daily basis to regulate the hormones in my brain and align it with your plane of reality, and have been doing so for over 20 years now.

Unfortunately, while my medication keeps me alive and allows me to function quite well at a technical level, it also has severe side effects such as loss of short term memory, the inability to sleep, and makes me prone to psychotic breaks when not regulated.

These breaks dont happen that frequently, as i usually remember to take my medication, but when they do they tend to rip apart the fabric of the universe around me leaving me in a fragmented reality where I feel the need to destroy everything around me for better or for worse.

My doctor always told me I would not live past 20, and when I hit 25 my shrink told me that I was mentally unfit for society. As a result i have pursued a life in the digital realm where I don’t have to interact with regular people.

10 years later my probation officer and the judge told me the same thing, however I have been able to succeed in life where many have failed and have been able to secure a wife (after 2 tries), raise a family and secure a considerable amount of personal wealth against all odds.

Over the past few months I have been experiencing mental tremors, and went back to my doctor to have my medication regulated, which after a few tests he did. Unfortunately i found out a few days ago that he died in 2005. As you can imagine this has made me stop an think about many things.

One of the things I have been thinking about was the way I responded to the community here over what some may think as a trivial matter, but to me was deeply wounding because of the challenges I had to face living on this planet.

During the ensuing rampage i developed a split personality that has been busy using the considerable amount of technology I have access to, to go to war with the members that took me on. Its surprising what you can do if you know how to travel the digital pathways of the internet at a base level.

Thankfully Invader777 introduced me to courage wolf, and the ensuing internal battle in my psyche introduced a new personality to the multiple personalities which are me that has now taken over and is helping to unite my mind and bring me back to what you would consider reality.

I have convinced myself, after much debate, that I have been going down the wrong path – not just here but also in my other life where I have been doing things that make the arguments here look more like a love affair. I owe Invader777 a lot for helping me to get here, and remember it, and hope to repay him one day.

I have decided that it is in my best interests to take a 1 year sabbatical and seek enlightenment and will be leaving to immerse myself in the fabric of the digital universe so as to try to understand my calling in life and the reasons why your organic technology has kept me alive.

Before I leave I will be turning over control of the vfxtalk community to Andreas Jablonka and Gentle Fury, who have proven to be men of real character in their actions over the past few weeks.

I believe they are the leaders your community is looking for. Given time I am sure that they can help you all to find a way to mend the issues that have affected your industry and through leadership can help to unite the different vfx factions that are spread across the world.

I thank you for your time, and for reading this message, and again extend my apologies to anyone who was affected in the vfxwar that was waged here.

Best Regards,

Jah Shaka

* Just in case you think any of the above is false or made up, or i am trying to be condecending, as i know it sounds a bit off kilter, i assure you that it is all factual and 100% accurate. none of it is fabricated.

We would like to get your feedback on the most useful and helpful threads of all time that you have seen or frequented on the forum. We are working on a archive of knowledge that people can refer to for quick help…

These can be any thread for any reason, if you can post a thread and the reason you found it useful (regardless of if you are a freasher or a professional) that wold be awesome.

I give full credit to metalrahul for this idea, its a great one!

A little over 8 years ago, Paul Moran and I started VFXTalk. We had grand plans for it, but very little experience with that kind of thing, but, through a series of very fortunate events, VFXTalk gained in popularity and people from all over the globe, artists of all skill levels, and a good reputation for being one of the places to go for compositing information.

Four years ago, Jah bought the site. Paul was no longer interested in getting into the VFX industry, so wanted to sell it on to someone who would look after it.

Over the past year, I’ve been slowly drawing away from the community for various reasons… Things have been busy on a professional level, but I’ve also felt very disconnected from the way the forum has been run.

The events of the last month or so, have caused me to re-think my involvement. I feel that I no longer wish to be so closely associated with the forum, and as such have revoked my own admin/moderator priviledges, and withdrawing from any activity.

It’s been a fun 8 years, but I’m going to be moving onto other things now…

Hugh

Hi there

I’m looking into the role of a Previs artist and Layout TD. Do these artists have the same role?

In some job summaries, a Previs artist works with the Director and VFX Sup by providing previs, post-vis, camera and character blocking in 3D which shows the early shot sequences of a film.

Is the Layout TD merely responsible for creating pipeline scene assets to be used in set extensions, UV mapping for compositors and integration of 3D animation for the 3D/CG Department?

If this is not the Previs artist’s job, then does the Layout TD do the previs as well as provide pipeline scene files?

Hope to hear some good answers!

Thanks

tl;dr:
http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2010…cg-censorship/
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=vfxtalk
http://conradolson.com/why-i-removed…nk-to-vfx-talk

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Its one thing to blow your temper, to offend MANY users, rant and spew racist viewpoints, and effectively rip out the foundation to your own forum, all the while keeping it contained withIN the forum, but when you get an email from the moderator, using (read: abusing) their ability to send a news letter to all members of the forum and then to fill it with their justifications for their racist and hot tempered views, that is where I draw the line.

If you keep bringing up or reminding everyone of all the topics that were hotly debated by many of the prominent users of this forum, you’re going to keep opening up wounds for those who want to make amends and keep this site going.

I can not be a part of this forum any longer. You have crossed the line sending your bullshit lies and "justifications" for your "actions" to my email. I want so badly to keep supporting this site, passing on my knowledge that I have both learned from my own experiences as well as learned from being passed down to me through this very forum, but I can’t any more as the moral integrity of this site is crumbling and being left for crows to peck at.

Jah, your actions will cost you and everyone a part of this forum a heavy toll in knowledge and resources and this site will once again fall into a depression, with nothing but amateurs and "hobbyists" crawling around blindly spamming for help. India and China may be developing countries, but there is NO excuse for dragging them in to support your views and to use them as propaganda and justification for your beliefs. You’ve essentially turned the people you want to help the most, into the most hated because you have brought them into this, constantly referring to them, constantly blaming others for them and their problems, always speaking on their behalf as though you were their ambassador, not once considering that it isn’t "The Americas vs. the developing world", but rather, we’re all in this together and to share our knowledge with everyone pushes the cutting edge of our industry GLOBALLY. Did you ever stop to consider that those countries might use this site to access knowledge they’d never be able to either A) afford, or B) learn due to their geographical location? And where do you think most of the top-end talent is located? So how does alienating one and offending another help to bridge this world and help share knowledge? What happens now? You’re the apple of your developing country’s eye. They all love you, because you’ve opened up the VIP forums, and offered VIP Status to those in specific parts of the world who you have PITTY over because you feel they are being witheld benefits because of their nationality or financial status. So now you have a bunch of fresh people, who are still trying to get into the industry, still trying to learn, altogether just starting out, and now there’s no one here to give guidance. Just juniors and hobbyists leading each other, or metaphorically, the blind leading the blind. And whats going to happen? Someone is going to say "well shit, I’m not finding my answer here, i’ll try searching elsewhere". And where do they end up? At a tutorial site! On other forums, and bloggers offering their advice! And guess what. The majority of those sites they’ll end up running into? On the other side of their world. And THOSE people could of been here, helping, offering advice, guiding beginners, but no, we’ve gone right back to being fragmented again as this was one of the largest VFX knowledge-base hubs on the net.

To think, this site crumbled like the berlin wall in HOURS just because you decided to "crowd-source" for a project, and then when people called YOU out on the moral implications of that, your own pride and fear of being labeled as an abuser of labor, you decided to create a storm around you defending your views, justifying them by using other’s work conditions and nationalities as well as playing the race card foolishly, as fodder to feed the flame war, which soon spread like a wild fire, ruining everything this site once was, all because of your pride and temper. You’re an absolute perfect definition of a hypocrite. You’re doing all of this asinine "liberating" on the forums to help support the abused artists of developing countries, ONLY TO PROVE that you would NEVER abuse vfx artists, and this all originally stemmed from you trying to abuse your power and get a project done for cheap, with cheap labor (crowd-sourcing).

With all of this said, I regret none of it. And you would be wise to leave this here, untouched, and unmodified, as a testament against your ridiculous management and personality for others to read and voice their own opinions about your actions, in hopes that one of us will eventually break through your wall of ignorance and you’ll come to your senses. IF you delete this, or modify this in anyway, I WILL scatter this post as a screenshot into the net for the entire world to see and judge. Your views have already been logged in their entirety UNEDITED here: http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2010…cg-censorship/ and you’ll never be able to remove that. Same can happen to this post. Thousands already know whats happened here, people are tweeting http://search.twitter.com/search?q=vfxtalk, blogging (http://conradolson.com/why-i-removed…nk-to-vfx-talk), and linking back to this, and the vfxsoldier post, and I guarantee you, there is no recovering from this. I hope you’ve learned something from this experience.