Perfectionism holds artists back. It gets the best of us, both junior and senior artists like. It’s part of the inability to manage ourselves.  It also ends up costing more: You’re spending so much time on the project, you burn through the budget. You end up paying the client for the privilege of working on their project. There is a famous quote from Leonardo da Vinci, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” But if you’re creating art as a business, you need to know when enough is enough. You’re the one who has to give yourself the constraints. Your goal is to create the best work within ..read more

Chris Bailey is a Productivity Expert and the bestselling Author of two books about productivity: The Productivity Project and Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction. Chris writes about productivity at www.alifeofproductivity.com and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive, without hating the process. Chris was born in Red Deer, Alberta and raised in Ontario, Canada. He first became interested in productivity in high school after reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done. He graduated from the Sprott Business School of Business i ..read more

We all have doubts if we’re on the right path. Being an artist requires a lot of patience, perseverance and skill. In addition, we have to continue learning and innovating.  There is this inner voice that asks, “Am I investing my time into something that’s going to pay off?” It weighs on you. It doesn’t help when we have people around us, telling us to give up. There is so much negativity on the internet – and on social media – as well, and it’s hard to weed out that noise. Everyone is opinionated and not everyone knows what they’re talking about. It makes us double guess our path and som ..read more

Tim Miller is a Film Director, Animator, Creative Director and VFX Artist. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for the work on his short film Gopher Broke. He made his directing debut with Deadpool. He is also known for creating opening sequences for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Thor: The Dark World. In 1995, Tim co-founded Blur Studio with David Stinnett and Cat Chapman. Blur is where animators and artists can collaborate and be in control of their creative destinities. Since then, the Studio has evolved into an award-winning production company with work ..read more

AI is exploding everywhere. There are so many technological innovations that use AI in visual effects. You might be already following the massive growth of AI. For VFX artists, the question is: Is AI taking over the art world? Will art be replaced by AI? Are artists’ careers over? In 2010, deep learning changed everything. AI became the revolutionary thing we can utilize. But the big part of preventing AI growth was processing power and storage. With technological innovations, we’re beginning to experience AI for the first time. How exciting it is to be alive right now!  Machine learnin ..read more

ActionVFX is a website that provides stock footage for visual effects, from smoke plumes to fire, from sparks to explosions. Before the company was launched in 2016, its CEO Rodolphe Pierre-Louis, along with Joe Camarata (Marketing Manager) and Luke Thompson (COO and Co-Owner) conducted an extensive survey among visual effects artists, which determined the type of files the site would contain and its content. After only a year, ActionVFX’s footage has been used in television shows like Flash, Fear of the Walking Dead, Legends of Tomorrow, How to Get Away with Murder, Narcos, Series of Unfortun ..read more

EveryPoint combines photogrammetry techniques with the iPhone Pro’s LiDAR scanner to fill in the gaps, as well as utilizes the positional / accelerometer data from the Apple AR toolkit. When combined, this delivers color 3D models that are said to be more accurate than simply using the iPhone’s LiDAR scanner alone. EveryPoint is not an end user product in itself, but a technology layer on which developers can create their solutions, in construction and other industries. In this Podcast, Jonathan Stephens, the Chief Evangelist and Marketing Director at EveryPoint, talks about EveryPoint, the po ..read more

COVID-19 created havoc in people’s lives and for a while, we thought it would shut down the VFX industry. But it turned out to have the opposite effect. As productions shut down, the studios sent artists home and their equipment to their homes, allowing for artists to work from home. That also means that studios could now hire from artists from anywhere, turning the industry into a truly global one. Which also meant incredible opportunities for artists anywhere. In addition, VFX has become a booming industry. That gives opportunities for smaller studios to compete. There is so much work out th ..read more

Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri is responsible for continuing Epic’s tradition of fusing state-of-the-art technology with the pinnacle of visual artistry, and for defining the studio’s Unreal Engine as the platform of choice for all types of interactive experiences including games, movies, visualization, augmented reality and virtual reality.  Prior to joining Epic Games, Kim was the Chief Strategy Officer at Lucasfilm, where he was responsible for the company’s STAR WARS technology strategy and innovations in interactive storytelling, including the highly-awarded 1313 prototype. Kim’s career ..read more

At the beginning of your VFX career, things can seem so hard and so stressful. As a junior VFX Artist, you may feel like everyone is out to get you. Here are some powerful mindset shifts that will change your outlook and how you feel about your career. A lot of artists have a struggling artist mentality. Once you understand that you’re in a commercial industry – and you are a commercial industry of Hollywood movies and AAA games – you also understand that your client’s vision is the most important. It is your job to deliver the result. As a VFX artist, you are in a service industry. Which mean ..read more