Chad:As a kid I tricked my parents into buying me a 386 computer for word processing, which I then used exclusively for gaming.

In high school, I was good at art and math but they never seemed to overlap anywhere in my life except in my often insanely detailed perspective drawings. Calculus was my favorite math course because of how visual it was -- tangents, solids of revolution, volumes (a.k.a .integrals) -- it all made sense because it was something I could close my eyes and see, but I honestly never expected that it would have anything to do with my job.

I went to University of Virginia and wandered there for awhile. I took pre-engineering classes, I took art classes, history classes, and eventually settled on art history, because that was where most of credits ended up. Unfortunately, for the many talented artists at UVA, the art department was sorely underfunded -- in my digital art class the most advanced application we had was an outdated version of Flash. It was pretty sad. Then one of my programmer friends told me about an interdisciplinary class hosted by the computer science department, which had beaucoup $$$, so we had plenty of seats of Maya to go round. I was hooked immediately. I took a follow-up course the next semester, which was just a made up class to let those of us who had become addicted continue to work on projects together. After I graduated and almost everyone had left town, my friend and I stuck around to finish our short: to finish it we worked 30 hour shifts in a "secret" underground computer lab, operating as human render queue managers for the 50 workstations there.

When I started shopping my reel around and I realized the “Catch 22” of breaking into the visual FX industry: everyone wants at least 2 years of experience. Then I got a call from Payam Shohadai at Luma Pictures telling me that I had a job if I could be in California in 3 days (I was in Virginia at the time). Three days, 3000 miles, and 3 flat tires later I was doing rotoscope on my first movie in sunny LA.

Chad: Percy Jackson, Wolverine, Harry Potter 6, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Underworld 1&2

Chad: I use Maya primarily for lighting and programming.

Chad: First and foremost, I love the confluence of art and science. I'm a problem solver, and when you're making movies there is always a new and interesting set of problems to solve and the solutions often have a direct visual result, which is always nice. I also really enjoy the spectrum of personalities that you get when art and science merge.

I love that there's always something new to learn. Sometimes it can be overwhelming -- you've got to be absorbing new information all the time -- you learn to use part of your brain for cataloguing and indexing ideas and technologies that you come across even just fleetingly, just in case they come in handy sometime down the road.

There's an interesting dynamic in our industry: It's at the same time highly cooperative and highly competitive. Even though there are a handful of companies vying for the same pool of VFX movies, there is still a lot of cooperation between companies: you can see this in the high quality open-source projects sponsored by various companies in the industry, and in our peers world-wide who are usually very eager to help each other out.

Lastly, I really appreciate that the industry is project-based: I hate when there is never a finish-line in view. It's a great feeling to finish a project, then regroup, reflect, and prepare to tackle a fresh set of challenges. It also makes very clear the appropriate times to throw big parties.

Chad:The film industry is always trying to stay one step ahead of television to keep people out of their living rooms and in theaters. Currently, stereo and Imax are fighting to prove that they are not just fads. “Avatar” and “Dark Knight” currently stand as the pinnacle of each technology respectively, and they showed us that, when done right, they can both go a long way to augmenting the viewing experience. They also make our jobs a lot harder! Imax theoretical resolution is around 15k, but even a working resolution of 8k is still 16 times the area compared to our current 2k standard (and that's not even taking the differences in aspect ratio into consideration, which would put it even higher). Ultimately, I think that stereo gives a lot more bang for the buck and will therefore have more staying power. However, once the technology goes mainstream and lesser-skilled directors and VFX houses get in on the action, there may be a backlash against the inevitable headaches that poorly executed stereo can cause.

One of my primary interests is lighting and rendering, so physically accurate renderers like Maxwell have me very excited by the natural, photographic quality they produce. However, experience tells me there is a lot that needs to happen before they are commonplace in VFX (and I’m not just talking about bringing renders times way down, which will come naturally as computing power increases). The visual FX industry is quite different from architectural visualization, because we have many constraints placed on us: we have to match our CG lighting to a live-action plate and we are asked by directors to create lighting scenarios that are not physically possible. If the industry is going to move towards physically accurate rendering we can't rely on simple spherical HDR maps, we need highly accurate, HDR textured models of the real sets. The work that was done on “Benjamin Button” is a great example of this workflow, and the results speak for themselves.

GPU acceleration is another technology to keep an eye on. Games are quickly getting more realistic, but the scope and complexity of visual effects for film is growing just as fast. Utilizing the GPU as a more general purpose processor, like is being done with CUDA and OpenCL, will be essential to its adoption in VFX.

Chad: The single best piece of advice I can give is this: If you might have to work overtime, don't make other plans. Overtime is most stressful when you've got somewhere else to be: you move too quickly, make mistakes, curse your failed renders, and pull out your hair. Just accept it, put on some music and enjoy the late-night camaraderie.