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We decided that we wanted to create a new category where some of our peers can vent about their latest annoyance… This month we gave the Soap Box to a dear friend, David J. Stephens, CG supervisor at Digital Domain. And now.. we pass the mic over to Dave…

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I’ve been offered a few minutes to stand on a soap box and bitch about what ever I wanted, so..

My favorite pet peeve at the moment, the scourge of the visual effects industry, is “temps.”

“OK, what the hell is a temp?” you ask…For the uninitiated, a temp is a temporary version of a visual effect.

Principle photography of a motion picture usually wraps many months before the visual effects are completed (or even started in some cases.) While editing the film together, something has to fill the holes left for uncompleted F/X shots. Everything from storyboards, crude CG pre-vis, or the caption “insert FX here” are called upon to fill in the missing pieces of film, but at some point (usually stated in the contract) the FX house is duty bound to deliver an early version of the effect that better helps tell the story.

All of this sounds fairly reasonable…and it would be, if that’s how it worked in practice.

To get a handle on what temps have become in recent years, we must first look at a fundamental shift in production methods in this The Digital Era. A mere decade ago, the means of producing visual FX and in general, any media product, were so expensive and time consuming that many weeks of pre-planning were needed. And then after all the preparations, the effect was filmed/performed/executed in what was nearly a single all or nothing attempt. While I’m overstating things a bit, filming a model shot on a motion control stage or optically assembling the composite were precision tasks that were performed a bare minumum of times. It either worked or it didn’t…

Now enter the computer.

From video editing to desktop publishing, images and artwork can now be flung about with wild abandon, combined in a thousand different ways till somebody says, “OK, we’ll go with that.” The work of days can be now be done in minutes which ofcourse leads to a very off-the-cuff attitude towards projects, but why not? If I don’t like the first edit, I’ll do another one and still be able to take an early lunch!

All this creative freedom sounds very heady, and it’s easy to get carried away, but we must remember that there are limits to what digital technology can do. Many areas of FX technology and specifically CGI have not kept pace with “instant gratification” digital workhorses like infernos and avids. CGI is still slow and ponderous by comparison, mostly because of its intense research and development needs and the shear size of the data required to do acceptable film quality effects.

But this hasn’t stopped general expectations in this instant digital age shifting from the “lets take our time and get this right the first time” concept to the “OK, well, give me ten takes or so, and I¹ll pick something, and then we’ll start from there” method. We’re forced to abandon sound planning and scheduling to keep a break-neck pace only a thumbnail sketch artist could meet.

Here’s were “temps” re-enter the story.

Imagine that you’re already under the gun to produce, and then just as you’re making some progress, you’re informed that all the shots you’re working on have to be finished three months ahead of schedule.

In an industry where budgeting and scheduling is already very difficut, this is the last straw. Temps have become an early deadline where the client is given unlimited freedom to make changes and art direct ad infinitum, because the purpose of a temp is no longer just to fill in…It’s used to get direct, relevant feedback from test audiences on the effect itself.

Temps become a mini-show within a show where the end goal is finished shots not temporary versions. Custom/hacked pipelines and software must be rapidly developed and deployed to meet the accelerated schedule, and excessive hours of tedious and technical setup must be done, most of which cannot be re-used when the show returns to normal production. In short, temps exert a terrible strain on a production and yield no forward gain for the production. And many times the rushed work is so far removed from the eventual look, that any feedback on it is nearly useless.

The ultimate lesson here is that we’ve all become conditioned to think in these instant digital terms, but we must forget the hype and instead be cognizant of the strengths and weaknesses of a medium and plan accordingly.

With that in mind, what can be done about temps? Two thoughts.

Option one: Treat temps as temps. Use them to help fill in the story but not to judge the FX. Movies did it for decades…seems like it’s still a valid strategy.
Option Two: Budget and scheduled temps (ie near finals) as a mini-show. Obviously cost and time go up overall (which no one wants to hear) but it’s probably better than wrecking a show or a facility just to save a few pennies.

As to whose responsibilty this is to sort out, ie the client or the FX house, I’ll leave to be the subject of debate. I just know I’m tired of being caught in the middle…

End of rant.

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