sent from: London, UK. destination: Playa del Rey, California, USA

If the studios knew just how little VFX companies knew of their own costs and how to bid accurately for work, they would have a heart attack. I’ve worked at enough studios to be able to say this, bid on enough work, and wondered after – how much DID that cost? All VFX companies can really say is how much they were paid, and how much the whole thing cost. But when it gets down to the time people spend on-the-box doing actual work – I’ve never seen anywhere do it right. IF they track it at all (most places do not know how long people have worked on tasks – how crazy is that?), they do not track time spent waiting for updates (animation, rigging, shaders), time when systems fall over (disks fill up, licenses max out), time spent working around bugs, time spent discussing knotty problems, time spent getting your damn movies together for dailies, and almost nowhere tracks all the extra hours spent beyond a 40 hour week, whether paid or not, that people spend working. And then they ask you to bid without any idea of what things cost the previous time, and wonder why companies go out of business.