Alexander Kucera

I have been hired at [Pixomondo Images] 1 in Ludwigsburg to work as VFX Coordinator for some of their recent projects. This is an exciting opportunity. The company size is considerably bigger then most companies I have worked so far and I have to handle several smaller projects instead of one or two big projects. That is a new challenge and I am looking forward to master it in the coming weeks.

It is official now. The production of “Prisoners of the Sun” has been put on hold. All employees and freelancers have been laid of as of 30th April 2008. According to rumors, it seems the legal situation of the movie was not researched thoroughly before going into post production. It is a pity, because we were at a stage, where all the pipelines were set up and we just started our first two full CG shots.

I wanted to share this litte trick with you for quite a while now, but of course I have been busy and other things came in the way. They always do. I work with my MacBook Pro at home and at the office. That is of course nice, because it is my only base of operations and I have everything in one place. But do you know the feeling that you are working with your laptop at work and don’t want anyone to snoop around on it, because it also is your private laptop and has all kinds of personal stuff on it?

I finally found the time to transfer all posts from the old BabylonDreams blog over to their new home at this address. I only transferred posts I attached a certain value to, so not everything is mirrored 100%. If you miss a post or something is broken, please send me a message via the contact form. Thank you and enjoy diving into all the new/old content.

I just found an article on the BusinessWeek site entitled [“How Not to Be the Obnoxious Newcomer”] 1. It seems that author [Liz Ryan] 2 has also stumbled over one too many of those annoying people that waltz in on their first day and step on everybody’s toes, just like I did a while ago when I wrote (link: blog/newbie_dont_act_like_a_pro text:“If you are a newbie, don’t act like a pro!”).

Hello everyone, I have to make a completely selfish plug for a movie I worked on lately. It is called Solo and is about Jon, the first winner of the Danish Popstars show. I don’t speak a word of Danish — well, at least not enough to fully understand the movie — but the critics seem to love it and it is a big success for us so far. Me and my team worked on several things, some which made it into the final movie and some which ended up on the cutting floor.

A lot of times I hear people complaining how slow this or that program is. “shake is so slow”, “motion is total crap” or “why is this taking so long?” Well, guess what, there is actually a solution to it. And the magic word is workflow. We are working on pretty heavy projects most of the time. HD material (even if the output will be PAL in the end), 2K material for film or lots of layers or 3D layers.

I don’t know if you already know this service called [Twitter] 1. It can be described as a IM independent status message, so you can notify people of your current doings if you like. [Coda Hale] 2 created a [Quicksilver action to post conveniently to Twitter] 3. [Ted Leung] 4 thought it would be nice to have [Growl notifications] 5 in the mix and [Matt Matteson] 6 thought it needed a bit more sparkle by [adding iChat support] 7.

Last time I talked about the basic ingredients of a working naming convention, which got inspired by a topic covered on [Lifehacker] 1 and [43 Folders] 2. What to avoid — like never using the word “final” in any circumstances — and what to include — for example version numbers. This time I will show you how to use this new gained knowledge and plug its elements together into a working template for a professional naming convention.

Remember Emilia? She did this song called “Big Big World” about 7 years ago: Big Big World Guess what? She is back, with her new song “Var Minut”, which means “Every Minute” and is the usual thing about love I guess. I can’t really tell though, because she is singing in Swedish and I don’t understand a single word of it. ;-) Anyway, I was VFX Supervisor on set and also the main guy to do the VFX in post.