Quarterly I'd invite the staff to our stage for day of film making experimentation. The focus was technical, but spun towards how camera issues affected the VFX process and the artists themselves, like how different formats affect field of view and depth of field, why faster films are more sensitive but have bigger grain, and the nature of shooting plates on a hectic set and why plates are not always as perfect as perfect can be.
I established a scholarship at York University where I received my film degree. A promising student with an interest in VFX and camera is given a cash scholarship to be put towards equipment rentals, processing, etc.
Keynote speaker at assorted Film Festivals, conventions and seminars including Imagica in the Principality of Monaco, the Gold Maple Leaf film week in Taipei and The Post Experience series which ran for several years, including NAB.
GVFX ran a formal training program once a year that turned out successful, independent, money making Flint artists in 8 weeks. Usually 4 students were chosen and taught the basics by our senior staff with homework assigned and evaluated. They knew from the beginning we would only be keeping 2 of them at the end of the program. It worked.I enjoy speaking to students at all levels, from grade school to graduate programs and try to do several per year. The format is usually a demo of before and after material heavily interspersed with questions from the class. Most recently I spoke in Calgary and Edmonton at the SAIT Institute, January 2006.
