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MillimeterEditor's Notes
Jul 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
When we started to think about this year's Siggraph issue, our reporters' ideas came from a more personal direction than usual. Notably, our longtime Senior Contributing Editor S. D. Katz has been in China for almost four years. (He even has a legal name now: Wang Xiao, which has something to do with being strong or grumpy. It's a leadership quality, apparently, and the name is supposed to be a compliment.)
Katz's experience in China has been that of an insider, to the extent that's possible — first in Shenzhen at the Institute of Digital Media Technology, which was China's largest animation school and studio at the time. Now he works as head of development at Xing Xing Digital, one of the primary privately owned studios in Beijing.
Katz has been on the ground in China during a period of enormous, imperfect growth, and we gave over a lot of this issue to his observations and interviews. There's more online, and it's also worthwhile to look back at the stories Katz wrote from Shenzhen in 2004. Like most things, the China boom is happening in a slower and more frustrating way than the drumbeat would have you believe. Still, it is happening. Also, like most things in the global economy, there are many ways not to make money or save money or be successful. Outsourcing and globalization have that whole inconvenient “other culture” thing about them in which cheap labor is the tip of an iceberg of advantages that often ultimately appeals to locals more than to Westerners. There are dense networks already in place, and Westerners are welcome to play by the rules of those networks or shrewdly learn to work with and around them, at no small peril. There are exceptions and success stories. Be careful about betting a business plan or a budget on being one.
Senior Editor Michael Goldman catches up with Rob Cohen, who shot a chunk of The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor in China and who talks about important changes to his approach to modern visual effects.
Also in this issue, Ellen Wolff checks in with her old friend Jim Morris on the occasion of his new job. She also covers a pet subject of hers: the visual-effects artist as director. Here again is a once-glib trend that has proven to be hard-won.
We'll be blogging again from the Siggraph show floor. I hope you'll tune in at blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/siggraph. We will also be launching a new student section of Reel-Exchange. Please consider joining the professional site and taking a good look at the student reels. Students are tomorrow's talent, in this country and globally.
