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Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'm a little curious why VFX work has so much allure. It's a decent wage, but I don't see why that job specifically is worth it. Surely there are other jobs demanding less work while paying more money. Is it just because it's art? I feel like that sort of corporate "spend two weeks making a realistic fire which will be on screen for 3 seconds" can't be that fulfilling as art in itself, when you have essentially zero creative control.

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The problems that you work to solve are not the usual "I need a new parameter for this API endpoint" type of work. It's fun (for a while) and crazy and even glamorous (watching something you've worked on in a theater with the public is great). Another nice thing is that, while most software written is very evanescent (almost every bit of software I have worked on in my 38-year career is gone), my name in the credits of some very popular movies will be around 100 years after I'm dead. That's pretty cool.

I worked in VFX for almost ten years. It's incredibly fun! I absolutely loved making movies and I worked with some amazing artists. It pays terribly, but it was the most fun I've ever had in a job.

I would add that there are really challenging problems and continual technical development. And since each movie comes with its own new set of requirements, each one is a fresh slate of new, crazy problems. For me personally, I love the short iterative cycle between math and an output image.

I worked on tools for artists and you're totally right. The fast iteration was so great; it felt more like good ol' fashioned stay-up-all-night hacking for the joy of it than anything else I've ever done professionally.

I'm sure it's pretty fun to see the stuff you worked on in theaters, and from what I've seen on the 'VFX Artists React' show that Corridor Crew puts out the VFX artists actually do have some amount of creative control - depending on what they're doing.

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