Useful VFX Links

Befores & Afters

Great VFX journalism by Ian Failes

Ian Failes @ianfailes is a journalist who specializes in the VFX and animation industry. He writes great stuff and I particularly like his retrospective pieces where is investigates how VFX were done on older movies. It is fascinating to see how things used to be done.

Ben McEwan

I've worked with Ben McEwan at several companies in Vancouver. He's a smart compositor, great trainer, and a lovely bloke.

As well as being a talented compositing supervisor Ben has taught at Vancouver Film School, run an online mentoring program and written Python for Nuke 101 and Github for Compositors.

Chris Fryer

Chris has a bunch of really interesting tips and tutorials on his blog

creativecow.net

Creative Cow has loads of forums for different software packages. A lot of them aren't very active but the After Effects forum definitely is. This used to be my first stop for any After Effects issues I was having. They also have hundreds of After Effects video tutorials.

FXGuide

FXGuide is run by the same guys who run FXPhd. This site is a good source of news and hosts some really interesting podcasts

FXRant

A blog from Todd Vazari, a compostior at ILM. General rants and articles about VFX stuff, does some good comparison peices

Gati Media

Attila Gasparetz has some great tools, tips and code examples on his website

Job Listings

This is an epic spreadsheet of jobs listings for VFX, animation and gaming studios around the world. It's pretty amazing and is maintained by Chris Mayne

Josh Parks

Josh is a compositor who also does a lot of training. He has run course and has bunch of cool tips and tutorials on his website. He also runs an email newsletter that you can subscribe to.

Mads Hagbarth

Mads Hagbarth is a Nuke genius who writes some amazing tools and does some great tutorials

You should also follow Mads on Vimeo

Motionscript.com – Dan Ebbert’s Expressions

Dan Ebberts is an After Effects expressions genius.

I found Dan answering posts over at creativecow.net. This site has loads of example After Effects expressions. In most cases you can take the maths that he uses and rebuild the expressions in other apps.

Nukepedia

A wiki based resource just for Nuke related issues

Python For The Anxious CG Artist

A YouTube playlist covering python basics

This is a great series of short YouTube videos by Nelson Lim describing the basic concepts of Python

Real Or Fake 3D

An interesting list of which 3D releases are shot stereo and which are conversions.

Ron Brinkman's Blog

Ron Brinkman, one of the creators of Shake and author of The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, writes about stuff. Mainly photography.

Split The Difference

I have worked with Sebastian Schütt at several companies now. He is a very friendly and very smart compositor. He has created the "Split The Difference" YouTube channel and webpage, where he posts a series of great tutorials. He has two different series; Nuke Timeouts and Unleash The Nodes. Nuke Timeouts are quick little tips, whereas Unleash The Nodes are deep dives into nodes or techniques.

Studio Hog

This is a massive directory of VFX studios around the globe

The Foundry

The Foundry are the makers of Nuke and other industry standard products. Theirs site has plenty of training videos for their products.

Video Copilot

Andrew Kramer is an After Effects genius and records some excellent tutorials.

These tutorials are mostly for After Effects but some of the tricks and techniques that Andrew uses are really smart and can help you think about how to approach problems in different ways.