I have been observing the Visual
Effects "industry" and the behavior of people in that
industry since about 1980. I am constantly amazed by the sense of
sharing, the love, the collaboration, the farsightedness, wisdom and
sheer intelligence of people in this industry.
Well, actually, no I haven't.
In fact, I have noticed what seems to
be the reverse: a thuggish, callous, stupid, fuck-you-I-got-mine
sensibility that pervades the industry like the smell of rotting
garbage in August. To those from the NY area, who will understand
the reference, I tell them that I suspect that people in New Jersey
Waste Management industry generally show a much higher level of
intelligence, wit and humanity than people in our industry.
Every once in a while I come across
intelligent behavior in the animal world that totally recreates for
me some sense of what the visual effects industry, or the people
within it, are like. For example, in this post, I discuss why the Komodo Dragon might
make a good mascot for Visual Effects.
I have just stumbled upon another
example of animal behavior that evokes for me the sense of the visual
effects industry in some subtle, or even sublime, way.
In the past, I have often wondered if
there might also be some relationship between visual effects people
and the cartilanginous fish known as "stingrays". The
stingray is related to the shark, and many have noted that visual
effects people do share behavior with stocks, notably the need to
always move forward and the tendency to go into a feeding frenzy
whenever blood is sensed.
Who you looking at ?
One behavior that visual effects people
seem to share with the stingray is in the area of mating. Here is
how Wikipedia describes mating behavior in the stingray:
"When a male is courting a female, he will follow her closely, biting at her pectoral disc. He then places one of his two claspers into her valve."
This so clearly resembles mating
behavior in visual effects people, to the extent that they mate, that
one has to wonder if there is not a deeper genetic relationship
between the two groups of animals.
Normally, the sting ray is a loner who
travels and feeds by themselves and rarely seeing another of their
kind but recently new behavior has been observed in the Cayman
Islands. There, tourists have taken to feeding the stingray with
prepackaged-for-their-convenience squid packets and the stingray have
taken to the idea in a major way. Now instead of being nocturnal
and alone, they hang around during the daytime in large crowds
waiting to gorge themselves on tasty squid packets. Apparently
there is no ethic or value that the stingray is not willing to give
up in return for tasty frozen squid.
Consider the following picture of this practice:
Consider the following picture of this practice:
You can read more about this here:
This reminds me of the feeding frenzy
in visual effects and computer animation in the early 90s, with scum
newly trained in art schools flocking into the artificial and
unsustainable slave pits of the major studios on the West Coast,
gorging themselves on tasty and competitive salary packages and
leaving chunks and detrius from dead squid floating in little pieces
in the water.
The
relationship is surely not a coincidence.
The Stingray on Wikipedia
Grand Cayman Islands on Wikipedia
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