Looks like Monsters Inc. is on track for a $64 million take this opening weekend. Pretty amazing, I guess. I’m finding I’m less than completely enthusiastic about this, and it’s sort of tied up with the general mood swings I’ve been having since the wrap party, at the Hallowe’en gathering and basically at any recent company function.
As I mentioned before, there are a lot of sticky issues I need to sort out, but I’m at the point now of being able to elucidate a couple of them. First: I’m getting frustrated of being at the company for nearly three years, and still barely knowing more than a handful of people. I realise I am mostly to blame for this; but the larger issue is that I also feel that I’m missing the sense of cameraderie from working with others on a shared project. I’m not sure whether this is just some ego thing, i.e. whether it’s some dark psychological thing related to respect, peers, adulation, blah blah blah. There is however the clear fact that everyone in my immediate group is either in Seattle or in L.A, and that in the last year I’ve had less and less reason to talk to anyone else in the rendering group means that I could (and nearly have, on a few occasions) go through the day without talking to anyone face to face. And I know that isn’t healthy.
This leads to the second issue: I’m starting to realise that I want to at least try my hand at something more production oriented. Watching both the Final Fantasy and Phantom Menace DVDs over the weekend was pretty illuminating, not only for reminding me how bad both movies were, but also for reminding me of one of the reasons why I joined this business in the first place: to be able to work on cool visual effects, and then to be able to point at it in the theatre and say “I did that!” – rather than “I sort of fixed some bugs in the software which was used for that”, or “I answered questions for the people who worked on that”.
So, I guess before the end of year review, I’m going to be thinking more about where I want to be headed. I mean, I like my job, and I have enough freedom at it now to work on code, which is what I thought I really wanted three years ago – but I think I’d also like to see my name on the silver screen at least once. On the other hand I know production is hard, and again: I do like my current job, maybe enough not to risk the unknown. Maybe moving up to Seattle and working out of that office will solve the communication issue.
Argh.
