So here's what happened to me at Stargate Atlantis - beyond R.Cooper Stealing my concepts and not paying me... does any of this sound like hypocrisy if you look at the content of their show?
I have been discriminated against and ripped off by a film production company in vancouver.
I am also going to write an article on my blog later about how hard it is to file a human rights complaint in BC and Canada, there is no email links, not because email is not secure, a secure form can be made, it's so there won't be an easily trackable complaints process. I need assistance in this, the police in vancouver are being paid by these rich people to attack me and shut me up for standing up for my rights.
"No one gets left behind...."
right.
So its 6 months later,
I still don't have any work
broke and homeless
My buddy tells me to keep my mouth shut,
"You'll never work in the Vancouver film scene again!"
he exclaims.
Like I fucking care.
I never worked in film in Vancouver before,
each company I sent and received work to while I was at Atlantis has posted a position since I left, and I didn't get a phone call, never mind an interview.
Blackballed for sticking up for myself.
despite knowledge, skill, talent, ability, creativity, efficiency...
1.
The Starry eyed hopeful Techie gets shafted
So I get this call. A gig in TV.
Sounds good. The dude likes the fact that I know Lightwave, even though the position is "VFX IO"
I agree to come on board at a ridiculously lowballed starting wage.
I had asked for $3500 a month.
I got offered $500 a week, with it going up to $700 a month later.
That's before tax BTW.
Shitmoney in an expensive metropolis like Vancougar, but "a foot in the door" I figure, like so many idiots before me.
Multimillion dollar TV show, and I'm being offered $500 a week to do actual technical work that requires brain cells.
10 bucks a fucking hour basically.
To put that in perspective, Production Assistants(coffee gatherers and clipboard holders) make almost $15 plus they get overtime, and janitors at the Bridge facility make over $15 hr.
An actual Editor makes $3k-$4k a WEEK, and an Assistant Editor makes somewhere around $6k-$8k a month. So I'm lowballing when I talk about what a VFX Editor makes.
The guy who hires me isn't the people I actually work under.
He's a cool cat, excellent 3D animator and art director type dude, interesting to talk to. A teeny bit uptight and stingy, but hey, that's what contracted supervisory roles do to people.
So I get to work.
Never had money for a Mac, but I'm a Mac technician as part of my long experience with Network Systems Administration, and a couple of different technical roles in the publishing industry.
I have to get up to snuff on Final Cut Pro.
No problem. I study applications for a living.
Make some nice word documents with all the shortcuts that would be useful laid out in large text, print em off, tape em up all over, and get to it.
Its not like its rocket science. Maybe it is to some people, but I've used, studied, and taught the usage of a couple hundred applications in my career.
The HD timeline templates are already in place, its just a matter of tweaking my compression settings and getting proper overlays for timecode in place.
Basically I get a list of VFX shots, broken down into the various separate shots, called elements that together when compositied with special fx make the final shot. I find the elements, set the in and outs for them, output the elements to frame sequences, and organise/package them on removeable disks for the FX vendors who are contracted to take the elements they get from me and put the shot together.
Its called pulling plates. Its what a Visual Effects Editor does.
If a shot comes back and someone needs to compare the last version recieved of the shot with the latest one, or needs to check the footage recieved from the vendors for compression or some other bad fuggum, or needs to look at the various elements and raw footages that make up a shot, they come to me.
I also make log DVD's of intermediate show "cuts" with frame accurate timecode burned in so the VFX coordinators can "log" the shots, check them for accuracy as to what was requested. The "selects" process of collecting and trimming elements can be over 2000 mouse clicks for one episode if it has a lot of VFX, since a single 4 element shot takes about 18 mouse clicks and 3 cut-pastes
Like I said, it's basically what a Visual Effects Editor does.
VFX Editors make about $400 a day. I make $500 a week.
There's always those who talk about learning curves and blah blah blah.
I was up and running in 2 weeks and didn't even have real shit coming down the pipeline yet when I was ready to go.
In the first month I had all my timecode burns set properly, labels for log dvd's set and ready, extensive keyboard shortcut tweaking to make "selecting" the elements fast as possible, compression settings to fit full log cuts on a dvd with the highest visual quality and frame accuracy, etc.
I always take my work seriously. I'm a pro at whatever I do. I always streamline processes, and important people actually ask my advice on things. Its always been this way.
So the month goes by, I've been kicking ass, what I do is running smoothly, despite the fact that I actually need more ram and a faster pipeline between my two workstations, since things bottleneck fast at HD image sizes, but I'm rocking.
And the $200 raise doesn't come.
Everyone is busy, these are important people, there is an accounting department, I'm sure it will work out. 3 weeks later I actually have to bother my busy supervisor about the raise, and when it comes through a month later, guess what? I don't get the $200/week for the month previous.
Someone just put $800 in their pocket and it wasn't me.
So I choke on it, cause what are you gonna do.
I work the whole of Season 4, and get hired back for Season 5, I guess because I did good work.
But no more raises. I don't get a single other raise in Season 4, and I get hired back in Season 5 at the same wage.
You see, by changing the name of the position from what it is, to something else, a la "sandwich artist", the wage of $400 and the film CREDIT that a VFX Editor would get suddenly disappears into someone's pocket, and the "VFX I/O" is born. Gets around unions, and those credit things add up to big money over time.
Not for me though. Damn my ass is fucking sore from this shit.
I gotta say, the VFX coordinators that I worked with were good laid back people. Post was a bit more snooty on occasion, but mostly positive and nice.
Even the supervisor Mark Savela who reamed my ass with this rip-off wage shit was actually a nice guy to talk to, but still, getting fucked is getting fucked. I guess he made a nice $40k+ bonus in Season 4
So I finally said "Honey, I'm not enjoying this..."
2.
The Experienced Techie Consultant Screwover
I fucking hate this one. It's the eternal ass-rip. It never ends.
So there I am, Season 5. I have a new office. No raise, but I got a new office of my own and no longer have to share the former broom closet with the IT dude.
One day, in walks a Lead Compositor.
She's unnamed at this point, but preggo by a good number of months. Nice lady, obsessively compulsive and perfectionist like all good compositors are.
So it's a hot day, and she walks into my office with a heavy wool jacket all buttoned up. No pregnant woman in her hot flashing right mind would be wearing that on a day like today, and the sweat on her brow isn't even from the jacket.
She's nervous. Because she's been sent on a mission.
You see, this is TV land, where micro miniaturization is only a couple of years behind the early adopters in Spookland. And those fuckers had cameras the size of a pinky way back in the early 70's.
So she's got this heavy wool jacket, and it's covered in camera buttons.
Yeah, that's what I said, camera buttons. I'm an early adopter of technology and I study surveillance gear for fun. The buttons on the front of her jacket, most are lookalike duds, but the center one is a camera button, and she's got her hands in her pockets, resting on the baby bulge, so she can steady that camera button and aim it. She's trying to look like she's just hanging out asking some simple questions, but she's not an actress.
You see, on set they have a multimillion dollar camera problem that's affecting the cost of compositing in the pipeline.
The compositors are getting crappy dirty source footage, and the 2 million dollars per episode "Video Village" truck with it's team of 4 "professionals" isn't making it better at all over the last 4 months. That's quite a few million bux.
So someone, like her boss, has sent her over to my office.
To pick my brain. She makes more than twice as much as me, the other people involved in this nasty video stew shitfest make humungous amounts of cash more than I do, and they've sent her to pick my brain.
She's obviously not happy about and is squirming. Because anyone with 2 or more braincells knows that its a shitty thing to do.
I've been in this situation a few times.
Now, you're probably asking yourself why a bunch of video pro's with a fancy new HD pipeline would be wanting to pick the brain of a lowly "VFX I/O" who makes $10 an hour.
I've said it before and here it comes again.
I'm a professional at almost everything I do. My memory is borderline photographic, my observation and analysis skills are top-notch, and I've been studying visual effects since I was 12 years old and first learned how to blow up plastic models with mothballs and gasoline and make planets from painted beach balls with lights inside them.
So.
A consultant would make about 5% of the amount saved by the results of his consultation on a problem. Along with all those big wig producer folks and their golden slaps on the back.
I'm not gonna get those prizes, someone else will, and I know it.
So I look straight at the camera button, watch her squirm a bit more, ask her why she's asking me. Her boss said I might have some "suggestions".
$10 bux an hour and I'm being asked for suggestions. I snort derisively while giving the little camera button the evil eye. I bet they had a good laugh when they watched that later.
So we pull up one of the scenes that's recently been giving her problems.
I look at the footage closely.
Its the central command of a Wraith hive, with a couple of actors playing plastic gun shootemup, and dry ice smoke swirling about. Smoke is a killer for compositors, but I can see almost immediately what's up.
Smoke moves with a stringy motion caused by "brownian movement", this has little dots that point to algorithmic manipulation. A program or device has inserted its own approximations into the clip. There is also clear evidence of video gain being used to processes the footage.
I've been doin this shit for years.
I ask her some questions about the pipeline, since I've never been on set, and I've never talked to these particular camera crews, except when I'm having a smoke maybe. I ask a few more questions until I get the full picture.
Pregnant as she is, she refuses to sit down, see she has to get both me and my monitor in the field of view. Pregnant women do not stand for 45 minutes when they can sit. Analysis takes time, and I'm stretching it to see how important this is to her. Damn she's sweating in that coat.
So I tell her....
First of all, scrap the "Video Village"
I'm paid shit, so I don't give a fuck about the white collar uptight yuppie fucks who will moan at my suggestions. I'm telling it like it REALLY is and NEEDS to be for the best QUALITY.
Because I'm about quality.
So.
1. Scrap the big truck and the techs.
2. Put the best quality lenses on the HD cams and set all filters OFF and all camera gain to default. Camera gain and filters introduce NOISE. Turn it all off and go with top level optics.
3. Put a dedicated high quality video amplifier directly at the output of the HD cams and connect the P2 drives directly to the high quality amplifier.
4.If the output is digital from the camera, still don't put anything in the pipeline to the p2, add gain in post
5. Take the P2 footage directly to ingest and do not touch it anywhere between the P2 drive and Ingest.
She asked me "why?" at a number of points. I gave her my scientific explanations. I gave her comments gleaned by long conversations with HD cameramen , tech geeks, and editors at smoke breaks and coffeeshops
And that's all I get out of it. A thank you. A big fuck you techie.
Damn my ass hurts.
I thought about it later.
The reason for the Video Village, is the same reason that recording artists are forced to use recording facilities owned by their record companies.
It's all about the money flow.
Save a bunch of money on this and that, switching to digital let's say, and suddenly there is a big wad of cash sitting there. The head company has to find a way to get that money out of Canada, so they send up the Video Village. It's not REALLY there to do anything at all, except to make sure that 2 million dollars per episode goes straight down to the states, instead of remaining in Canada and circulating in the Canadian economy.
3. Alchoholics, Weedheads, Powderheads and Hypocrites
So this lead Editor and Production Manager are telling me about
The Old Days
plates of coke held under their nose by Directors
So they can keep editing while they snort
Free. Piles of it. Just keep the slicer rolling and churn it out.
The Old Days.
Hmmm.
This is the bloody movies.
Vancouver sells itself as the little Canadian lap dog
starting to get big
Big names on the screen.
Tell me there's no blow.
Seriously tell me about multi millionaire stars coming to Vancouver to shoot
And tell me they go cold turkey while they're here
Fucking bullshit.
That's part of why I hate that Intervention show so much
The film industry has been hand in glove with drugs since its earliest forms
Don't get me wrong, I LIKE drugs.
I think they should all be legal
the only thing that should ever matter
is are you being a dick.
3/4 of any film crew in Canada are serious alcoholics
Like drink a 26'er and then some to yourself each Saturday,
They've got money to burn when they're working
My cameraman friend says they'll never really get hired on other productions after Atlantis
Because people "know"
I figure the crew on his gig probably drinks as much, he just doesn't hang with drinkers so much anymore.
I have my 3 or 4 beers and I'm just fine, I did my bottle slinging long ago
I didn't meet more than 2 people while I was there who actually drank less than me.
I smoke my little joints of crappy dimebag weed
Every pothead (there are lot's, believe me) I've ever met in film
has a connection to the good ganja
half a doobie and you're begging for it to be put out
space weed
I could never afford that stuff,
but I'll gladly smoke it.
Could you imagine some big star in Van, heard about the glistening BC Bud for years
They sure don't send him down to the streets to get it.
It gets delivered. Hotel, set, wherever, and no ones gonna stop it
because they shouldn't really
and why would big stars come here, if not for the perks they get everywhere else
If the VPD or RCMP were to clean up the movie lots of drugs,
no big productions would ever come here again and everyone knows it.
We have a HUGE hypocrisy problem in Canada
The rich man can chomp his illegal cigar at a table where he eats
They'll escort him to a special room with a big poofy chair
Get blow or weed delivered
Drink spirits that are illegal to purchase here
But a poor man,
sitting by some tracks
with a couple cans of beer and a joint
listening to birds
is a "drunk" or "junkie"
While plates of blow still fly up noses
And honestly
no one goes insane and kills people or self explodes
There are Hollywood and Hollywood North parties all the time
Plates of blow on the table
As much of anything you like
And they don't die by the dozens
Betty Ford is only for those who get caught
Those are the fear stories, the fnords we are programmed with.
So why do I bring this up?
Who cares, thousands of dollars of coke and weed a day go through Wall st.
and every major film lot
Everybody knows that, why bring it up?
Because, for some reason, throughout my job at Atlantis, from at least 8 different people, things were said to me that insinuated that I was some kind of former(or current) heavy alcoholic, or druggie. It was as if, before I got hired, someone had gone around telling people
"We have this guy, a total washup druggie alkie, who we're hiring cheap"
And almost every time I saw that in their eyes, the funny thing was, I was looking at an alcoholic who drank more than me. The expensive shit too, not the $2 tall can of cheap beer. The $50 to $100 a bottle shit. People who, at one time or another(or a few times) in their past life, had more than $100 worth of coke in them. People who had done lots of drugs in their mid 20's to 30's.
I really fucking hate hypocrisy.
4.I know how many people think I'm crazy.
Talking about pedophile rings, sick little covens hell bent on human sacrifice, cia backed canadian gangs and film production company fronts, cointelpro in canadian coffee shops, corruption in gov't and law enforcement, human rights violations in our friendly happy land of poverty....
I really don't give a shit if you want to believe I'm crazy.
There's a reason I run into these things, I've been a target for a while.
I got used to it by the time I was 20.
It still wears me down.
I could cry I guess,
but I decided to pick up stones and swing my slingshot
long ago I decided that.
Like when I was 12 and knew I wasn't going to get anywhere
in this "suck rich cock to succeed land of ever present bullshit and stupidity"
Fuck.
I'm one of those guys that talks this shit on the coffee shop patio
I'm one of the reasons you can't smoke on a patio anymore
to shut people like me up
fucking sheep we've become
Live music in Vancouver pretty much sucks these days
they've migrated to colder cities with warmer hearts for live music.
So I know there are a lot of people who are mad at what I've said about my stint at Stargate Atlantis. Suck my dick, its true.
I came back to Van in Jan. 2003
I spent that winter-spring-summer hanging at a coffeeshop on commercial drive
shivering with various other malcontents on the patio as we smoked and bitched about the destruction of culture and the rise of the new culture of misery
I am fucking serious about Robert C. Cooper ripping me off at that coffee shop across from the park.
with his little marantz recorder
asking me about what I thought about Atlantis, the lost city.
I know a lot about myths and science fiction.
I told him I thought it was not an island, but an island submarine, it didn't sink, it submerged
and after he pried and dug more I suggested that it was never found because it launched into space a la Eric Von Daniken. Of course it went on a journey of enlightenment, but if they ever made a movie about it they'd fill it with something stupid like "Army vs. Space Vampires"
Then I was talking about my "universal power block" idea which I've been going on about for a few years. Sound familiar? Is it zed or zee?
this is in 2003, early summer late spring
I know you don't believe it. But it's true,
and someone is out there whohas worked with the bastard and hates Robert Cooper.
Someone who has heard him boast about ripping off that crazy hippie cat.
Maybe they even have a copy of that cassette, or one of Robert boasting.
So consider that all of the nasty assholes I've run into in the last 2 years, all of the people trying to bring me down, losing my place, people tracking me, gangsters actually trying to drug and kill me, all of this started AFTER I started working for Stargate. As soon as they had my address, robert had people targeting me to mess me up.
Think about it. I may never be able to prove he stole some ideas from me, but he doesn't want to take the chance, he's made a couple million off of even a couple of the ideas he snarfed from me sitting at Turk's, I'm a loose end, he has connections through the entertainment industry to gangsters. He tried to get me discredited, f'd up, and possibly even killed.
I can't prove it at all, but I've been a target for assholes since I gave my original address to my SA employers. Don't believe me, I really don't give a shit.
But when I disappear of get sick and die, keep in mind, I'm healthy right now.
Other than a hernia, a f'd knee, I have had recent xrays and I have no cancers in my chest or abdomen. I state right now that someone in the next year is probably going to try and kill me in a staged "mugging" or I'll be poisoned somehow. If you trace it all back, like anyone would care, it's going to point to R. Cooper. Call me paranoid, it doesn't mean I'm not right about being a loose end some rich fuck wants to tie up.
Would you set some gangster assholes after someone if that person could cause you to lose more than $500k? Seriously, you just gotta shut them up and you'll have tons of cash for life?
I wondered a lot why they hired me at SA. Why people said wierd things during my time there like "this is the guy!" "This is him?" lot's of odd looks. Like something wierd was going on behind the scenes. Questions out of the blue about what I'd do if something I wrote was stolen. I wondered about it a lot, I've been doing Info Tech for the last 10 years, why hire me instead of a film school brat. It was tweaking me the whole time I was there. As soon as they had my address for administration, the shit started happening in my life. The house I was renting rooms out to people in suddenly filled with gangsters and whores. Tagged for removal.
Maybe my punker friend will realize that she witnessed the ripoff sitting there at Turks that day, and that might be why she's having some hard times too. Another loose end.
I'll never be able to prove it unless someone else speaks up
All those people on the crew, RC had to boast to someone.
Consider, if the lighting guy works all day on a scene, and the props person spent a week on the set, is it cool to send them home with no money?? How about credit? If someone works on a show, in a gig where they are supposed to get credit, does everyone just laugh and say "oh well" if they get their credit ripped off? You there, Ms. Coordinator, would you laugh off the removal of your credit? Or your salary?
I can write, that's all I can do I guess, short of amassing an arsenal.
and I write a lot of satire and science fiction
so get prepared this coming year
for the online novella
"Space Tunnel to Asslandia"
You'll laugh so hard you piss yourself
I guarantee it....
The You Tube version will be even better, when I can get something faster than a 486 to work on. I'm an animator/artist/writer so maybe I'll make something funny enough that every SA fan will want a copy sitting beside their box set.
I'll make the RC character a bit like Kenny, dying 10 times per episode in some disgusting way, only to be revived for his next unpleasant death.
5.
Outed by a Sharpie Pen
I was at Atlantis less than 2 weeks when this humongous fat bitch named Allison
(about 350-400 lbs of fat bitch I'd say, and I don't normally give fat people a hard time, but that's fucking obese)
She comes up and offers me some highliters.
I'm a pro at what I do, technical stuff.
I needed bright colors.
So I chose yellow, bright green, and PINK.
OMG I chose a pink pen.
"Oh, so you're one of those..." she intones, in front of the guy who hired me.
It's hard not to get a bit red faced when someone who is clearly a hetero fag hater outs you.
I did my best to let it slide.
But the back story is:
I'm bisexual and have an Intersex anatomy.
Let's clarify:
on the Kinsey sexuality scale
I would be a 1 or 2
anyway, I did my best to let it slide.
But that was the beginning of constant harassment by this cow.
5 fucking months of it.
Backstabbing gossip,
the wonderfully childish sounds of lisping speech every time I'd walk by a group
culminating in the "cheese incident"
where about $50 worth of cheeses went missing from the fridge
and it was pinned on me by The Cow.
Oddly enough, I'm severely lactose intolerant, so only one pack of that cheese would even be edible to me, and more than 2 slices in a day would give me the most severe heartburn you could imagine.
Details like that don't really matter though, not in "high school".
I mean work.
For 5 months I hid out and did my work as efficiently as possible.
Avoided the kitchen at lunch to reduce opportunities for so and so to slag me for whatever the infraction of the day would be.
Smoked twice as much as usual,
because it kind of stresses me out to be in an environment where I'm a target for bored children and their finger pointing games.
Fucks with your ontological security
After 5 months of ever increasing harassment, someone else in my department (vfx) finally stepped in.
So for the last 4 months of work I had peace.
And she wasn't there at the start of Season 5 when I was rehired.
It's not like you can really do anything about stuff like that.
You just have to put up with it.
There's no number to call.
No one's going to slap her on the fingers for it.
Complaining just gets you fired, not matter how much the attacks hurt your feelings.
Fucking screaming monkeys flinging their own shit at each other.
My, how we've grown.
So much for the efficacy of evolution.
Sometimes I wish it was a more primitive time, when you could just split your oppressor's head in two with an axe and pay their family the blood price.
6.
Headbanger Karaoke Shitslinging
So my final months of Season 4 were peaceful and productive, and I gradually felt like less of an outsider. Less I say. It wasn't like I was suddenly accepted.
Around Christmas time the people in Post where my job was (a vfx "I/O" in Post) went out for karaoke.
It stank like a setup.
I'm over 40. I know the feel of a set up. Inwardly I cringed at the thought of being subjected to cruel renditions of Boy George or George Michaels.
But I knew I had some chance to shine and fight back the playschool taunting.
I started in music as a singer. In fact I started in choir with a 4 octave range, and then went in to rock.
So what kind of knives would I be stabbed with?
Ahhhhh.
It was glam metal.
You see, I had grown my rocker hair back while working at Stargate Atlantis.
So, after listening to awful renditions of White Tiger(actual, Ryan did pretty good with the White Tiger), Poisoned, Crue, Warrant, etc. and every other spandex jerk off schlock that I hated throughout my teens, it was my turn.
When I went into rock, as I mentioned before, Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, Roger Waters, etc. were where I started.
So I sang "Lithium"
"- Light my candles in a daze, cause I found god, yeah yeah.....!"
I could practically see their hair blowing back.
because I'm actually pretty good.
So each round I had to counter less and less cheese with something rocking and fucking good, until it finally became what it should be, a bunch of drunk people singing together and having fun.
Setups like that are just a symptom of an underlying bitchfest, that creepy shitflinging crap that anyone who is outside of the norm is used to.
9 months of getting the job done and being professional and efficient doesn't matter.
Monkeys need targets for their shit.
If they throw their shit at someone else, then the other monkey won't see that they've shit.
I really did like working there a lot. The shit flinging and lisping behind the back crap is standard practice in the workplace in Canada.
You just get used to working and living while smothered in shit.
And try not to let it stick to you too much when you go home.
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