VFXwages.com news

Our First Official Press Release

Our first official press release went out today to the newswire, to entertainment and computer trades journals across the nation and around the world. It'll probably take some time to seep into the mindset of people, but we're really official, and we're here for good.

Here's the press release in its entirety. If you want to see it in the wild, hit up Google and search for "Industry Wages" under the news section!

SANTA MONICA, Calif., March 30, 2009 — For all those job-hunters in creative fields who need a strategic edge in the salary negotiation process - or who simply could benefit from the motivation salary knowledge can provide, Industry Wages Inc. has delivered a powerful new tool. The company has launched the website VFXWages.com (http://www.vfxwages.com) as a free way for these professionals and students to determine the latest information on salaries and hourly wages in their market. Currently VFXWages.com provides pay information for individuals in the visual effects industry, particularly film and television visual effects, gaming, motion graphics, and animation.

“We’ve created a necessary tool for the pursuit of salary equality in this ever-changing job environment,” says Aruna Inversin, president of Industry Wages Incorporated and founder of VFXWages.com. “In creating VFXWages.com, we strive to give the community a streamlined way to identify an appropriate wage to expect or ask for in salary negotiations.”

VFXWages.com is a global tool that will help job-seekers see how they rate among other artists with similar skills and experiences in a particular location. Using the special Wages system, users can graphically compare wages and salaries around the world by typing in a city, state or zip code. Registrants can also obtain information about employment based on job title, company, start date and length of time the position will last.

“We use the anonymity of the web with the power of a community to give you the information you need,” says Inversin. “This tool allows you to compare yourself to others in your field around the world.”

The database of wages is normalized to a 260-day year or 40-hour workweek, based on the pay options available for that job. VFXWages.com uses this method because it is the most common way to aggregate wage information among the different methods that film and television studios use to pay their artists.

There are three different types of accounts for users. Professional and freelancer accounts feature jobs with salary or hourly paid wages for those particular individuals. Student accounts are perfect for those currently attending any post-secondary schools, or have recently graduated and are looking for work. Company accounts are for recruiters and managers or company owners that wish to take advantage of VFXWages.com’s special services to search for and recruit talent.

VFXWages.com is cross-browser and cross-platform compatible. Industry Wages Inc. strives to maintain and deliver a high-quality product; the company spent several months privately testing the VFXWages.com site in beta to make sure the website would guarantee customer satisfaction. Clients can find out about recent upgrades and the latest happenings on the “Latest News” section of the website.

Public!

After a long and arduous first quarter, we've put the final touches on for our public beta. Lots of little fixes and tweaks from our private beta period, which I hope will help you get the rate that you deserve. There are a lot of milestones that we are still aiming to hit for our next release, hopefully within the next three months, so keep those suggestions coming!

We had some brief downtime last night as we migrated the rest of our data from a lower tier service to a grid hosted service, which should (will!) keep the site up, regardless of the number of users. This week I'll be prepping an official press release that will go out on the news wire. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, please contact us using the links at the bottom of the page.

New Items!

Well, our overnight upgrade seems to be successful! Check out some of the new items we have around and tell us what you think! We still have some items to hit before we go public. After all, it's only two of us at the moment in our spare time trying to make this happen.

Here's a list of improvements we've made so far.

Simplified menu bar and simple login/logout.
Simple index page giving you quickly what you might need.
New account menu items
Invites! Invite a friend or coworker to join. Currently one email at a time, but you have ten invites to use!
Easier access to the news RSS feed
Improved categorizing of wages and benefits

One of things that we hoped we would be able to do is simplify the choosing of regions. Unfortunately it's a little stickier than we expected, so we're working out the kinks. We're also slowly upgrading our graphs with the latest information that you put in, so on one day if there isn't a graph, be sure and check back again. We hope that the invite system will allow you to invite coworkers in your profession, so this should theoretically make it easier for a set job title to come up with a graph.

Downtime & Upgrades

We've experienced some unfortunate downtime for the past twenty hours, which does not involve our site upgrade today. Hopefully the worst is behind us, and I don't foresee future outages at this time. We will be transitioning to better equipped services in the near future, and downtime should be kept at a minimum.

Sometime today we'll be updating the databases and pages here. This will most likely occur in the evening, so if we time out again, that's the reason why. We've worked quite a bit on the next iteration, but some of requests we've fielded will have to wait until our public release. We will have more time during the holidays to sit down and tailor our release schedule for you. Once we have a new release, I'll most more news on how to get the most out of this site.

Over 400

As of this moment, we have over 400 members, with about 100 wage data points, which will increase based on your input. We hope to roll out an incremental update to the site before the Thanksgiving weekend, so keep visiting occasionally! Not too bad for only starting 16 days ago, with word of mouth and free advertising. Once January rolls around, expect a lot more traffic to come, and a lot more accurate information!

Along with that accurate information comes some misleading data entries, which we will have to weed out manually, but it's not a big deal just yet. It will be automated soon enough, and our algorithms for calculating what falls outside of acceptable range are fairly good.

In order to provide everyone with the right information, I urge you to not add positions that are similar to the ones already listed, titles such as junior artist or senior artist are redundant. You are still an artist. This is reflected in the years of experience you have, not in your title. In addition, if you have had multiple jobs, for example, from a matchmover to becoming a lighter, the years of experience is only for the amount of time that you were in that profession. If you were a matchmover for two years, then became a lighter for another two, while you have been in the business for four, your experience in lighting is still only two, so put that down. You can also put down the wage for those two years of matchmoving.

Some of you have been inquiring about items such as benefits, stock options, 401k, etc, and the ability to compare those to others. That is a priority, and I hope that we'll be able to show you the results in our next incremental update coming in a week or so.

Updating Wages

We're still waiting for more wage data! If you feel uncomfortable putting a wage in for your current job title and occupation, feel free to put in the amount from the last place you worked, along with the time frame and your experience level at that time. We'll be able to get the graphs rolled out sooner to you!

No-Replies and RSS.

A couple of users (well, maybe more than a couple) have notified me that the registration and beta emails were coming from no-reply, which often gets trashed automatically at some companies and are ignored my many. So we've changed it to come from registration@ instead! Keep an eye out. Beta keys are handed out manually, we don't have an automated system for that, but registration is handled via the machine.

We've also set up an RSS feed for our latest news here, so be sure to right click and copy this link to add it to your RSS feeder of choice!

More Details

I've added one more industry, Motion Graphics, for motion graphics professionals, and I've also added a new company, called Freelance! It's in the world region at the moment, so you won't be able to select a dropdown to narrow the freelance wages just yet. If you're hesistant about putting an actual company in (like if you're the only one at your company with that job title), this may be the best choice for you at the moment.

In addition, I've posted a general invite to all VFXTalk members, and will possibly open it up to CGTalk members as well. We're currently evaluating number of users versus wages as well, to see when we can actually start the automatic compilation of the data in graphs. We need a lot more data, so ask your peers to provide anonymous wages!

Some Answered Questions.

There are a couple questions that I've been getting that I'd like to clear up.

The WAGES tab at the top will bring you to a no data chart, by default, of the wages of your occupation.. If you try to select a company or a region, you will get a failed popup, simply because the dataset has not been created. Currently we manually tabulate the lows, medians and highs, and because there is a limited number of users over a variety of professions, we chose not to display it just yet.. Over the next week, if we can get over 250 beta users (we're halfway there!) to submit wages, we'll be able to at least render most of the graphs!

Some items which we are aware of that are in the process of fixing include:

Contact Form doesn't contact us.
Zip Codes/Postal Codes don't allow for six to eight digits
VFXWages header doesn't link back to homepage
Various intuitive UI bits need to be added

We're open for business!

Welcome Beta testers! We're a couple days behind, but if you're reading this, it means that you are now a private beta tester for VFXWages.. We have about 60 plus people at the moment, and it will only grow based on your support. You may have noticed that several things here are static and unchanged. Those include our Wage Graphs, Job Listings, and Wage Table on the home page. The Wage Table on the homepage is a realtime listing of all wages that we get. At the moment it's a static table, so don't be alarmed (or be assured!) that your wage will not pop up there. That Wage Table will be static until January 1st, 2009, when we open registration to everyone. If you'd like to recommend a peer our service, feel free to point them to the homepage to get a beta invite. We're pretty much approving everyone that's a professional user.

At the moment we do have company and student user accounts, but they are still undergoing bug testing. They work, but we're not satisfied just yet.

On to the good stuff! What are we about? VFXWages is a small outfit based in Santa Monica. If you'd like to contact us, send an email to bothofus@vfxwages.com with your suggestions or improvements, or via snail mail at VFXWages, PO Box 872, Santa Monica, CA 90406. We are currently in the midst of a legal formation of a corporation in California, hence the private beta until January.

The bar at the top consists of HOME, WAGE, JOB, CONTACT, MY ACCOUNT, and LOGOUT. LOGOUT is what you'd expect. HOME is our homepage, with the latest wage table and latest news, and a bit of what we have to offer our users. WAGE is the big deal, and we have a lot planned for this page. At the moment, you may encounter a No Data graph, as we don't have enough people! These graphs are usually created on the fly, but since we have a limited number of beta users, we urge you to ask your peers to join! JOB is another big thing for us. Basically, we use your zip code to tailor jobs to your area! At the moment, there are no jobs, because we have no companies yet. We will have someone to parse through the lists at some of the other job sites until we can get recruiters here and submitting. In the future you will be able to put in any zip code or country you'd like, to get jobs in that area, in case you decide on moving. As well, since we have the data for wages, you'll be able to make an informed decision on if it's even worth it! MY ACCOUNT is where you control your contact information, wage and salary data, and job title and occupation. Beta users have the ability to add companies and job titles, in case we don't have it listed. Please double check the list of current job titles to make sure that it's not listed before you make a new entry. We will occasionally parse this list. It is not about your title, it's about what you do, so please read the description to make sure that it is correct for what you do. Adding, editing, and viewing wages are straightfoward. In the future (possibly before we go public), the timeframe, or timestamp, of a wage will allow you to compare yourself to others in your line of work and if you are keeping up with them in terms of salary and wage, and if you're even keeping up with inflation!

I hope that helps you get started with our site! Please read the Terms of Use as well, and again, send us an email should you encounter something strange!