It was announced today that ImageMovers Digital in Marin County will be closing after completing Mars Needs Moms, expected to be January 2011. ImageMovers Digital was built by Robert Zemekis with Disney and is best known for producing A Christmas Carol. We first heard this news from a San Francisco friend’s Facebook posting, then a Tweet and finally from a Nikki Fink story on Deadline Hollywood and one on The Wrap. (Update: post on The Animation Guild Blog states 450 people are affected.)

In the last 48 hours an amazing video has swept the net. The OK Go “This Too Shall Pass” music video – built and engineered by a creative geek group of mad scientists, art lovers, and inspired geniuses that collectively go by the name of Syyn Labs. As Adam Sadowsky, of Syyn Labs, was getting a haircut and about to go on national television as a result of the video’s enormous success, he spoke to fxguide’s Mike Seymour about the naive contraptions of sheer brilliance that make this Ok Go music video one of the most engaging viral videos of the year.

The video features a huge Rube Goldberg machine which is a deliberately over-engineered machine that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually including a chain reaction as was the case in the “This Too Shall Pass” video from Ok Go’s new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. Ok Go shot to fame for their famous ‘dancing on treadmills’ video “Here It Goes Again” on YouTube

Watch “This Too Shall Pass” here in high res

Click through for more about the Rube Goldberg machine and about the band playing a rare acoustic set.

The internet has been particularly active this week with visual effects news. Here is a list of links that we found interesting, if we missed any please add to comments and if we find more this week we’ll add them here.

Visual Effects related links:
Wall Street Journal: Working as a Visual Effects Artist

Shoot: AICE Extends Membership to Design, Motion Graphics and Visual Effects Companies

Postworld: SAG and AFTRA: Together Again

LA TImes: ‘Wonderland’ was a career challenge for EFX wizard Ken Ralston

WSJ: Being James Cameron

Labor related:
A real life story about freelancing: Epilogue Ei8ht: The True Story of a Freelance Artist

fxdad.org: Post about companies using Employers of Record also one titled Organizing Your Labor

The Animation Guild Blog: Organize MBO?

UPDATE- added since original post:
Dazpix: What you need to know when considering going Freelance and Setting Up on your own in Motion Graphics

Thinking Animation Blog: Protecting Yourself as a Freelancer

Pro Video Coalition: Is a Visual Effects Guild to Materialize this Decade?

We know many of you are waiting for the 5D MkII update to 24 P.
The date is Mid-March and the features will include:

The new firmware incorporates the following updates and benefits:

1) Frame rate now to include 24fps (cinema) and 25fps (PAL broadcast). Shoots a variety of frame rates, overcomes the need for compression/retiming

2) Movie shooting in shutter-priority AE (Tv) and aperture-priority AE (Av) modes. This allows users have greater creative control over the exposure and depth-of-field

3) Manual adjustment of sound recording levels (64 levels). This provides much greater creative control with the camera’s sound recording

4) Sampling frequency changed (from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz). Makes video and audio synchronisation easier

5) Histogram display for shooting movies in manual exposure

6) Fixes some bugs such as communication between the camera and the attached lens is sometimes interrupted after manual sensor cleaning

* source Canon.

The 8th Annual VES Awards were held tonight, Sunday, February 28th at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.

James Cameron was honored with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award and Ed Catmull with the George Melies Award for Pioneering. Avatar took a lot of awards with District 9 besting it in one category.

The awards will televised by the Reelz Channel (DirecTV channel 238, Dish 299 and other Cable Systems) Friday March 5th at 10pm Pacific and March 6th at 7pm Pacific.

Full list of winners follows along with a link to some photos…

Congratulations to Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, Andrew R. Jones who took home the BAFTA for Special Visual Effects for Avatar. The Orange British Academy Film Awards rewards the best work of any nationality seen on British cinema screens during the preceding year. The awards took place on February 21, 2010 at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. Here is an interview with the visual effects winners from the BAFTA site.

The VES Awards are next weekend, February 28th, and the Oscars are March 7th.

The folks at Massive Software announced today that version 4.0 of Massive is now shipping. The release contains new Terrain Nodes, V-Ray rendering, new Stadium placement tools, and other improvements.

We’ll have the new release available soon on the VPN over at our sister training site fxphd.com.

For the full press release from Massive, click through….

There has been a lot of activity since our podcast about the Open Letter to James Cameron and our interview with Steven Hulett from The Animation Guild. In the interview with Lee Stranahan about the Open Letter he proposed a VFX Town Hall meeting, a webinar style event to discuss the issue of VFX Fairness. Lee has been hard at work on this and has already confirmed participants: Digital Domain Founder Scott Ross, Visual Effects Society Chair Jeffrey A. Okun, Warner Brothers VP of Effects & Animation Chris deFaria, The Animation Guild’s Steve Hulett and VFX Artist Dave Rand. Start thinking of your questions and we’ll let you know the details when we know more.

Steven Hulett has a new post at The Animation Guild Blog about forming a Visual Effects Guild and mentions a new brand new blog to discuss the formation of such a guild – www.fxdag.org. This blog launched yesterday, so the forums have not had a lot of activity yet, but there is a poll: Is this a good idea? and a list titled: What labor concerns do you have?.

A couple other writers have been doing great work in this area. Over at AWN Richard Kerrigan has written several articles we would recommend. At Motionographer check out Questioning the Freelance Dilemma by Bran Dougherty-Johnson, and make sure you check out the comments.

UPDATES 02/18:
The New York Times has an article “U.S. Cracks Down on ‘Contractors’ as a Tax Dodge”
Inc. is covering also: Obama Cracks Down on Use of Contractors
A post on the Animation Guild blog about the NT Times article has lit up with comments.

Red Centre 56 podcast out. This is our biggest show ever, with Red and Canon news, Jeff’s Heusser reports from LA on the February Red Day. And Shane Hurlbut ASC (Terminator Salvation DOP ) kicks down the door of the Red Room.

Click the more button below for a portfolio of images from Shane Hurlbut, and in itunes or on our podcast page you can download each week a comprehensive set of show notes pdf.

Visit the red centre page for direct downloads and RSS feed links. To be notified automatically and have the episodes downloaded in iTunes, subscribe via this link.

A week ago Lee Stranahan wrote an article in the Huffington Post titled: Open Letter To James Cameron: Fairness For Visual Effects Artists. Lee has opened a wider dialogue for a topic we have been championing for years. We discuss what led him to write the article, the reaction, what should happen next and issue a call to action to artists worldwide to continue this discussion.

Links to the original Huffington Post piece, Lee’s blog and several forums and related articles can be found after the read more…

Visit the fxpodcast page for direct downloads and RSS feed links. To be notified automatically and have the episodes downloaded in iTunes, subscribe via this link.