During my final months of film school I got the opportunity to intern for Scott Ross, Chairman and CEO of Digital Domain. I was surprised about his frankness when discussing the present and the future of digital filmmaking which has been his specialty since his stints at ILM. Even more surprising is his honesty in this LA Times interview in which he essentially says that its only a matter of time before all digital filmmaking is outsourced to Asia.

Ross sees the root of the problem as the movie studios’ inability to appreciate the value of the visual effects industry’s contribution. To illustrate, he hands me a list of the 20 all-time worldwide box-office champs. The top 18 are all special-effects-laden or animated films that opened without major stars in the billing. (The top five are “Titanic,” two “Lord of the Rings” pictures, one “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace.") The only films arguably reliant on old-fashioned star power are “Forrest Gump” (Tom Hanks) and “The Sixth Sense” (Bruce Willis), ranked 19 and 20.

“Studios continue to think movies are opened by stars, but times have changed,” he says.

This argument is not without precedent. A similar situation has already destroyed the animation industry in the United States. Animation is no longer done in this country and instead Korean animation shops dominate. While writing and development are still done here, the laborious processing of animating has moved abroad.

Digital technologies and networking mean that industries which previously had little threat from abroad are now open to almost anyone. The democratization of digital tools has many unforseen consequences, one of which may be your job.