New Orleans

Nerds

I think R&D and production engineering got some ideas and
inspiration and talked to some promising candidates.  I know Hugo
collected over 110 business cards.   Once, I watched Hugo sort of
interview a guy on the spot.  The guy was going on about voxelizing
meshes and whatnot and Hugo said, "Let me test you, give me one
Open GL call."  It seemed to really trip the guy up for a moment,
he could not give an answer that satisfied Hugo.

I do like to nerd out as much as my limited technical background
allows. ILM amped up their rigid body sim to calculate 3 million
bodies for Transformers 2.   The previous record was 11,000 for
Indy.  Hilmar Koch, and old friend from the early Blue Sky years,
was on the panel for Star Trek.  He supervised the black hole effects.

The Maya booth has a presentation from Sony about the cloth system
they use for "Cloudy".  They could generate maps which highlighted
the worst pinching areas.  It looked like they could automatically
open up those areas, but I think this can take something away from
the pose.

There was also a lot of talk about using the GPU to speed things up.
At the Electronic Theater, someone showed a real time demo of
3000 high res characters in a highly detailed environment, reacting
to changes on the fly.  They reduced some of the load with LOD
distance algorithms.

Rockstars

No.

There was Tom, the older AM grad, who used to be an
art director.

The girl from SCAD who still had a year to go.

Maybe 70% of the people who came up to the booth
were looking for an animator position. Many of that
group wanted to show their reels on their iPhones or
laptops. Nine-nine percent of these impromptu
screenings would not have made even the first cut
here at the studio. It was hard to walk the line of
constructive criticism as they were hanging off of
every word--and article and preposition--that
came out of my mouth

Brand

I realized part of why we're at Siggraph is just to be good
ambassadors for our own Bluesky brand, and our place
in the industry. Various schools want to build their
animation programs, and they want to get some credibility
by having a relationship with Bluesky. Sometimes it was
"can you come to our school on career/recruiting days."
Sometimes they would just want to know what to tell their
students what we're looking for on a demo reel.

Outsourcing

Several start-up studios in other countries wanted to talk to us about
outsourcing. I talked for quite a while with a rep for a studio in China
that employs 1500 animators. They are starting to get game work
sent to them, but their goal is for a slice of the feature animation
market. The rep showed me some tests, much of which were
attempts to recreate shots from high end vfx shows.

They did their version of Gollum, which looked kind of like WETA's
Gollum with about 40% of the appeal and animation quaility.
The guys were basically asking me "How do we get better?" I said they
have to spend money on american salaries and bring over seasoned
animators to supervise (not me).

Their top animators make 1200.00 a month. When they do get good
they will start taking jobs away from here.  The only thing preventing
this remorseless transfer of industry that's historically befallen other
manufacturing sectors is that animating is part algorithm and part
artform.    Chinese studios, like Japan in the 50s and 60s, may be
able to reverse engineer the algorithm but the art is an ineffable
thing that bubbles up in the culture.   Rather than copy, they will
have see if they can draw from within themselves and refine it and
see if it can be accepted in the global movie market.


I also spoke with two young Columbian animators who are starting an
Animation school in Medellin and also Sao Paolo, Brasil. They wanted
to buy me a coffee and sit me down for an hour to learn about the
production pipeline of an animated feature, and use this to structure
their production courses. They seemed to have very ambitious plans
as to how much of a film would get produced by 15 students in a
semester, and I think I did nothing but confuse them when
attempting to break down the just part of the pipeline. I'm sure
they'll figure out the best way to structure things for
their purposes.

Weds

Weds afternoon. Looking down Chartres St. Temps were in the 90s all week.

Tuesday

best meal ever--the Big Easy is starting to deliver on the culinary
front. At the Bluesky booth I asked Brien Hindeman if he'd heard
of any parties happening tonight, and he didn't know of any but
mentioned he might be Nola, which was on the list of places his
dad (from Houston) emailed him were worth checking out. Long
story short, I head over on my own later, and the maitre asks if I'd
be willng to sit at the chef's bar ("best seat in the house"). Ok, a
little out of my comfort zone, but I am consciously trying to push
through the anxiety.

July 3

It is our standard departure scenario.

Though the separation anxiety is strong, we do finally accept we
cannot take our house with us when we travel.   If it only had wheels
or wings.  But alas, it is not very aerodynamic, and made of fieldstone.

Yesterday, my first day of vacation, we started leaving. Thanks to 36
hours of prep and packing, we are now pulling away from the house
a little past 12pm.

The weather is going to be lousy for the 4th weekend, as it has been
for the entire summer so far. We head up through Connecticut on I84
and seem to be heading into storms at every turn, but then after a
few minutes, the threatening skies are sliding to the side of us. So
the entire trip goes--towering clouds all around, but only a few
occasional drops on the windshield.



At one point a plane shadow slashed precisely across the car.

Halfway through Massachusetts a dark Nissan SUV sidles up next
to us and its Beth, Paul and KP, smiling and waving. They left
Connecticut even later that we left New York ("two vehicles
traveling at different speeds from different starting points...").

We watch them pull ahead purposefully. They have a lake house
to get up and running.

Nerves have my stomach always playing tricks on me, and one
consequence is I drink a lot of water, and therefor, being 46, fairly
frequently and urgently need to find a rest stop. No sooner do I say
to Leslie, "thank god the Vermont Welcome Center is 5 minutes
away" than the flow of traffic grinds to a halt, and signs announcing
road work and single lane ahead appear in the distance.

The travel gods are having fun.

Its at the VWC we catch up to Beth and family. We chase KP
around for half an hour or so and relax to varying degrees
(I don't know how Beth does it--the little guy is like a nuclear
powered Energizer Bunny). The sun is hot. It's nice to see
Annabelle enjoy being the big cousin--she's really great with
all her younger relatives.






We stop again somewhere below White River Junction, and
Annabelle runs around barefoot in the grass. We have a race,
and my knee allows me to keep pace, which seems almost a miracle.




We pull into the Hampton Inn in Littleton around 8pm. A poster board
sign in the lobby proclaims Obama stayed here during the 2008 campaign.

"Maybe we'll have the Presidential suite!" muses Annabelle.

Downtown Littleton offers something of a food and arts scene
so we check out Chang Thai Cafe for a late dinner. Travel days
always do a number on my stomach and head, so I don't know
why I went with spicy Thai food. Annabelle, the finicky eater,
deemed the chicken satay and rice acceptable. The owners and
staff were really hospitable and friendly, and perhaps being as
we were the only customers at this hour, they let Annabelle play
with a giant stuffed elephant and have full run of the place. We
all spent time oogling baby Taylor who was holding court in his
playpen by the cash register, his grandma watching over him.

Back at hotel, we promised Annabelle could swim before she
went to bed, so she was in and out of the pool and hot tub until
about 11pm. I don't know how kids can swim around in an
unheated pool then plunge into a hotub for a second before
jumping right back in the pool.

Shea Lilly and Annabelle

Also, the pool room was full of families (were the accents Russian?) at this late hour, and Annabelle sought out another girl who looked close to her age to talk with. They would interact a bit then seemed fine to go back to their own agendas.

The next morning (the 4th) I was paying the full price for the Thai meal, as Annabelle and I went downstairs right at the end of breakfast. In the small area, almost a crush of people, many from the pool last night, now vying for dwindling breakfast resources. Feeling woozy, I try to help Annabelle find something to eat after it becomes apparent pancakes are not on the minimal menu. Fortunately, she's ok with the last packet of maple oatmeal I find, in addition to toast and cheerios. Initially there didn't seem to be any open seating available, but I kept eyeing a small table that had a bagel and piece of bread sitting on it. After a few minutes passed the unclaimed food seemed less and less likely to be some kind of place holder, and I swooped in.

Back to the pool. Annie swimming as the pool cleaning guy goes about his duties.

Lunch at a place called 99. Waitress seems a bit frosty.