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.