Heading back to NY

Monday morning 10:30 pacific time.  Waiting at gate 46a, 

hungry for lunch but everyone still on the breakfast shift.  

Finally grabbed a lousy salad to go from Chilies.

Feeling a little guilty for  returning to the ladies empty
handed, too late for anything but the duty free shop--
better no gift than afterthoughts.

Good decision to visit the Wallings yesterday—connecting 

w/ friends in a distant city is the human thing to do.

Met some of their friends and neighbors and their kids while 

watching the Saints go marching to their victory.

The Annies: parting notes

I’m ate the age now where a little partying past 11pm involving 

a glass of wine, in a different time zone is going wallop me the 

next morning.    So I’m putting these words down at 7:30 am 

Sunday with a fair bit of slush in my head, as I couldn’t get to 

sleep until 3 or 4am.  I’m about to hit the gym to bootstrap myself 

back to functioning form, and see if Cogan is around here some-

where for breakfast.  I made an arrangement to visit the Wallings, 

who live over in Pasedina, and share some company.  Its also 

Superbowl Sunday, a much bigger show than the Annies.

Showtime

So its Saturday morning at the Intercontinental, same dank
rainy skies as yesterday.  No doubt a beneficiary of the time
shift, I feel pretty good for being up at 7 am.  Morning
agenda will be the gym after I finish writing this, then track
down Nick Cogan for some breakfast in the restaurant down-
stairs.   The hotel has free car service to locations within a mile
and a half, so at some point I'll have them take me to a CVS
for sundries (I've been fixated on getting hair gel on the off
chance it will make me look ten years younger).

Saturday morning view

Note regarding the tux: it was in fact, waiting for me here when I
arrived.  To have made arrangements in New York, five days
ago, for a tux (with my measurements) to appear in a hotel in
Culver City, and have it actually be there on time,  with no
mistakes in the logistical chain is, well, its a feeling of relief,
and maybe, power.  Until remembering its not power but
being fleeced for 125 bucks rental at a menswear chain plus
25 dollar messenger fee to the hotel.  Still, the all the links
worked.

Speaking of links, the shirt cuffs are turning out to not be visible
under the jacket sleeves.  Fleeced AND wearing a prom clown suit.

with co-director Nick Cogan

UCLA campus

Annie Award impressions.   

William Shatner took a bemused, ironic  air as host and provided 

plenty of impromptu moments of humor, most stemming from a 

small moment when he mispronounced John Leguzamo’s name 

when introducing him as a presenter.  Leguzamo did not let 

this go without getting back at Shatner, saying the mistake 

was understandable, nafter all “it was only my given name.”  After 

this Shatner (and even other presenters) were off to the races for the 

rest of the evening, referring back to this.  Shatner tried to be 

smarmily ingraciating, kissing up to Leguzamo about what a talented 

actor he was, why get bothered by a little mispronounciation.

Shattner kept the crowed amused with other remarks.  When the 

well know Indian actor Deep Roy, Who played the lead Oompa 

Loompa in Willy Wonka finished hosting the tribute to Tim Burton, 

Shartner quipped, “You know Deep Roy—well I’m Shallow Bill.”

The smarmily ingratiating host.

Another funny running gag concerned Shatner taking over hosting 

duties from long-time Host Jeff Kinney (the voice of SpongeBob).  

They showed a video of Shatner and Kinney doing a comically 

slow and stiff fight scene shot in some scrub desert locale, 

over dubbed with the audio from the well-known Star Trek 

episode where Kirk fights a lumbering bipedal lizard called 

a Gorn.  Later, there was another brilliant video created for the 

show which had Spongebob and Patrick trying to escape to the 

surface in a rocket, with Sharter doing the voice of Spongebob—

no falsetto or anything, just Shatner.  Funny stuff, only to be 

topped by the inevitable answer to this clip, a re-dubbing of an old

Star Trek show with Jeff Kinney’s Spongebob voice replacing 

Shatners.  It was appreciated that they had found a clip which has 

Kirk emit a chuckle, which of course came out instead as the 

Spongebob laugh.

Very interesting to see all the big names in the field take 

the stage, including Pete Docter, Eric Goldberg, Don Hahn, 

a slightly drunk June Foray soldiering on through her remarks 

(and mispronouncing her own name at one point, which 

would have a genius comedy moment, given the evening, had 

it been intentional),  a spookily nervous Bill Reeve, rambling 

on for five minutes as he recounted his life odyssey in computer 

graphics in minutia,  ignoring the producer’s music cues to
wind it up several times.
  

Jeffery Katzenburg took the stage to receive  the final of 

three Windsor McCay awards.   It was somewhat of a relief to 

see that Katzenberg and other top dogs were not above

Reading off of paper or prompter as they gave their speeches.   

For a different audience, maybe the Oscars,  perhaps he 

would have made the effort to appear extemporaneous,

But thats just the cynicism talking again.

Disappointment in all three flavors for Blue Sky—no Powell, 

no Leguzamo, and most self-interestedly, no Nutty Trade.  

Two random observeations.   When they show clips from 

nominated productions, there is almost always healthy 

applause, or at worstt a smattering.  NOTHING, crickets, for 

Nutty Trade.   Until I alone clapped loudly to pathetically fill

the void.   The other thing is that I had resigned myself to 

stay in the audience, bereft of a moment of glory on the 

stage should we have won, because of some rules sent

out by Asifa requesting just one person go up to represent 

for production awards.   Turns out everyone walked all over 

those rules, as every production award saw two, three or more 

people take the stage.  My blind faith in authority would have
foolishly trumped my need for vainglory.   The advice 

to anyone else who thinks they should be up on that stage is, get 

up there and say at least “thank you”, even if somebody else owns 

the main speech.

All in all, Nick had the most riding on a win, and seeing him in 

the hotel gym at 7:30 in the morning before the show only 

underscored for me he wanted to be ready for his moment.   

I couldn’t tell how disappointed he felt afterward.  They afterparty 

at Royce hall on the UCLA campus was insufferably crowded, 

and I huddled with Nick and Gail Harrison, the FOX VP of marketing

only for a short while.   Then Nick was off with his pal Pete, while 

Gail dropped me off back to the hotel, saving me the trouble of a 

cab, and showing me a little of the Beverly Hills and BelAire 

neighborhoods we passed. 

Off to LA for the Annie Awards

Car arrived prompltly at 930.   Driver friendly, professional 

demeanor.  Gregarious, and we banetered for much of the 

hour drive to JFK.  He’s originally from Jamaica,  has a wife 

and 27 yo kid in the Navy down in SC. --proud of him.  Had 

him when he was pretty much a kid himself.  “He was more 

like my little brother.”  The son is buying a condo for 160, and 

the old man is putting in 12,000 for the down payment.  Got 

talking about pets, cause he once drove a FOX animation creative 

to the airport with his six cats.   The dude loved his cats.   

“Takes all types to make the world go around.  In Jamaica, the 

dogs live outside the house.   They come to the door and look 

around, but they know their boundaries.”

He had other stories about driving folks from Bluesky around, 

most memorably the guy he picked up at his house in Mahopac, 

“Big guy,” who’s odor forced him to open the windows.  “I think 

he was a programming genius or an editor.  Didn’t dress well, wore

dirty jeans.”  You’d think somebody would tell him.  I asked hold 

old the guy was and the driver guesses middle age, “mid-thirties.”  

I really have no clue (nor want to find out), other than more than 

few collegues are from that area northern Westchester.   At one 

point I wonder whether this guy angling for a tip with the bonhomie, 

but I know I’m too much of a knee-jerk cynic when it comes to 

parsing human motives, so I settle for him just being a good guy.

Because of this, I feel I should offer thr gratuity when we pull up 

to the curb at the American terminal (almost spooky lack of traffic 

at 10am), and this leads to the obligatory social faux pax moment.   

Knowing n the past I’ve been informed not to tip the driver as 

gratuity has been pre-paid, I figure ten bucks would be a reasonable 

over-tip if this guy has in fact been pre paid (I have no clue what the 

deal is this time).  So, bags offloaded I hold out a twenty and say 

“Great ride, man” and ask for ten back.  Well, he can’t find a ten in 

his wallet, so I stand there awkwardly for a beat thinking “Don’t tip 

him a twenty, no way, its too much!”  The guy ends the impasse 

with “don’t worry, next time boss”.   Striding off into the terminal, 

I wonder when the next WTF moment that I am responsible for

will occur.

For now, I’m 38,000 feet over the mid section of the country, 

crammed in next to the mid-deck gally on a 767.   My ass hurts.

Then we're descending somewhere over the Nevada desert, ground
invisible under a rolling meringue landscape of cloud tops.
Soon enough, its time to plunge into the meringue and make
a wide, slow turn to land from the east, which air traffic control in
the wet and windy LA basin has deemed necessary.

To be banking and maneuvering through solid clouds for
anything longer than a few seconds has always made me un-
comfortable.  For my primitive id, there be monsters, mountains,
and other passenger jets here in this gray nothingness.  So I
examine each moment that passes during the fifteen minute descent
f0r some sense of bearing and relationship to the ground.

Then, from below, the gray void darkens and dissolves and there
is the storm dark ocean dotted with white caps.  So, a landing
from the east it is.

The limo driver who picks me up from LAX looks a bit like the
actor Luke Wilson, doing nothing to dispel the old saw that everyone's
an actor or writer out here, biding their time. The limo is beyond
clean,  it appears to gleam with cleanliness on a molecular level.
So the limo patter starts with observations about the differences
in appearance between New York and LA Towncars. Its ap-
parent to me during this trip, and again a week later in Miami,
that it really is more about a certain visual here--nobody wants
to experience old and ugly.   Back east, the grimy and grim
aspects of things are more taken for granted, maybe simply
because the weather gets bad and the bricks and mortar are
much older and crumbling and nobody can afford to keep
it all clean.

The limo patter--yes, I get the guy's story in broad strokes,
of growing up in the snows of Minnesota spinning the Jeep
around in the local ice rink for chuckles, the year in Sydney with
his girlfriend, and the philosophy the crept up on him from time
spent in other cultures that you should work to provide only
what you need--the simple daily joy of life in many places
can be had without spending much at all.

Soon he'll be heading to Bolivia to spend time with a girl from
La Paz--a lawyer for the government.  He says he may try
again to convince her to bring her skills and education to the
States, but the subtext of everything he's been sharing makes
me wonder if he knows that maybe she's getting too old for the
career upheaval that such a displacement would demand.  

What unfolds when even scratching the surface of people's lives.

The limo's at the hotel.

The dank Culver City vista.

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.