The RMCAD Students Siggraph Adventure

Hey all, Jonathan did a long write up about everything he did at Siggraph.  Cut and past this link to head over to his blog and read it.  Very cool and detailed!

 www.jmgrimm.com

 Scroll down a bit and enjoy!

We all arrived back home safe and sound early Saturday morning. (It was an even longer drive back home)

 This was a great trip and I wanted to again thank Dan, Jenny, Sue and VA for all of their help on getting funds and preparing us for this experience.  The four of us are excited to share everything we learned and saw with the rest of Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

As the week goes on I will start pulling together all the pics we took and post as many as I can on here.

Well its a quarter to eleven and I’m the last one up.  Time to write one last blog and get some rest for the long drive home tommorrow ( I hope the group isn’t too upset with me for drastically underestimating how long the drive is out here.  Turns out there’s a big difference between traveling to San Diego in a fully loaded SUV as we did this time and traveling to San Diego in a two door sports car as I’ve done in the past…oops.).

 I think we all agree this was a really good trip, and I believe everyone can say they achieved what they wanted out of it.  Jonathan and Melissa made a ton of really good contacts, maybe even got a job lead or two, Jen got to make some contacts herself and got a first hand look at the type of work that is out there giving her a new perspective on her own work. 

As for me, I really feel like I got everything I wanted out of this trip.  I got take a look at the industry, see what other animators and filmmakers are working on and what new tools they are using to produce their work.  Mostly I wanted to see what other people where doing and see what kind of new things are coming down the line, and I definitly got all of that.

I think all four of us are excited to get back to Colorado to begin working on our various projects again, it really feels like this trip lit a fire under us all.  All day today I could hear one of the other three talking about a new idea for a short they had, or a project they want to reapproach. 

When we get back I’ll try to get everyone else in the group to hop on here and do a little write up about their experience on the trip.  And Jen has volunteered to edit together a short movie of the trip as well for our presentation in the fall.

It’s been a long trip…but a great one as well!

This is directed at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design people who might be checking in on this blog.

Ok RMCAD people out there…think about this for a moment:  Westwood had a booth at Siggraph.  Westwood.  Of all the animation programs in Colorado…it’s WESTWOOD that has an official presence at Siggraph. (of course its not just animation that Westwood offers people but still….)

Let me be clear, I don’t mean in any way for that to sound like a slight against Westwood.  I’m a graduate of the place afterall.  And I was there when they first began their animation program (about 5 years ago, for a short time I was one of the first students in the program).  And after talking to one of their reps, it does sound like they are trying to put a lot of work into it.

But really…Westwood is the first Colorado school to have a presence at Siggraph? 

So the conference is slowly but surely winding down.  Crews have already started pulling some stuff down and begun gently urging people to start packing up.  It was a good last day.  We caught a small talk at the animation-mentors.com booth, hit the exhibit floor one last time, met some more people and took in a great lunch by the bay. 

 Jen and I also got to do a little motion capture this morning at the Guerilla Studio.  We acted out a littl short and did some walk cycles and a little dancing.  It was fun getting all suited up with the sensors and everything.  They gave us the recording on my flash drive, and said to contact them in a few weeks and they will have full bone set ups done of the mo-cap. 

Everyone  around me is saying their goodbyes and rushing to get that one last look at whatever it is they missed.  Just about everyone has a smile on their faces.  Siggraph really is a social event as much as it is a technical conference. 

The crews are giving me some looks so I better pack up and head out.  The others in the group are waiting on me before we head to the beach…time for me to leave Siggraph. 

 We’ll do one more wrap up tonight before we begin the long drive home tommorrow….

Three of us caught the Electronic Theater yesterday afternoon.  It was at a theater a few blocks away from the main convention center.  Before the program started there was a little preshow where they selected three audience members and invited them on stage to play some old school arcade games on the giant screen.  I never thought tha Ateroids could be a spectator sport, but I guess I was wrong.  The three games where Asteroids, Tempest, and the original Star Wars game.  Pretty amusing, but not as group interactive as some of the other Electronic Theater shows that they’ve done in the past.

 The show itself was good overall.  There where some pieces that where absolutly beautiful and some pieces that we all questioned their merit for being included.  I think most people think that the Electronic Theater is where the best of the best most high quality animation is shown.  But as the speaker at the Intro to Siggraph said, getting into the ET isnt really about better quality animation; its also about presenting something unique, something revolutionary perhaps, demonstrating a new way to do things, etc.  So it’s not just how much entertainment value a piece has that determines whether it makes it into the show or not.  Still on a few pieces I wondered what quality it was that landed them in the ET.

 Still a good show though.  Pixar had a new short, as did the people behind Ice Age.  There where some really fun commercials and some independent shorts as well.  Actually the Best in Show went to an indpendent short called Ark (or the Ark, I can’t remember now.)

I’m looking forward to getting home and watching the DVD.  I’m also excited to watch the Animatino Theater DVDs as I only got to poke my head in there once or twice.

Last night we caught the winners of the first ever Fjorg competition, an Iron Animator event where teams of three had 32 hours to create a short animation.  I think I detailed more about it in a previous post. 

It was a cool event.  First the lady who organized it all talked for a bit about the event and the participants.  Then the panel of judges (guys from Dreamworks, Pixar, ILM, and the creators of the Electronic Theaters best in show; the ARK).  Next they showed the shorts, followed by a short documentary about the event.  Then we had the presentations of the winners.  These guy’s got HUGE prize packages, and the winners got to meet alot of industry high ups from Pixar and Dreamworks.  Cool stuff.

 The winning short was a nice little piece about two guys tied two different train tracks.  With a train fast approaching they start hiting the track switches next to themselves, trying to switch the train on the other guy’s track.  In the end their furious switching derails the train, saving both thier lives.  It was quite well done.

 That said, everyone in our group agreed that RMCAD needs to get a team together for this event.  Not to take anything away from the teams involved, but I truly believe that RMCAD could easily put together a team that can compete with every group there, including the winners.  Our group is eager to talk about the even with RMCAD when we get back!

Yesterday a few of us caught one of this years two featured speakers (instead of doing one keynote speaker this year they went to three featured speakers, one of them had to pull out due to a family emergency).  Scott McCloud was invited in this year to talk about the medium of comics, specifically how comics is learning to adapt to the digital age and how the industry is facing a revolution in how it expresses its ideas and how it delivers those ideas to it’s audience. 

 For those that aren’t familiar with Scott McCloud, he’s a well-known graphic artist and author.  He’s written Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and the recently released Making Comics.  H also self published his own comic book; Zot! and is generally regarded as the expert in the study of the form and craft of comics.   If you want to know more about him, check out his site.  http://www.scottmccloud.com/

It was a great talk.  He talked about his family and how he grew up with many people who would eventually enter the comics industry.  He discussed how comics is lookging to find a “durable mutation” and gave a history of the medium (going all the way back to the ancient world) and then showed examples of his favorite online comics.  He gave us examples of strips and artists who are looking to reinvent how comics can be presented to viewers on the web, now that they are free the printed page.  He also talked about how comics compares to other industries and how important it that comics stay at the forefront of technology.

 It was a great talk, he’s a fantastic speaker and a really nice guy.  I’ve been a fan of his for years, ever since I picked up Understanding Comics so I was very excited to see him in person.  I even got him to autograph a book for me and got my picture taken with him!

We’re back to the exhibit today, the four of us all jetted off in different directions as soon as we hit the door.  Melissa struck up a conversation with some animtors from Florida as we where waiting for the exhibit to open and we got to exhange some business cards and got some advice on how to present our matierial. 

Later on today we’ll hit the Guerilla Studio for a bit, and then some of us are headed back into the job fair.  We’ll have more to post later tonight.

Really quick (because I’m running low on battery!), I spent some time in the Job Fair and the Main Exhibit today.  The Job Fair was nice, smaller than I expected and pretty crowded.  Lots of people looking for that dream job. 

 The main exhibit was great.  At first it didn’t seem as huge as everyone makes it out to be.  But the more I walked around and saw the HUGE vareity of people, products and services the more turned around I got.  After a few hours I had pretty decent headache (and a much lighter wallet…damn Maya DVD’s…)

It was good times, we’ll be spending more time there over the next couple days.  But I think I’ll keep my credit card locked up in my luggage…must….not….spend….money….

Just got out of the Shrekology special session.  It was a really entertaining discussion about the evolution of the Shrek franchise.  There where a lot of clips from from the Shrek series, which was great because the audience really got a chance to see how much progress has been made from film to film and just how far the capabilities and characters have come come from Shrek 1. 

 The panel gave a demonstration of a storyboard artist pitching a scene (absolutly hilarious, in a good way!).  Then they reviewed the creation of the character designs through clay modeling (”clay is good”).  There seemed to be a large focus on how valuable a role analog creation like pencil to paper and clay can be even in a modern project.  I liked that a lot. 

They also talked about the animation process for each character.  Shrek was tough because he was a heavy character that needed alot of weight, but they had to balance that with keeping his energy up.  Donkey was fun, basically they would animate his head and his body would follow from that.  Fiona presented some issues to the mostly male animation crew and Puss had so much personality he was a joy.

They showed many of the keys from the art dept, and talked about how that informed the lighting process and they talked about the impact that global illumination made on the production as well.

 Finally the panel wrapped up with a lengthy discussion on on the effects process.  On each one of the Shreks the effects team rethought their process’.  Fire, which was a major focus, was never done the same from film to film, and it is only with Shrek  3 that the crew found a process that they truly seemed to deem worthy.

 It was a fun panel, lots of lively discussion and plenty of Shrek clips which is aways a good thing!