Nearing the close of a long and amazing week at Siggraph 2011 here in Vancouver. The show highlight for me has to be the Jury Prize winner in this year's Computer Animation Festival, Damian Nenow's incredible short film, "Paths of Hate". The long form trailer linked above gives you some indication of the look and feel of the piece.
I've been here working with some of my best students from VCU, attending papers and presentations (the most astounding of which was on Lola's work creating "Skinny Steve" for Captain America), seeing old friends and making new ones.
On Tuesday, I recorded an episode of the VFX Show with Mike Seymour, Ian Failles & Mat Graham, where we discussed the visual effects in "Cowboys & Aliens". It was great fun to meet up with the whole FX Guide/FX PhD crew in person and talk about the film as well as some of our impressions of the convention this year.
Tuesday night was the infamous Lighter/Darker party in Gastown where I got the chance to catch up with several old friends and colleagues, Chris White, Dan Goldman, Ellen Pasternack, Miles Perkins, Adam Martinez, Alex Seiden, Matthew Adams & Serena Rainbow Naramore, the great Neha Wickramasekaran, and Jonathan Litt among others. I even met my new arch nemisis, a fellow San Francisco State University graduate, who seemed to disagree with every word that I uttered in a pretty amusing way, Jessica Walker.
On Wednesday Sony Executive, Ken Maruyama was incredibly gracious and invited my students and I to come by Sony Imageworks/Animation's new Vancouver studio for a casual "meet and greet". It was great for the students and its clear to me that Ken is one of the nicest and most down to earth people in the business.
Thursday is my last day here at the conference and I'll be attending a few more talks on subjects like, Fast Simulation, Video Resizing and Stabilization, Lighting Worlds in Unity, Dscrete Differential Geometry and Designing Curriculum for 3D Computer Animation: Innovation and Experimentation for an Evolving Discipline.
I look forward to getting home and getting some much needed rest. Its been another great year at Siggraph and I am already thinking of booking a block for August 2012 in Los Angeles. Happy trails.
I can't help it, I really enjoyed this short too. Hotdog must have something to do with it...