Siggraph

Hey!

So here I am… Ken Seward, student animator… at my first day of the Siggraph Exhibition… and it’s pretty damn exciting…. really!

It’s kind of overwhelming… but in a good way… a chance to see a lot of the faces behind the stuff that has been such an inspiration to me… the reasons I got into this business to begin with…

Everyone here has been really nice and friendly so far… it’s great to be able to walk right up to an animator from Rythm and Hues and ask him questions… you can listen to their war stories and see their process and just generally get a rush from it all… the excitement of creating stories and images.

All the software companies are pulling out their best stuff and giving demos and eager to help you figure out new ways to use their wares… the Z-Brush show was great… and the Adobe one too. I really enjoyed the Houdini presentation… someday I’m going to have to put in some time on that one too.

Since I’ve decided to direct my specialization towards modelling for a while I bought a recommended tutorial DVD about modelling human anatomy… I’m looking forward to that… back to my undergrad roots in biology There’s a great art show here too… all kinds of fabulous things that I’ve only just seen a glimpse of so far.

Earlier we got a chance to watch our film “Solomon Grundy” on the big screen and hear audience reaction… luckily they laughed at the right parts. There are so many great short films screening here… I really liked “One Rat Short”… and “A Great Big Robot From Outer Space Ate My Homework”… hopefully I’ll get a chance to see a bunch more tomorrow.

I sat in on a panel on digital arts that was very interesting. A group of artists who use ‘ubiquitous computing’ (all the computers around use that we don’t think of… like cell phones, security cameras, the systems that measure water usage and CO2 concentrations in buildings) to make art… like feeding the water usage data into an animation of a waterfall that plays on a screen in the lobby… the more water the business uses the bigger the waterfall… or a building that grows and contracts as people enter and leave. One fellow is doing a protest against his having been ‘profiled’ by the FBI as a potential terrorist by uploading a constant data stream to them that details his every movement… he programmed his cell phone to link up to a GPS satellite and produce a map that shows his location on Earth 24hrs a day… he takes a photo of every toilet he uses and that image is automatically uploaded to his ‘interviewers’ at the FBI… same thing with his airplane meals and daily purchases… very political but amusing reverse usage of the software that tracks us everyday… he calls it ‘aggressive compliance’.

I’m still hoping I can find the Bauhaus people to tell them how much I love their Mirage program… and to tell how I’m using it in my thesis.

I’m really gonna have to get up early tomorrow… there’s so much left to see.

Ok, gotta go… time to eat!

K