Sunday, February 12, 2006

Pixar, ILM, Siggraph - a normal week in San Francisco

Yes, my friends, San Francisco in winter time... well, not always like that, but once in a while... ahh, beautiful!


Hi everyone,

here it is, finally, my blog entry about the travelling to San Francisco, February 2006. Originally I was traveling there because I got the chance of working as ex-student volunteer (XSV) in the Siggraph courses committee which had to decide on the course that are going to be represented this August in Boston. Just click here to get some more information about Siggraph.

That is the Boston Convention Center where Siggraph 2006 will be held.

The process for creating the program was full of fun and getting to know many 'famous' people among the CGI-industry (CGI = computer generated images). Next to working all Saturday there were also times when we went to a restaurant and had the famous 'earthquake' ice which had 20 scoops of ice. Yummy!

In the middle you can see this incredible 20 scoops of icecream earthquake!

In the end we got a nice courses program which will have interesting courses for everyone - on every single day of the conference. I'm really happy that it turned out that way because it is difficult to get everone's interests in one convention. I hope we did succeed.



I got to San Francisco early to meet some awesome people from the animation industry. Among them were Bobby Beck (Pixar, now CEO of Animation Mentor), Rick o'Conner (lead animator at ILM), Shawn Kelly (Ninja animator at ILM), Doug Dooley (my current mentor and body mechanics master at Pixar), Anthony Wong (former Disney 2D artist, now at Pixar) and Michelle Meeker (currently working as a freelance artist, animated on Lord of the rings, Bug's life, Antz etc.). I was pumped just knowing I would meet them and in the end my expectations were all fullfilled and even more than that.

The first day (Monday) I went to Animation Mentor headquarters, located in lovely Berkely not a 5 min. drive away from Pixar - but actually, 1h 20min away from Mountain View where I stayed at Dave Shreiner's house. I had a great car (a 8 people Hertz Gold member Van) which I was given for no other reason than asking kindly - well, maybe asking for a Hummer was a littlebit frank but in the end I got this awesome car for the price of a Honda Civic. Anyway, I drove all the way around the Bay up to Berkely and eventually made it to:

Many of you should know this sign by now due to our weekly videos

Meeting Bobby, Jay, Taylor, Becky, Rosie and all the others was totally fun. I came right on time for lunchtime and so we had pizza together while chatting. I could talk to Bobby about the school and how we as students could spread the word (blogging for instance?) and was able to take a closer look at his office and all the toys he collects there (whoot!).

One of hundreds of awesome toys Bobby has in his office.

Later this week I will be able to release that video to this blog and the AM forum but more on that later.

Bobby right before getting some pizza...

Not only AM is fun online but the headquarters as well. People are as nice as they appear on the video and the overall feeling is relaxed and open. Should you ever feel like going there, do it. The staff is just amazing and they have some awesome stuff to show, too. In the end I made it to the video news to demonstrate people the meaning of timezones and that people from Germany (like me) would sleep at the time we were shooting the video:

timezone demonstration visually expressed

AM HQ was fun and so the week had started off... AWESOME (you are going to hear that word a lot from now on - Shawn Kelly infected me there!). Talking about Shawn. Shawn works at ILM together with Rick o'Conner. Rick is a lead animator currently on a very interesting show. I look forward to it. I was able to visit both and see how they work and what ILM is like. Let me say this: ILM is one of the coolest places to work at - that is for sure.

Yoda fountain - "Me you must seek, ILM you will find"

It was funny to also meet some of the people featured in the videos like Kevin (Martel?) and Charles Alleneck who (btw) has the biggest Lego Star Wars collection on EARTH! Well, that was my impression, at least. At ILM Rick showed me a lot of very, very cool stuff: How they work, which tools they use, how the animators sink into their chairs behind their desk, hundreds of maquettes and photos and pictures and models and Star Wars props... and also their lunch area.

While having lunch in this terrific building (you can see the Golden Gate bridge to the left, Alcatraz inside the Bay and Downtown to your left) we had a question and answer session where I kept bugging Rick and Shawn to the extreme about age limitations, VISA questions or moral issues. It was awesome, totally honest and extremely interesting and the discussion went on in emails even after I left ILM (thanks again, Shawn). Unfortunately I wasn't able to film inside ILM but you just have to believe me that you are feeling like walking through the history of computer animation.

The place is huge, the building awesome but foremost are the people cool and friendly guys creating some incredible work there. Definitely still the top notch place to work at when you are aiming for CG work in live action films!!!

I also met many AM students who were cool enough to leave their seats for one day and come down to the Cha Cha Cha in San Francisco downtown. We had a great time and I tried to talk to as many as possible there. Hopefully I didn't miss too many - in the end, I had a wonderful time just seeing all of them.

One of the few pictures where you can see anything. The ChaChaCha was quite dark....

Thursday was the day were I visited Doug Dooley and Anthony Wong and that way: Pixar. I've been there once for the geeky fact of just shooting a foto of me in front of Pixar but now I was able to turn into the drive way and get into the building as registered guest.


I got into the hallway where people are being picked up by employes. The entrance hall is huge and full of cool stuff. There are a lot of toys around, 4 giant statues of the Incredibles and a brand new car for Daytona racing (for those who don't know yet, Pixar is releasing Cars this year in cinemas). The place is - like ILM - packed with drawings from the movies Pixar has created (remember, together with Cars that are 'only' 6 so far) and walking there you feel like walking through a big version of the making of art books.

Doug and Anthony showed me the cinema they have (wow, that is a bigger one) and the rendering hardware - it is big, loud and has millions of blue and green lamps. I guess it is fast, but that is mostly all I can say about it. Then we turned into the animation "hall" where every single animator has his own little building to live in. And I mean building. They have alleys and walkways and verandas and a huge kitchen, some have a couch and a TV, others a castle made out of bricks, some are pink, some are plain white, some animate while standing... this place was full of creativity.

Doug showed me some cool figures they found on eBay from a carousel. They hadn't been plugged in yet but they are supposed to still work... amazing. The whole place had so much life going on you really have to know where to go to first before starting. Well, I was lucky and got to meet Carlos Baena too and we talked a littlebit about AM and Europe, too. All in all it was great meeting him and he certainly has the same energy that he shows in the videos every week. His office too was awesome. All Pixar animators have a huge 40"(inch) display that is just huge big (well, I guess some 'just' got 23" ones but I'm not sure).

Doug's office was especially cool since it had two levels (one on top of the other) where the second one had a couch and a tv. He was even able to build a staircase into that 3x3m big office... way cool. Anthony has a more convenient office together with Nancy K! Also, a very impressive mentor mostly working as campus mentor there! It was super cool meeting her.

As at ILM I just couldn't resist to buy some way cool stuff (two shirts, the Moma-book and some toys at Pixar, two shirts and a mug at ILM)... and the best thing is: no one cares if you act geeky - everyone is. I mean, even Pixar employees buy their own stuff. Totally amazing.

Then Doug, Anthony and me had an AWESOME discussion about AM and this term. We talked about story and personality and I got to know Doug better which was super cool. I also had a glimpse into how keen Pixar is about story and how well things have to be thought off before animating on them. They teached me a mini-10-min lecture there. Whoot!

I could film some of the entrance hall and you can see that in my video later this week.

Well, that's it for now. The whole trip was more than exciting, mind-blowing, awesome, enormous, captivating... whatever you can say. I'm super thankful to have been able to meet all those people. They were kind enough to show me far more than I had thought of. And San Francisco is a wonderful place to live in, too. So, I will be working hard on getting there some day when I can't stand Munich anymore. For now, I better start animating seriously good stuff to be able to show it around.

Feel free to shoot me some questions. Though I tried not to harm any legal issues I hope I still could tell some interesting stories.

- Alex

2 comments:

Benjamin De Schrijver said...

Awesome, man! I'm jealous! Can't wait for the video

- Benjamin

Brian "My Fault" Nicolucci said...

That is awesome Alex!

Doug is one of the coolest, nicest guys you could ever meet. He was an awesome mentor when I went through quarter 2 and I learned a ton. And the two story office, woooo! You can see everything from up there.

BTW, nice appearance in the AM news!!