X-Radiation

May 18th

I ran into Daniel and Tim at the breakfast buffet. Discussed the day’s strategy. Special Agent Shaw picked us up. Thanks to his excellent driving skills aggressively navigating the Xi’an traffic we arrived at the Shaanxi Animation Industry Platform building. After a brief introduction to the Platform Directors Mr. Lu and Ms. Soon I was lead into a press conference where several journalists asked me to compare and contrast the American and Chinese animation industry as well as advise them on how the Central Chinese Government could support the animation industry in China. Following the press conference I addressed a crowd of 350 journalists, government officials, industry professionals and students giving them an introduction to SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia as well as a personal history of my work in visual effects and animation.

We took a break for lunch in a private room within the building. There was a contingent of Japanese executives working on animation in China as well as the heads of various animation companies working in the Animation Industry Platform building. The Xi’An Director of Propaganda and the Director of the Xi’an Department of culture joined us as well.
After lunch I gave a one-on-one interview with China Central Television (CCTV) where I talked about my favorite projects and informed the journalist that stereoscopic 3D was the new hotness in animated feature film production in America.

For the afternoon session I presented information about the history of computer graphics in film. I think I lost the audience a bit during this part of the presentation. This was followed by 45 minutes of questions and answers.

We had a family style dinner on a lazy susan in a private room in a Chinese restaurant that had the largest lobsters I’d ever seen sitting in the tanks in the lobby awaiting their sizzling fate. Mr. Lu’s wife, the Shaanxi Provincial Director of Propaganda, joined us and we engaged in the Chinese tradition of toasting each other with shots of Baijiu. Mr. Yan from Yelloon Animation and Mr. Oong who runs another animation studio as well as the museum of Shaanxi Folk Art joined us as well. The restaurant staff wheeled a television into the room and turned on the Central China Evening News. About half way into the broadcast they ran the interview from earlier in the day. Things got a little hazy after that but Special Agent Shaw’s professional driving ensured our safety on the way back to the hotel. Ms. Fu arrived at the hotel, suit in hand, for a first fitting and I let her do her thing over a glass of Macallans before crashing out for the evening.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6

Today we gave our presentation on crowds during the courses sessions at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in Yokohama.  I was very happy with the content and variety of  presentations. I owe a debt of gratitude to each and every presenter who agreed to be part of the course.

A Fuzz of Crowd Animators L to R: Mihai Cioroba, Paul Kanyuk, Tak Yoshida, Marc Salvati, Stephen Regelous, Xray Halpein

After the talk Paul, Tak, Mihai and myself went back to Toki for a celebratory noodle dinner and coined the term “A Fuzz of Crowd Animators” to refer to a group or herd of crowd animators. It’s sort of like “A Gaggle of Geese” or “A Murder of Crows”.

More pictures after the jump…

Stephen filling us in on Massive 4.0

I spent the second day of SIGGRAPH Asia attending the conference and getting ready for my presentation on Friday. In the morning I went over to the exhibiton hall and caught up with Leyla, John and Richard from Side Effects Software. My friend Matsuno-san from OxyBot came to the show. We went over to the nearby mall for an Indian food lunch with Tak, Mihai, Paul, Matsuno-san, Soren, M. Kennedy ans Stephen.

In the afternoon I attended a session called Chiptune Marching Band which was a great workshop run by Jamie Allen and a Japanese guy named Joe. They walked us through building a oscillator and amplifier circuit with the parts they provided and then circuit bending it into a musical instrument. It was a stellar workshop! You can check out their web page here:

http://chiptunemarchingband.com/

After the workshop we marched through SIGGRAPH Asia playing the instruments on the way to the art gallery to include them into a presentation on Chiptunes. Later, I donated my “Xrayzaphone” to one of the particpants after the instrument she built mysteriously disappeard. The thing looked like a bomb anyway, so I’m not entriely sure I would have been able to get it on the airplane.

That evening we attended a nice reception held by NVIDIA, spent some time talking to Laura and Dominic then headed out to a small club in Yokohama for a party organized by Polygon Pictures. The music was a lot of fun with a techno drum trio as well as a Residents “cover” band called “The Yokohama Residents”. I used the word “cover” loosely because while they may use the Resident’s visual tropes and audio inspiration their particular brand of music was much more dance friendly… but still enjoyable.

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This morning I spent some time catching up on correspondence and updating the blog. Hooked up with Tak, Mihai and Paul for lunch and took them back to Toki. It was just as good as last night. Superb noodles.

Headed over to the conference to catch part of the Autodesk users group, but it was all in Japanese. Went over to the Nvidia users group and met up with Laura, Dominic and Wil.

Bumped into Marcos at the Nuke users group meeting then headed over to the Papers Fast Forward, meeting Sebastian along the way.

The papers fast-forward presentation was excellent. There were a handful of papers relevant to crowd animation and lots of other interesting material. One presentation was done in rap, another was done like an episode of South Park and yet another concluded with, literally, a pie in the face.

After the presentation I went out for sushi with Colin, Thomas, Andrew, Keith, Paul, Tony and Bill  from Pixar, Leo from Polygon Pictures  and Stephen from Massive.  It was a truly epic dinner. Ten gaijin sitting around a table carved from a very large tree. Mounds of sashimi including a still wriggling lobster. A plate of big yaki-ebi, bowls of ankimo, very large pitchers of beer, plates of Tai heads,  miso made from the leftover bits of live lobster and final serving of nigiri sushi and various maki. Everyone rolled out of the place stuffed.

Walked back to the Seamen’s hall with Paul and made it back around midnight.

Looking forward to tomorrow.

Dec. 15th

Woke up early and checked out of the hotel. Met Sneery and his friend Ming in the lobby. Headed out to Shinjuku to grab some food. The plan was to scout out the basement food shop at the Isaten department store and eat at the park on their roof.  I also wanted to check out their whisky selection.  We got there a bit early so went for some coffee to wait until they were open.  I got several croquettes (Okonomi, Imo, Ebi, Kani) and one big Ebi Fry. We picked up a bottle of sake and went up to the roof to enjoy the fruits of our hunt.

We wandered around Shinjuku for a while. We saw some guy taking what looked like a small dog out for a walk but I did a double take when I realized it was a spider monkey.

We ran across the local franchise of my favorite Mongolian Hot Pot restaurant, Little Sheep.

We found a really great liquor store with an amazing selection of rare whisky called Shinanoya.

I got back to the hotel, grabbed my bags and hit the train for Yokohama. I put on my Santa suit and registered for SIGGRAPH.

Hooked up with Oyabun Santa, Santa Maki and Baby Santa Juno.  Got back to the hotel, linked up with Santa Michael and wandered around Yokohama’s china town looking for some dinner and damn if we didn’t find it.

We ended up at this place called “To Ki” or “Toki” and had some of the best noodles ever. It’s a style from the Shanxi province of China called dao-Xiao-mein. At Toki, Chef Wang uses a large chunk of freshly kneaded wheat  flour dough and hand shaves flat strips of raw noodle dough into a big wok of boiling water. The cooked noodles  have a rough and chewy texture with a very unique fresh wheat taste.  We also tried their delicious Mabo Tofu and a spicy Salt & Pepper shrimp dish, similar to what I’ve had before but this was probably the best version I’ve every had.  Simply outstanding.

Stopped off at the combini to get some desert. Picked up some Sweet Potato flavor haagen-daaz ice cream and hit the sack pretty hard.

Dec. 14th

Got up very early. Ate breakfast and ran some errands in Nagoya. Had lunch as a place that’s been awarded the Scovie for their spicy mabo tofu. I had the spicy tan-tan-men ramen and made the mistake of asking for it extra spicy. OH MY GOD! I managed to get through about half of it before giving up in lip quiverring agony. I paid for that later in the evening.

I got on the shinkansen back to Tokyo and got to OLM Digital around 3:30PM.  I got a tour of the facility. They work on 2D animation for Pokemon as well as 3D effects, notably for the more recent films of Miike Takashi. I worked with my OLM host Ken on our SIGGRAPH Presentation then headed out to Ebisu for a chankonabe dinner with Marc, Ken, Ayumi, John from WETA and myself. I can’t remeber the name of the yokozuna that owns the place but it’s famous for shio chanko. The meal was delicious.

Got back to the hotel and started to pack for Yokohama while paying the price for the spicy tan-tan-men experiement.

Dec. 11th

Back in 1996/1997 I worked on Titanic at Digital Domain and made friends with  an exchange artist from Japan’s Tokyo Broadcasting Station  named Sori. In 2001 at Sony Imageworks I made friends with another exchange artist named Tadao. I’ve kept in touch with them over the years and try to visit whenever I’m in Japan. It’s great to see that Sori is now a film director and Tadao works with Sori as his visual effects supervisor. They are a great team who work on great projects together.

Sori’s IMDB page

I went to luch with Tadao at a bento place owned by a famous theater actor, grabbed some coffee and went to OxyBot Studios to see what they are up to. I met the staff and saw some great work being done. Sori and Tadao have surrounded themselves with a friendly and talented group of artists. I’m looking forward to their future collaborations. Hopefully I’ll have another chance to catch up with them during this trip.

Dec. 9th

Departed SFO for Narita via Seattle. Had planned to wake up at 4am for final packing and get to the airport by 5:30am but overslept and woke up at 5am. Managed to get out the door ten after five and made it to the airport just after 6am. Went to the international terminal but found out that my flight to seattle was, in fact, domestic… duh. Jammed through the airport and checked in with just moments to spare. Had a four hour layover in Seattle and got to Narita in one piece on Dec. 10th.

Dec. 10th

Got some Yen from the ATM and picked up my rental cell phone.  Made it to Shibuya on the Narita Express. Pain in the ass schlepping bags through Shibuya Station. Could not find the elevators. Somehow manages to get a small but bloody cut on my hand but there was no pain so I didn’t notice for a while. A confused Gaijin with a bloody hand wandering around Shibuya station. Got my bags down the stairs but had to push them back up over the crossing near the West exit to the hotel. Settled in for a moment before heading out to meet Tak and Mihai from Digital Frontiers in Naka-Meguro for some sushi.

Had a great dinner at  “Yoshi Zushi” よし寿司

Mixed sashimi platter – Yuzu Ika, Toro, Hamachi, Aji, Ebi, Small white fish whose name I forgot. Drank a lot of beer and nihon-shu.

Second course was yaki-miso shirako, fresh shiokara , hotate with uni sauce and kujira steak.

Finished up with some engawa, tamago and aji nigiri.

Went to Karaoke with Mihair & Justine until 4am. Brought along a bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask to share. Belted out some punk and metal and generally hammed it up for a good time.

My proposal for a crowd animation course at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in December in Yokohama, Japan has been approved! I’m really looking forward to organizing this course and attending the conference. We’ve got some stellar talent presenting at this course representing work from Pixar, ImageMovers Digtial, Digital Frontier, Massive Software and OLM Digital. More info to come!

My friend Callum pointed me to this article that was posted last year about my visit to South East Asia.