X-Radiation

This week I’m giving some lectures in South Carolina. I arrived this evening at Charlotte Douglas airport after a 4.5 hour flight from San Francisco. Dr. William Thacker of Winthrop University met me at the airport along with Lauren Cairco, the President of the Winthrop student ACM SIGGRAPH chapter. We had dinner at the Sheraton where I had my first taste of Cheese Grits with shrimp and andouille sausage. Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at Winthrop University and Furman University with a side trip for lunch at the Old Town Bistro in Rock Hill, former site of McRory’s where the Friendship Nine held a historic lunch counter sit-in similar to the one at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1961 as part of the American Civil Rights movement.

On Tuesday I’m addressing Wofford College and Clemson University then heading back to San Francisco to get on the ball at work. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to some Southern hospitality.

CGTantra, the Indian computer graphics web portal, just published an interview I did with them while visiting Mumbai and Pune in September. You can check it out here:

http://tinyurl.com/xraytantra

You could also get to it from the main page at http://www.cgtantra.com

I just found Andi S. Boediman’s Blog site IDEONOMICS.  Andi runs the Digital Studio College in Jakarta and was one of my hosts while visiting there for SIGGRAPH 2008. While some of the blog is in the Bhasa languange I think it might be interesting for anyone who wants to track what’s going on in the burgeoning business of digital content creation in Indonesia. I’ll create a perma-link in the blog-roll.

There’s an AnimationMentor.com student named Chaitanya Limaye who attended my presentation in Pune, India. After the presentation, Chand and I viewed his work from the Mentor program. As it turns out, my friend Joe Mandia is his mentor. Small world!

Link to Chaitanya’s blog

This is an earlier short piece of animation from the team that’s working on Hey Krishna. It was done at AniRights before Reliance bought them and they became Big Animation. For a behind the scenes look at the production, check out the link over at CG Tantra

L to R: Chand, Kamlesh Pandey, Ashish S.K., Xray, Pratchi, Nupur

Chand took me to visit a really amazing animation studio in Pune called “Big Animation”. We were treated to lunch by CEO Ashish S.K. and I was honored to meet one of Bollywoods most well known writers Kamlesh Pandey. We had a spirited discussion about Indian literature, Joseph Campbell and Bollywood film making. They’ve really got it together. Big Animation is working on both 2-D and 3-D animation. They have several hundred employees and their studio is totally state of the art. They showed me some previews of their work on a project called Hey Krishna. There are two versions of it and both look very good. They aren’t cutting any corners. One is a 3D animation for broadcast televsion and the other is a traditional 2D version for theatrical release. The 2D animation looks every bit as good as Dreamworks Prince of Egypt. Big Animation uses Flash as well as several proprietary systems and according to Vikram, the director n of Hey Krishna, they are torturing Flash in ways it was never intended. The artwork is stunning.

After the presentation one of the participants introduced himself to me and gave me a great gift – A picture he’d drawn of me at the podium. His name is Harsh and he’s got an impressive web site up at http://www.inkbrushme.com. Somone should hire this guy as a concept or boards artists or something.

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Flew from Mumbai to Pune this morning and met up with Chand on the flipside. He drove up with his sister, as well as Pratchi who is a modeler and Nupur who is a lighting lead on a Disney project in India titled “Roadside Romeo”. There was a last minute change of venue but the theater we presented in at MCCI media tower was very nice. The audience was a little smaller than in Mumbai but no less enthusiastic and the intimate setting was a nice change of pace. There were three guys I met who came from a small village outside Pune. (5th row, left side). I have not seen their work but I’m told they are amazing painters. They have very limited access to digital technology. Chand, Chaitan and some of the other folks I’ve been meeting are working on an initiative to get these disenfranchised artists access to the gear and training needed to nurture their development into the digital age.

This afternoon I made a presentation at the Whistling Woods International Film Academy in Film City, Mumbai to about 350 people.

Whistling Woods

The place is amazing and the audience was enthusiastic. The school has top of the line gear. Dolby surround certified mixing studios, hi-def productions suites, render farms, final cut pro servers, stages with lighting grids… really just about anything you’d need to do a production. (more…)

This morning we went to check out a business incubator called Frameboxx. This is a picture of some of their animators. They have a pretty cool business model. They have a bunch of cg artists accepted to their program who train on real world projects. They get the projects in-house by offering free work for back end participation of the projects if they sell, so if you’ve got a computer animation pilot episode for something in mind and have some strong art direction they’ll execute the first episode for you free of charge. If the pilot sells, you pay them based on your arranged contract. It’s a really neat idea. They are also bronze sponsors of SIGGRAPH Asia 2008. http://www.frameboxx.in/