X-Radiation

Due to booking with frequent flyer miles, my original itinerary flew to
from SFO to FAT to LAX to NRT with no padding for late flights. The
first leg got pushed back 30 minutes after I had checked in so they
booked me on a direct flight to LAX and need to transfer my bags. Now I
can only pray that the Baggage Gods smile kindly upon my travels. I
don’t know what Oyabun Santa did to piss them off but his bags were lost
enroute to NRT yesterday.

I just booked my tickets for Santacon Tokyo 2008. I’ll be in Tokyo from Dec. 19th-31st. Join us for the 6th annual Santacon Tokyo on Saturday, Dec. 20th. Santacon Tokyo is always the last Saturday before Christmas. Santa meets at noon at the Hatchiko statue in Shibuya Station. There are sure to be lots of other fun things going on after that as well. If you’re in Tokyo let me know. 

Japanese readers can find the link here- http://www.magarisugi.net/santa/

or see the google translated version here- http://tinyurl.com/6apdmn

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

This past weekend I went wine tasting in Napa Valley. Click on the map to see the route we took. We visited Summers, Reverie, Von Strasser, Frank Family, Heitz Cellars and Sullivan.

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The Blue Angels over San Francisco as seen from Alcatraz.

The 1980 show from Sid and Marty Krofft defies explanation.

Well, actually, there is a pretty good explanation on Wikipedia.

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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.

Animation Express posted an overview of my presentation at Whistling Woods in Mumbai. A few things got lost in translation and it leaves the impression that Bee Movie was done with Massive while it was really done using Dreamworks/PDI’s “Mob” system but overall it captures the gist of things.

Animation Express article