X-Radiation

My last day in India. Got a late start today after last nights celebration. Chand picked me up at the hotel and we headed over to Fabindia to do a little shopping. Nupur helped me pick out a bunch of clothing items for Rie and a few things for myself including a pair of kurtas and churidars. It was a little too bulky to fit into my luggage so I also bought a nice cloth and leather bag to hold the extra goodies. Fabindia is a great department store with some very nice things. You can actually get some of it on-line in the U.S. at fabindia.com but it’s about 3x the price of buying it in the shop.

Concluding around the world trip. Back where I started.

After the presentation Chaitan (sp?), a former Digital Domain artist who now runs a facility in Pune, took us out to celebrate at Post 91, a very cool restaurant/bar/banquet hall in Pune. I tried the local whisky called Blue Antiquity. We were joined by the owner Saurabh and he extended his hospitality to us for the evening. It was a great time filled with wonderful food and drink.

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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 evening is the Idil Fitri (or just ID) celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. It’s a big celebration in Muslim population centers around the world. In India, all the Muslim neighborhoods are out partying and celebrating. There are throngs of people on the streets. Chand and I had a late dinner near a muslim area behind the Taj hotel consisting of liver curry, butter chicken and seekh kabobs with roti. The place was a little crazy. It’s the Indian version of car-hop service. You pull your car up to the curb and a waiter pops the hood and puts a bottle under it to keep it level. He puts some newspapers on the hood to act as a table cloth then takes your order. Pretty soon lots of small dishes come from the general direction of the streetside BBQ and are placed on the hood of your car, serving as a picnic table. Quite a scene. Afterwards Chand challanged me with a beetlenut and beetle-leaf desert called Pan. It was all delicious.

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/

Chand showed me around Mumbai a bit after our visit to R&H. Our first stop was Toto, a really cool Indian pub in a converted garage. The car lifts are still there and they’ve got a fiat jacked up over the bar. There’s a VW van jacked up on the ther side where the DJ booth is. They spin classic hard rock. We headed over to the Boat Club and had some whisky and seekh kabobs then had dinner at Papa Pancho!. 

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