Update from India… the last of the Asia & Southeast Asia Training Tour.

Update from India… the last of the Asia & Southeast Asia Training Tour.

Hello from Mumbai! It’s 3pm in India, and we are about halfway through our last training day on this whirlwind tour.

Mumbai is a place that’s so hard to describe. Busy, bustling, friendly, religious, commercial, rich, poor – all whirling and churning and constantly on the go.. you could spend weeks in this city and see only a fraction of it.. Of course, if you are trying to get through Bombay traffic on the Wednesday of the Ganesh Festival, you might see even less, at a much slower pace. LA traffic is NOTHING compared to Mumbai!

This week we held two seminars – one in a university nestled in the heart of Bollywood, one at a downtown ATC.

The university in Bollywood was the first event on Wednesday. This was the day after we arrived from Phuket, and Nikki and I are wearing the Marriott golf shirts that we received since our luggage was lost (it has since been returned to us) – this is not the latest Softimage uniform!

Anyhow – Whistling Woods – the university - was amazing. Founded by one of India’s top film directors, Whistling Woods is an elite academy that teaches everything from acting to sound design to animation. Whistling Woods is a partner with several international academies in the world, and has a very rigorous admittance policy. The location is next to the sets where the majority of Bollywood movies are shot. Actually, the school in the middle of a nature reserve, where leopards are free to roam in the hills. Really.

Here’s a quick story about the worst thing I have ever heard visiting a studio or a school..

[me] Do you ever see any leopards?
[client] No, they stay away. I do see a cobra once in a while when I go for a smoke.
[me] Haha, very funny.
[client] Why are you laughing? Since we are trespassing on cobra territory, every once in a while we need to call the cobra catcher.
[crickets chirping]

For those who know me, having scenes in our reel from ‘Snakes on a Plane’ was hard to watch. So was the Corona commercial. I don’t like snakes. At all. Not on a plane, near my beer, or least of all in a garden 20 feet away from me!

Anyway.. back to training..

Since the sessions in Mumbai are all in English, I have enjoyed being an unofficial TA. I have been trying to learn the tools and commands to support the class during the intro to XSI session. Although I can’t really help more than navigating property pages and opening scene files, I have perfected the “Nikki – please, we need some help over here” command very well! My favorite part of the course is watching people just go and really dive in and move ahead with the software. GATOR time is the best.. I like watching people get it.

Best quote from today… “that’s the beauty of our GATOR.” Yes, yes it is.

The best part of working for a company like Softimage is seeing and remembering that the CG community really knows no borders. Animators are animators – they are passionate and dedicated and intelligent and high-main.. I mean highly skilled – and they are all focused on homing their skills and showing their stuff.

We met with some of the head CG community leaders here in Mumbai, and how animators here use the web forums slightly differently than in other parts of the worls. If an animator working in a film studio is stuck on a technical issue, he will go to the central web station (not everyone has web access at their desks) in the studio and post a question on cgtalk.com or highend3D.com. He or she will then go back to work, and check back on the responses later. Animators in Indian studios are very careful about being anonymous, since it’s a tight community and not hard to tell who is working where and on what. This gets particularly tight-lipped in studios working on outsourced projects.

Tomorrow is my last day here in Mumbai, and as every fabulous city that hosted the training tour, it will be hard to say good-bye to our friends here. So I won’t just yet.

More pix tomorrow. It's 8:30pm, and its been a loooooooooooooooong day.

Cheers!