And last but certainly not least, here are the photos from our Mumbai, India week. We are all home now, and we are ready for ADAPT Montreal, more on that later today.
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007
jen
Monday, September 24, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
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!
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!
Monday, September 17, 2007
I didn't know the meaning of intense.. I do now.
It's Monday, Sept 17th at 5:40pm. Nikki, Teresa and I are in Bangkok, Thailand, waiting to leave for Mumbai.
We spent 1.5 days in Phuket over the weekend, taking a break and splitting up the long China
-> India journey.
We were scheduled to fly from Phuket to Bangkok and then onto Mumbai yesterday.
At 3:45pm, our plane was on the runway, next in line for take-off when the an extremely powerful squall hit the airport. Nikki and I looked at each other and asked.. "Are we really taking off in this???"
We didn't, because the same time we were sitting on that tarmack getting ready to leave, the One Two Go Jet crashed on the runway.
It was sad and surreal and scary and the next 24 hours were dedicated trying to Bangkok. We ended up taking a three hour bus ride to Krabi, where Thai Air had a jet waiting to get all of its passengers to our destination. They were wonderful and took very good care of us.
We are about to leave for Mumbai, safe and sound, and happy to be ok.
jen
We spent 1.5 days in Phuket over the weekend, taking a break and splitting up the long China
-> India journey.
We were scheduled to fly from Phuket to Bangkok and then onto Mumbai yesterday.
At 3:45pm, our plane was on the runway, next in line for take-off when the an extremely powerful squall hit the airport. Nikki and I looked at each other and asked.. "Are we really taking off in this???"
We didn't, because the same time we were sitting on that tarmack getting ready to leave, the One Two Go Jet crashed on the runway.
It was sad and surreal and scary and the next 24 hours were dedicated trying to Bangkok. We ended up taking a three hour bus ride to Krabi, where Thai Air had a jet waiting to get all of its passengers to our destination. They were wonderful and took very good care of us.
We are about to leave for Mumbai, safe and sound, and happy to be ok.
jen
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Shanghai Training Day - 'Intense' is probably is the best word for it!
We held the Shanghai Training Event yesterday. It was a really intense session. The room was full - at least 30 trainers and professionals were there - and we stared at 10am and ended at 6pm. Nikki led the training, and Alex provided translation and hands-on support.
Although, as unofficial TA, I am not sure how annoying I was.. probably slightly. Every once in a while I'd lean over to Nikki and whisper.. "psst.. look, that guy is struggling, he has the no icon texture map on his tank!" .. "Nikki.. psst.. that girl is having a hard time transferring to the medium res model... should 'we' help her?"
Bless my patient colleague, she didn't tell me to hush up!!
It's interesting to see and observe people learning something when you don't speak the language. I spent all day gauging people's reactions to the material and the software. The people being trained yesterday really embraced the material, and many who hadn't really seen much of XSI other than a demo were enjoying the experience of diving into the workflow. It was awesome watching a room of people GATOR at the same time!
One of the trainees new to XSI said "XSI should be the future of 3D in China - no other package out there can compare to it in terms of workflow and performance." Two artists from a post poduction studio outside of Shanghai took a 3 hour train ride - EACH WAY - to get to the event. They have been waiting for XSI training for a long time, as they want to switch their pipeline over to XSI as soon as they can.
I can't say enough what a great job Adam Sale did on this material. Using the soldier model from August Zhang and the material built by our content team for the Six Education tour, this is such a comprehensive training package - i was learning more about Crosswalk & Maya today! Its going to be instrumental in helping schools and trainers around the world teach the next generation of 3D artists. Speaking of, very cool to see how many young women are studying 3D in both Shanghai & Seoul. We need to keep trying to balance out that sky-high level of testosterone out there in the industry!
Nikki said something so brilliant today.. "Women working in 3D today are the warriors for the next generation." Love it.
I stayed in the hotel today while Teresa, Alex and Souma-san went to visit clients. Nikki and I had a top secret assignment to finish, something long overdue for our WW education & training community. I'll write more about it in the near future, once the kinks have been worked out and it's approved by our management team. (Hi there, Management Team! :)
Photos from the event:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SoftimageAsiaTour2007ShanghaiChina
I also added more photos to this folder:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SoftimageAsiaTour2007Outtakes
Tomorrow is a travel day, with potentially a client meeting in the AM. Saturday is a day off somewhere fabulous, and Sunday we head to Mumbai, India for the last leg of this Amazing Training Race.
It's going to be sad leaving Shanghai, this has been an incredible week.
Hope you are doing well, wherever you are!
jen
Although, as unofficial TA, I am not sure how annoying I was.. probably slightly. Every once in a while I'd lean over to Nikki and whisper.. "psst.. look, that guy is struggling, he has the no icon texture map on his tank!" .. "Nikki.. psst.. that girl is having a hard time transferring to the medium res model... should 'we' help her?"
Bless my patient colleague, she didn't tell me to hush up!!
It's interesting to see and observe people learning something when you don't speak the language. I spent all day gauging people's reactions to the material and the software. The people being trained yesterday really embraced the material, and many who hadn't really seen much of XSI other than a demo were enjoying the experience of diving into the workflow. It was awesome watching a room of people GATOR at the same time!
One of the trainees new to XSI said "XSI should be the future of 3D in China - no other package out there can compare to it in terms of workflow and performance." Two artists from a post poduction studio outside of Shanghai took a 3 hour train ride - EACH WAY - to get to the event. They have been waiting for XSI training for a long time, as they want to switch their pipeline over to XSI as soon as they can.
I can't say enough what a great job Adam Sale did on this material. Using the soldier model from August Zhang and the material built by our content team for the Six Education tour, this is such a comprehensive training package - i was learning more about Crosswalk & Maya today! Its going to be instrumental in helping schools and trainers around the world teach the next generation of 3D artists. Speaking of, very cool to see how many young women are studying 3D in both Shanghai & Seoul. We need to keep trying to balance out that sky-high level of testosterone out there in the industry!
Nikki said something so brilliant today.. "Women working in 3D today are the warriors for the next generation." Love it.
I stayed in the hotel today while Teresa, Alex and Souma-san went to visit clients. Nikki and I had a top secret assignment to finish, something long overdue for our WW education & training community. I'll write more about it in the near future, once the kinks have been worked out and it's approved by our management team. (Hi there, Management Team! :)
Photos from the event:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SoftimageAsiaTour2007ShanghaiChina
I also added more photos to this folder:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SoftimageAsiaTour2007Outtakes
Tomorrow is a travel day, with potentially a client meeting in the AM. Saturday is a day off somewhere fabulous, and Sunday we head to Mumbai, India for the last leg of this Amazing Training Race.
It's going to be sad leaving Shanghai, this has been an incredible week.
Hope you are doing well, wherever you are!
jen
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Trying to blog from Shanghai...
It's funny.. I can't see anything I post on the blog page, but through a feed on Facebook I can see my updates.. but i can't post any photos onto Facebook.. but I can use Picasa.
Using the internet from China can be a challenge, although this is a very small problem compared to last year when I was here with Mark, and he was trying to download the latest RC of version 6 from here. Since downloading a file of that size wasn't working through our network, Mark had to find alternate ways to access the latest build. Something about splitting the file onto newsgroups, etc. I still don't like to think about that, it was a stressful few days last December!
So this is Day 2 here in Shanghai, were we have spent the last 2 days visiting clients and Education partners. Personally, I was feeling a bit somber today, being 9/11 and all, and so far from home, remembering where I was that fateful day 6 years ago.
Back to present. We visited a few studios here that have set-up outsourcing pipelines, and it was interesting to hear and try and help solve a set of concerns and issues that are the same, but different. When supporting a company that provides outsourcing services, the support requirements range from strictly modeling and or animation, to full project pipelines. I met with an Art Director today that is managing over 2 dozen simultaneous projects with a team of just 130 artists. While he stated that the projects ranged from Big to Small, the fact that all those projects going on at once doesn't leave time for training and development. Speaking of Big and Small, they had the funniest conference room names.. Small 1, Small 2, Small 3.. Big 1... etc. I found this both amusing and brilliant in its simplicity.
Tomorrow is a big training day, where we bring out new material to the local market. It's going to be an intense 6 hours, with Nikki doing the training and Alex doing the translation.
I should have more blogging time as the week progresses, although Shanghai, as always, is a complete whirlwind and the days are over before I realize it!
Using the internet from China can be a challenge, although this is a very small problem compared to last year when I was here with Mark, and he was trying to download the latest RC of version 6 from here. Since downloading a file of that size wasn't working through our network, Mark had to find alternate ways to access the latest build. Something about splitting the file onto newsgroups, etc. I still don't like to think about that, it was a stressful few days last December!
So this is Day 2 here in Shanghai, were we have spent the last 2 days visiting clients and Education partners. Personally, I was feeling a bit somber today, being 9/11 and all, and so far from home, remembering where I was that fateful day 6 years ago.
Back to present. We visited a few studios here that have set-up outsourcing pipelines, and it was interesting to hear and try and help solve a set of concerns and issues that are the same, but different. When supporting a company that provides outsourcing services, the support requirements range from strictly modeling and or animation, to full project pipelines. I met with an Art Director today that is managing over 2 dozen simultaneous projects with a team of just 130 artists. While he stated that the projects ranged from Big to Small, the fact that all those projects going on at once doesn't leave time for training and development. Speaking of Big and Small, they had the funniest conference room names.. Small 1, Small 2, Small 3.. Big 1... etc. I found this both amusing and brilliant in its simplicity.
Tomorrow is a big training day, where we bring out new material to the local market. It's going to be an intense 6 hours, with Nikki doing the training and Alex doing the translation.
I should have more blogging time as the week progresses, although Shanghai, as always, is a complete whirlwind and the days are over before I realize it!
Sunday, September 9, 2007
UPDATE: Picasa Album links
Sorry.. all thes newfangled programs..Picasa, Blogger.. I am still working out the kinks!
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SoftimageAsiaTour2007SeoulKorea
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SoftimageAsiaTour2007Outtakes
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SoftimageAsiaTour2007SeoulKorea
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SoftimageAsiaTour2007Outtakes
Back to work.. now in Shanghai, China
Hello again..
It's Monday, September 10th, and Nikki and I are now on our own in Shanghai. It was hard to say goodbye to Seoul and our friends at CORE, Animal Logic & Blur. Saturday market the end of our stay in Seoul with Jay, Lee & Choi from CORE taking Nikki, Jeff and I to a fabulous restaurant that was on a mountain overlooking the city. Later we went to the King's Palace and finished the day shopping in a Korean open air market.
Last week was stellar. This one will be too, I can feel it. Shanghai has this incredible pulse to it.
We flew to Shanghai on Sunday morning, and had a few hours to explore the city by day and night. It's amazing that I was here 8 months ago, and I had a totally different experience. Last time, we were staying at a so-so hotel that was in a very unexciting part of town. Now we are right in the center of the action on Nanjing Road. As I type this, I am looking at the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, the famous Shanghai landmark. I never want to leave my room, because the skyline at night is art in itself - much better than watching TV!
Nikki and I would have made our male colleagues proud yesterday.. the very first thing we did was go to the awesome Sai Bo market, which has EVERY electronic device known to man (and woman!) there. We had to leave before we spent a fortune, but what FUN! We felt a bit too geeky, so we headed to the Yu Garden after, this great open air market that has everything you'd expect a Chinese market to have.
Today we are waiting to meet Alex Liao, our Sales Manager for China, to go over the training requirements and head to the location where our event will take place on Wednesday. This week will also be filled with client meetings. Teresa Manley, our Director of WW Marketing, arrives tomorrow, and she'll be joining us for the rest of the tour.
Here are some photos from the last week. Posting images on the blog is a bit tricky here, not sure why, but I cant add photos to this or Facebook as easily as I was able to in Seoul. Could be the connection, could be me, it's hard to troubleshoot because my Blogspot interface is now in Chinese!
Anyway - Picasa works, so here you go!
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SeoulWork
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/AsiaOuttakes
It's Monday, September 10th, and Nikki and I are now on our own in Shanghai. It was hard to say goodbye to Seoul and our friends at CORE, Animal Logic & Blur. Saturday market the end of our stay in Seoul with Jay, Lee & Choi from CORE taking Nikki, Jeff and I to a fabulous restaurant that was on a mountain overlooking the city. Later we went to the King's Palace and finished the day shopping in a Korean open air market.
Last week was stellar. This one will be too, I can feel it. Shanghai has this incredible pulse to it.
We flew to Shanghai on Sunday morning, and had a few hours to explore the city by day and night. It's amazing that I was here 8 months ago, and I had a totally different experience. Last time, we were staying at a so-so hotel that was in a very unexciting part of town. Now we are right in the center of the action on Nanjing Road. As I type this, I am looking at the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, the famous Shanghai landmark. I never want to leave my room, because the skyline at night is art in itself - much better than watching TV!
Nikki and I would have made our male colleagues proud yesterday.. the very first thing we did was go to the awesome Sai Bo market, which has EVERY electronic device known to man (and woman!) there. We had to leave before we spent a fortune, but what FUN! We felt a bit too geeky, so we headed to the Yu Garden after, this great open air market that has everything you'd expect a Chinese market to have.
Today we are waiting to meet Alex Liao, our Sales Manager for China, to go over the training requirements and head to the location where our event will take place on Wednesday. This week will also be filled with client meetings. Teresa Manley, our Director of WW Marketing, arrives tomorrow, and she'll be joining us for the rest of the tour.
Here are some photos from the last week. Posting images on the blog is a bit tricky here, not sure why, but I cant add photos to this or Facebook as easily as I was able to in Seoul. Could be the connection, could be me, it's hard to troubleshoot because my Blogspot interface is now in Chinese!
Anyway - Picasa works, so here you go!
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/SeoulWork
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/AsiaOuttakes
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