ADAPT Conference with photos

We had a great time at the cocktail mixer last night. I was chatting with Bill Kroyer from Rythm & Hues about shared experiences in Mumbai. I also caught up with Justin Jackson, a recent graduate of Loyalist College and former Soft Siggraph intern.

Kevin G. Clark, Phil Tippett & Marc Stevens

As I mentioned last night - it' so great to be able to attend an event like ADAPT and enjoy the opportunity to mingle and meet people. It's also cool to read about our fair city in from the eyes of our friends from CG Society: http://features.cgsociety.org/adapt07/

Kevin G. Clark with CGSociety's Paul Hellard (L) and Andrew Plumer (R)

Anne-Marie & Jonny - The indefatigable ADAPT conference organizers

Ron Martin (Stage 3 Media) &Maggie Kathwaroon (Meteor Studios)

I am looking forward to Greg Punchatz and his wife Liz's arrival in Montreal tonight, we are meeting them for dinner with a few other guests from out of town.

I was also catching up on Marc B's blog this morning. It's great to see Modus hiring so much talent in October. Montreal is growing so fast - there are so many jobs here for XSI artists! http://www.marcbourbonnais.com/blog/

And if you need any help installing XSI - I now have one install under my belt!

The rest of the album is here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/jgoldfin2007/ADAPT2007

Tuesday at ADAPT Montreal

Blogging live from ADAPT, standing here with Softimage customer Ron Martin, Bill Desowitz from vfxworld.com and Jonny Abenheim of ADAPT. We are about to go into the Autodesk cocktail party, just chilling in the lobby first.

It's a beautiful summer-like day in Montreal, and close to 1000 people have gathered in Montreal to attend presentations from studios around the world like Double Negative, Pixar, Bioware, Ubisoft and more. This is the second year of the conference, and its great to see how its doubled in both attendance and sessions.

It's great to see so many faces here from SIGGRAPH - our friends Syd Mead and Roger Servick are here again, our friends from Gnomon are in town, the House of Moves team arrives tomorrow, and of course, ADAPT systems sponsor Dell are also represented. For us at Softimage, its great to be able to spend the time connecting with customers and listening to their presentations. Something we don't get to do at SIGGRAPH - actually take the time to watch and listen! Dilip and Herman and Sid are attending the sessions today, I think more Soft staff will be there tomorrow.

I am looking forward to Ron's Sanctuary presentation tomorrow, and I am VERY pleased to say that I personally installed the license for Greg's preso on Thursday. Yes - my very first install - and it worked flawlessly (Of course!)

Anyway - time for cocktails. See you tomorrow - with pictures!

Softimage on the Road.. in Montreal!

Even when we are home, we have something going on!

Today is the beginning of ADAPT Montreal - a great conference being held here right here in our home town. In it's sophomore year, ADAPT has a line-up of the industry's best and brightest artists and legends.

Check it out:
http://www.adaptmontreal.com/

Greg Punchatz (Janimation) and Ron Martin (Stage 3 Media) are flying in to be our guest presenters, and we are also excited to see our local talent Rob Moodie (Buzz Images), Marc Bourbonnais (Modus FX), Sebastien Racine (Ubisoft) and Pierre Raymond (Hybride) tell their stories.

We have events going on all week, so Kevin and I will be reporting on the conference and the activities as it goes on.

Looking forward to our friends and partners coming to visit our fair city, including Syd Mead and Roger Servik, Patrick Hannen (Dell) and my favorite party co-host Scott Gagain (House of Moves).

It's great to be home and even better to have such an exciting event to come home to!

jen

Photos from India

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

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!

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

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