last weekend at the blender institute we finally swapped out the shabby old carpet in the STFU corner with a new cosy one. now it even has a nice zen garden feeling to it! out of pure boredom i decided to record timelapse videos: 1) me painting the walls between 8 pm and 2 am (13.9 megs) 2) ton roosendaal and me putting in the new carpet the next day (22.2 megs)
back to DVD recording!
.andy
today i was moving random stuff around in the institute and discovered a rather huge pile of our old elephants dream artwork. fellow blender institutionist bassam kurdali helped me to scatter them around the table for a last photoshoot and a minute of memorial silence.
on a more related note: yes, i’m currently working at the blender institute in amsterdam. aside from helping with blender e-shop orders, cleaning stuff and preparing for peach, i’m also recording a special video tutorial DVD for the blender foundation. in a few weeks peach is going into production… and the countdown starts. exciting times!
.andy
1:00 am: I’m sitting in the train back to Karlsruhe… and yup, that was day one.
In the morning I got up really early and went to Stuttgart to get my first taste of FMX as a speaker dude. Got my badge, ticket and goodies all nicely packed up in a 255;0;0-colored (really, amazingly, mind-bogglingly red) FMX shoulder bag.
The first talk I attended was on the making of Monster Samurai, a really funny short film/feature/tv series by the some of the people behind Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The style is very unique: stylized characters, shapes and surfaces, but also lot of attention to detail.
Dug myself through the schedule to find out which talks to attend and courses to take this week. Saw the session about The Ugly Duckling And Me and about CG movie creation on a limited budget, something that’s going to be kinda important for me soon (hint-hint). Still have to prepare my workshops for friday!
The weather was really nice, so I went around the city for a while, too. After all, May 1 is an official german holiday (no shops open and a lot of people walking around eating ice cream) and Stuttgart is sorta nice.
In the evening I watched the re-screening of the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater show 2006, which got me cringing once more (after having seen it at SIGGRAPH the year before): an awesome compilation of the best digital artwork in the world… argh, I need time to work on my own projects now!
Later that night I managed to meet with Nadine and a bunch of guys and gals from the German Film School. We had drinks and did some talking, but stupidly I had to leave earlier for my train. (Note to myself: get a train ticket next time that doesn’t require you to depart on the same day again).
Also briefly stumbled into Geoffrey Niquet from BUF Compagnie (whom I’ve met at the Future Film Festival and amazingly enough he recognized me). He’s going to give another talk about the marvelous CG imagery in Arthur et les Minimoys on wednesday morning, definitely not gonna miss that!
To sum it up, for the first day it wasn’t really that exciting: Couldn’t meet who I planned to, didn’t see many new things, but learned a few new tricks. Most of the fun stuff starts on wednesday anyway, bring it on!
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yes, it’s indeed been a while since… any update on this site, so you might be curious what kept me busy for so long!
wellll, the crazy times started with a short trip to boston for siggraph 06. i had a lot of fun at the open source pavillion (which i also helped designing and constructing) with a few blender demos and support. shortly after that spent a month in argentina, helping out the totally courageous folks at the plumiferos project. in the meantime - while i was still being flooded with loads of emails in the aftermath of elephants dream and giving a few internet- and tv interviews about our movie - i applied, got accepted and eventually enrolled at the hochschule fuer gestaltung (university for visual arts) in karlsruhe, germany.
next weekend i will be travelling to bologna, italy to give a talk about elephants dream together with bassam at the future film festival. apart from quite a few uni projects i’m also planning to produce another short movie. busy busy busy… oh well… i’ll post another update as soon as i find my brain.
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