From my 100Loaves blog. I learned that there’s a 50% variance in the amount of salt you might be adding to your recipe if you use a simple tsp to measure it. It depends very much on the type of salt you use, and it can really screw up your results. More here: It’s the Salt, Stupid.

Oh, and I really love this picture.

San Francisco Fog

Did you ever wonder why San Francisco is famous for its fog? I was driving north on Hwy 280 this morning and was confronted by this. A quarter mile later and you could only see about four car lengths in front of you.

“Megalodon” is the largest team we’ve had yet, with 11 students on it. They are working on a project for Electronic Arts. Without giving away too much, they are developing a multiplayer game using an internally developed game engine at EA that will run in WebGL compliant browsers (like Chrome).

This picture was taken in front of a conference room at EA with wonderful semi-frosted glass walls.

Megalodon Team

“Crescendo Encore” are building upon last semester’s project for Korean game company SmileGate, this time developing a music game that will run on XBox in addition to PCs.

Crescendo Encore Team

I love instructables.com – if you’re a DIY’er like me it’s a great resource for instructions and inspiration. I made an instructable for my Lifeguard Chair, and followed that one up with an instructable for this project. You can see it at www.instructables.com/id/Simple-Monitor-Backlight/. I was surprised to see it make it to the front page for a couple days, and it was featured in their weekly email blast, too. Thanks Instructables!

Simple monitor backlight at work.

Behind the scenes of a monitor backlight.

If you click on one of the images in the sets below it will pop up a slideshow for you.

One A Day

Not necessarily the best shot of the day, but the one that I think is the most representative.

Horizons

We traveled the length of New Zealand’s north island, exploring its coastline, cities, farmlands and forests. Other than the Kauri trees and waterfalls, it is a basically horizontal land.

Food

We also explored a lot of restaurants, enjoying a wonderful array of beautifully prepared food. Dining in New Zealand is world class and locally sourced.

AnimFX was held at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum in Wellington, NZ

(Note: My wife and I spent two weeks in New Zealand, with AnimFX making up the first five days. This post is mostly excepted from our travelog for the whole trip which can be found here.)

I was invited to speak at AnimFX in New Zealand at this year’s conference on Nov 15-17. The Visual Effects Society is one of the event’s partners, and it was through my friend and fellow VES Board Member Kim Lavery that my invitation was extended. But it was also because of what we’re doing at CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center that they felt I could be a relevant speaker for the attendees.

The conference is organized by the GAV Trust to advance the Gaming, Animation and Visual Effects industry in New Zealand. Most of the participants are Kiwis, and include students, producers, creative professionals in games, animation, effects and TV production, business owners, and representatives from New Zealand’s Trade and Enterprise group. The speakers are a mix of NZ and international professionals. Overall, about 250-300 people participate in the event.

I did two sessions, the larger was a five hour Master Class on Entrepreneurship in Entertainment Technology, distilled down from the 15 week course I do at the ETC under the same title.  The smaller session was a forty minute section for people to practice pitching their companies, but was set up the day before the longer class. More details on both are below.

Monday – Tech Prep

On Monday, the day before the conference opened, most of the speakers had arrived and we all did a tech check with the proper equipment in the rooms we would be speaking in. Kudos to the tech crew at Te Papa Museum – everything worked seamlessly right off. That evening there was a VIP dinner at Hippopotamus Restaurant across from the museum where we all got a chance to meet the other speakers and our hosts. Quite fun.

Enrico Casarosa of Pixar during tech check, testing out the projection in the main theater for his presentation on "La Luna."

Tuesday – Short Sessions

The conference began on Tuesday with an inspiring talk by Lance Priebe, creator of Club Penguin. If you ever feel frustrated that you can’t find time to work on your pet projects, take a lesson from Lance: he set aside Wednesday nights to work on what became Club Penguin while he was doing web design. His long term commitment to his passion turned into the biggest kids online game in the world (and he had some crazy stats about that!).  Patrick Hudson of Robot Entertainment talked about their transition from big budget console game creation to attacking the downloadable and mobile games market, and Tracey Sellar shared her experiences at Microsoft Games Studio in doing deep user research on their games.

My “Company Pitch Session” on Tuesday went according to plan, as long as the plan was Plan B. The forty minute session was set up as a precursor to my Master Class on Entrepreneurship the following day – anyone who wanted to do a practice pitch about their company was invited to do so, with the promise of a friendly audience and constructive feedback. I had a Plan B ready under the assumption that people would show up to be in the audience, and no one would be willing to put themselves out there and pitch. It pays to be prepared, as there was an audience of over fifty people, and no one wanted to brave the crowd. So instead I spoke about reasons to pitch, some good rules of thumb to use, and then we deconstructed a very successful pitch from a company who made their TechStars Demo Day presentation available on line. Overall it went well, and let me spend a bit of time in front of the room before the next day’s five hour session.

After lunch were four other breakout sessions, which I unfortunately missed. I got wrapped up talking to other attendees and doing some last minute editing for my class.

In the late afternoon, Enrico screened the Southern Hemisphere premiere of his short, “La Luna,” followed by a wonderfully illustrated walk through his creative process for creating the film at Pixar. This was followed by closing remarks and a cocktail party hosted by the New Zealand Game Developers Association.

Wednesday – Master Classes

Wednesday’s program had three tracks – a Games Master Class, an Animation Master Class and my Entrepreneurship in Entertainment Technology Master Class. The concurrent classes went from 9:00am to 3:00pm with an hour for lunch. This was my big work day. I had distilled my fifteen week class at CMU down to five hours.

Forty four people signed up for the class, all Kiwis, with a variety of backgrounds and experience from students to business owners to producers to representatives from NZ Trade and Enterprise. I had timed out the whole day on my notes and was right on schedule until about half way through. Utimately I ran long by about 15 minutes and sadly had to rush the last section.

The people in the class made this a very enjoyable experience – I wasn’t nervous about having enough material (in fact I was throwing stuff out right up until the day before), but I was a bit concerned about keeping everyone engaged though a five hour session. As it turned out we had a great dynamic – people shared their experiences, asked questions, and participated in some great discussions. I’m excited now about an opportunity to do this again, with obvious tuning based on the day’s experience. And next time I’ll have lemon and honey tea ready to fight off a subsequent day of hoarseness.

There were about 40 people in attendence, but I only remembered to take the picture after the class was over. These are most of the survivors.

Thursday – Weta Day

Weta Digital hosted everyone at their Park Road Post facility. They requested no photography or recordings on campus, so the best I did was this:

Me, outside Weta's Park Road Post

The morning had five speakers breaking down the making of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” including Eric Winquist (formerly of PDI!) going into detail on the Golden Gate Bridge sequence which he supervised. During the afternoon we were treated to talks by Wayne Stables and Jamie Beard about the genesis of the digital version of Tin Tin for “The Adventures of Tin Tin,” and pre-script visualization of action sequences for the film.

In between the sessions they hosted lunch for all of us at the local (lawn) bowling club. As is typical at conferences, these types of meals and coffee breaks make for great opportunities to meet new people and catch up with old acquaintances. Though I tend to be introverted in large groups of people, this crowd made it very easy to make some new friends.

I stuck around after the main events to watch two screenings of Enrico’s “La Luna” that were arranged for Weta employees in the evening. After seeing his talk on Tuesday it was fun to see the finished film a couple times more to appreciate the nuances that he exposed us to.

AnimFX closed with a party at Red Square in downtown Wellington. It was packed, loud, and lots of fun. The event felt way too short.

Thank you GAV Trust and the people of Wellington NZ for inviting me down!

The Hippo tank

Hippos are surprisingly graceful underwater, which this young lady is finding out – unflinching as the behemoth cruises by.

The chimps calmly take in the animal sights. They must see thousands of visitors up close every day, yet somehow seem to remain interested in the parade.

Eye to Eye

This older male seemed interested in the toddler, but I couldn’t tell how he felt about the older brother’s tongue antics – though it was simple to tell who had more life experience at this point.

Chimp to Chimp

Morphing Faces

In addition to allowing the camera to see both the observed and the observer, the reflections also afforded this real-time morphing between remote cousins.

Spying on the Neighbors

By just hanging there, these two monkeys managed to get their neighbors riled up to a full howling fit. I’m not sure why 20 people outside the windows didn’t have the same effect.

Finally, I played with one of the penguins for awhile. We did this routine for about 30 seconds before I started the camera rolling.

Stereo Lava

I took this stereo pair in 2003 at Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. Seeing it in 2D, it is a flat wall of lava, in 3D there are five distinct layers of rock. I think it’s a great example of the power of 3D in certain situations.

You need to be able to see 3D with your eyes crossed to view this properly.

Dino Ignacio of Visceral Games presenting to our ETC students.

Dino Ignacio is Lead UI Designer at EA’s Visceral Games. He gave a great presentation to our CMU ETC students about his work on Dead Space.

The photo was shot with my Canon 430EX flash angled to bounce of the wall to the right. This gave a wider soft light from the side, adding some nice depth to the scene. There was some editing in Lightroom to darken Kyu and Alex on the right, since they got the full blast of the flash. Dino was also the creator of “Bert is Evil,” so I added an homage to that in Photoshop.

Five Sided Square

“Five Sided Square” is a student-pitched project to develop a game for the Sifteo Cubeplatform. The photo was made with an off camera flash simulating light from a Sifteo cube. The team logo on the cube and some table reflections were added in Photoshop afterwards.

antEAter Team

The “antEAter” team is working on a project for Electronic Arts. Shot outdoors with a lot of fill flash.

Crescendo Team

“Crescendo” is developing a music game this semester for Korean game company SmileGate. Photo shot outdoors with not quite enough fill light, so I had to do some work in Lightroom.