Siggraph 2008 Day 2: Massive Limo and Lightstream

Wednesday at Siggraph was totally insane and unbelievably awesome!!!!! I took the subway in the morning from Kurt's place in North Hollywood to check into my hotel. Dumped off my stuff and took off to the LA Convention Center... in STYLE!!!!!! So turns out that Massive Software paid for Limousines to cart people back and forth all week from the Westin to the LA Convention Center!! So there were just Massive Limos sitting outside there while I was waiting for the shuttle bus... and the driver said, "Hey, if you need a ride back to the convention center, I'm going there too!!!" By the time he finished his sentence I was already in the Limo. :) This was my first time EVER in a Limosine and it was just the coolest thing ever. Chatted with some people on the way about their company's 3D pipelines. Hehe, good times. :)

Then off to the convention center and a ton of running around. Saw the exhibition floor for just about 30 minutes then got a call from Heather McNabb, an old friend from the Pixar days and who is now an illustrator and is also taking some Animator Mentor courses!! So that was fantastic, we caught up on everything and had some lunch, then took off to a panel by Rob Coleman (former Animation Lead at ILM) and a bunch of other ex-ILM'ers called "Starting your own Animation Studio." It was ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING and I must have scribbled down about 1000 notes. :) Very, very cool, and they addressed a lot of the issues I've always wondered about... like how you can possibly try to create images as good as the company you used to work at, but without ANY home-grown software, any backend stuff, any tools, any pre-existing pipeline, any resources.... totally wild, right?!?!?! Well they talked about a lot of these issues, and how they are so excited just to be buying the desks from IKEA and putting them together themselves, and kinda throwing themselves into this new venture. It was inspiring and totally amazing. So interesting and scary with it's "all in" kind of style, but I guess that's what entrepreneurial ventures are all about. So that was amazing, and they talked about their new company name and brand new logo for their company, "Lightstream Animation." They also showed us picture of moving into their new place and the work they have been doing lately. Very cool stuff, and an amazing result from such a small amount of (brilliant) people. :) http://www.lightstreamanimation.com/ Absolutely inspiring.


Massive Limousine!!


Free drinks inside!!


Stars on the roof


Iron Man stuff at the booth!


More of the booth


Awesome front of the booth


Coraline models


Coraline stuff from LAIKA, this was super cool. Written by Neil Gaiman and directed by the guy who directed Nightmare Before Christmas. This is gonna be awesome.


Wall-E stuff at the Pixar booth


Pixar booth also fancy as usual