New Orleans

Rockstars

No.

There was Tom, the older AM grad, who used to be an
art director.

The girl from SCAD who still had a year to go.

Maybe 70% of the people who came up to the booth
were looking for an animator position. Many of that
group wanted to show their reels on their iPhones or
laptops. Nine-nine percent of these impromptu
screenings would not have made even the first cut
here at the studio. It was hard to walk the line of
constructive criticism as they were hanging off of
every word--and article and preposition--that
came out of my mouth

Brand

I realized part of why we're at Siggraph is just to be good
ambassadors for our own Bluesky brand, and our place
in the industry. Various schools want to build their
animation programs, and they want to get some credibility
by having a relationship with Bluesky. Sometimes it was
"can you come to our school on career/recruiting days."
Sometimes they would just want to know what to tell their
students what we're looking for on a demo reel.

Outsourcing

Several start-up studios in other countries wanted to talk to us about
outsourcing. I talked for quite a while with a rep for a studio in China
that employs 1500 animators. They are starting to get game work
sent to them, but their goal is for a slice of the feature animation
market. The rep showed me some tests, much of which were
attempts to recreate shots from high end vfx shows.

They did their version of Gollum, which looked kind of like WETA's
Gollum with about 40% of the appeal and animation quaility.
The guys were basically asking me "How do we get better?" I said they
have to spend money on american salaries and bring over seasoned
animators to supervise (not me).

Their top animators make 1200.00 a month. When they do get good,
they will be definitely be taking jobs away from here. Its similar to what
happened to the domestic auto industry, and this Chinese studio is like
Japan in the 50s and 60s, attempting to reverse engineer something
we currently are the best at.

I also spoke with two young Columbian animators who are starting an
Animation school in Medellin and also Sao Paolo, Brasil. They wanted
to buy me a coffee and sit me down for an hour to learn about the
production pipeline of an animated feature, and use this to structure
their production courses. They seemed to have very ambitious plans
as to how much of a film would get produced by 15 students in a
semester, and I think I did nothing but confuse them when
attempting to break down the just part of the pipeline. I'm sure
they'll figure out the best way to structure things for
their purposes.

Weds

Weds afternoon. Looking down Chartres St. Temps were in the 90s all week.