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!
