Nov 112011
 

I was invited to speak at the AnimFX NZ conference in Wellington, NZ. The timing was perfect – 25 years ago Sarah and I spent two weeks in New Zealand on our honeymoon – so we decided to take some extra time on this trip and visit the country again for our anniversary.

Here’s our chronicle of the trip.

Nov 132011
 

Flying to Wellington is an all day event – we left on Friday night at 7pm, and arrived in Auckland at 5am Sunday morning. Saturday was passed over completely somewhere mid-Pacific Ocean, even though the flight was only about 12 hours.

SFO-AKL

Air New Zealand Flight 7 from SFO to Auckland.

We had a couple of hours at the Auckland airport to clear customs, check in for our domestic flight, and watch the sun rise.

Sunrise in Auckland

Sunrise in Auckland - We flew the wicked looking all black plane, painted in honor of New Zealand's ALL BLACKS Rugby Team.

What? They have Dunkin’ Donuts in New Zealand but not in California!?

NZ is Dunkin'

NZ is Dunkin'

Nov 132011
 

The first thing we learned upon arriving in Wellington is how good the coffee is. We had a bit of time to wait at the airport before Kim and Ray picked us up, so we grabbed some coffee at a shop by baggage claim. I was introduced to a ‘Flat White’, which is a Latte with a double shot of coffee in it, and it was excellent. This has become my new standard in NZ.

Kim is a friend of mine through the Visual Effects Society (VES), and is the reason I was invited to speak at AnimFX. She and Ray (both from Sauce FX) picked us up and gave us a driving tour of Weta on our way to the hotel. After hearing about Weta Digital for the first time when they were ramping up for “Lord of the Rings”, I’ve been following their work and rise to CG superpower. As is the case with so many effects and animation ‘shops,’ their humble exteriors hide the amazing work that is going on inside.

The Weta Cave

The Weta Cave - their retail shop

We checked into the Museum Hotel, right across from the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum where the conference will be happening.

View of the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum

View of the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum from our room at the Museum Hotel. The AnimFX conference is held at the Te Papa.

After lunch down the street and a walk through the Sunday farmers’ market, we boarded a bus tour of Wellington to help us get our bearings. We learned a bit about NZ politics (though it still remains somewhat cryptic to me), saw some wonderful historic architecture, drove along the Carmel-esque shoreline, and went to the top of things.

View of Wellington, NZ

Wellington, from the top of the cable car

Old St. Paul's in Wellington

Old St. Paul's, a beautiful wood church in Wellington

Sarah

Sarah, in Old St. Paul's

Me, Wellington, NZ

The view of Wellington from Mt. Victoria

We ended the day with a walk along the waterfront, stopping for drinks and a great dinner at Macs brewery.

Day 1, Winding Down

I had a Macs Wheat Beer, while Sarah dreamt of sleeping

Great Dinner

Chicken breast marinated in hard cider, with leeks, carrots and mushrooms. Yum.

Nov 142011
 

The conference starts tomorrow, so even though I’m ready for my sessions most of the day was spent reworking slides and fretting.

After breakfast (with great coffee!) at Joe’s Garage and lunch on a decommissioned tug boat nee cafe, Sarah toured the Te Papa museum as a visitor, and I toured it as part of tech prep to check out the rooms and computer/display compatibilities.  I had the pleasure of meeting Enrico Casarosa of Pixar, who will be presenting the Southern Hemisphere premiere of his short ‘La Luna’ on Tuesday.

AnimFX NZ Tech Prep

Enrico Casarosa checking out the projection of "La Luna" in the theater at Te Papa.

It’s always comforting to walk though the spaces you’ll be presenting in beforehand, especially when it’s as well organized as the AnimFX and Te Papa teams are – everything plugged in and worked perfectly the first time.

In the evening there was a VIP dinner at the Museum Hotel’s Hippopotamus Restaurant. Fantastic food with fascinating people. I got to meet many of the other presenters and hosts.

AnimFX NZ Dinner

VIP dinner at Hippopotamus. I wish I could have sat at both tables!

Hippopotamus Dessert

This was one of the astonishing options for dessert at Hippopotamus - a raspberry delight with almond macaroons.

Nov 152011
 
AnimFX NZ

Welcome to AnimFX NZ at the Te Papa Museum

(Not too many pictures today, I was mostly sequestered away at the conference, and didn’t give Sarah a camera to take with her.)

AnimFX began its three day run today with a full schedule of sessions. I presented a session at noon, so was able to sit in on three morning sessions (which I wrote about on my main blog). Lance Priebe spoke about his experiences starting Club Penguin, Patrick Hudson talked about transitioning Robot Entertainment from a console game developer to a mobile and web game developer, and Tracey Sellar from Microsoft gave us insights into their user testing labs.

My forty minute Company Pitch Session was set up as a precursor to my Master Class on Entrepreneurship tomorrow – 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.

After lunch were more breakout sessions, but I spent much of the time talking to individuals in the lobby.

The highlight of the afternoon was a presentation by Enrico Casarosa from Pixar speaking on the making of his short, “La Luna.” It’s a beautiful film and he put together an inspiring presentation about the design process.

Meanwhile, Sarah went on a tour with one other woman who was visiting in the area. They went to the northeast of Wellington, through the suburbs and along the high-cliffed island-studded coast. They visited a chocolate factory, where Sarah discovered that kiwi chocolate wasn’t covered fruit, but rather covered jelly. Yeech. But the honey chocolate was fantastic – or so she says since she didn’t bring any back for me. The tour also went to the Southward Car Museum, Sir Southward’s personal collection, including Mickey Cohen’s 1950 Cadillac with bullet proof windows, bomb proof floor and reinforced doors. The windows had been strafed with bullets. The most impressive feature to Sarah was the pivoting windshields for machine gun accessibility. I had no idea she dug that kind of stuff. The Nash Metropolitan (similar to the one I used to have which she didn’t really dig at all) looked huge next to a Fiat 500 and an Isetta.

We had dinner at Ortega’s Fish Shack, enjoying wonderful dishes that we had never heard of before and couldn’t pronounce anyway.

Ortega's

After a great dinner at Ortega's Fish Shack