AnimFX NZ – First Conference Day

(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.