end of the conference

manned the booth, saw some old friends from CalArts, and had dinner at a mexican restaurant in walt's town. we met alum, people promoting things, and saw some new technologies (cloud-based pipeline organization and file storage, motion capture systems, ultra-hi-resolution photography, "air painting," and many others).

someone stole the little green guy, so I stood in for him.

A whole city was built and torn down with effciency. this guy started talking to me, and I fled immediately, figuring him to be a plant from the NSA.

I also got to see the new umbrella film out by Claire's friend Saschka, who works at Pixar. This at one of the screenings, which included student, commercial, and I guess independent work. Nice design with the Pixar short, strong atmosphere and rich but subtle color palette. Same old heartwarming story. One shouldn't look to Pixar to do anything avant garde, content-wise, and their framework in that regard is conservative and conventional, unchallenging in its comforting nostalgia.

this body-fitting device is used to control a virtual environment. one nice thing about an event like SIGGRAPH is the high level of interactivity - unlike at a film festival, you get a lot of hands-on participation with the ideas being presented.

...and los angeles is a strange place. this image of sweet little silver baby Jesus and Mom taken out at the old "Tower of Power" church grounds in Anaheim, the Crystal Cathedral, oddly purchased by Southern California Catholics from evangelical zealots fighting amongst themselves over God Knows What (but I bet it had little to do with God).

out west, you still feel the optimistic allure of people doing whatever they want, in the technicolor sunshine, much of it coming to fruition as trashy and superficial (rather displaying a naïveté unaccompanied by anything resembling depth of content), but nonetheless embodying a sense of energy and open-ness that one doesn't feel on the East Coast, where people live in congested urban agglomerations and where the deeper roots can result in a more grumpy perspective. it's good to have both coasts. now about that middle section...