October has been a hectic month. Here's the reason why I had disappeared for a while...
I was invited to the "Seoul International Family Film Festival 2009" (www.sifff.org) to deliver a workshop on 3D Stereoscopic animation basics, aimed primarily at families and children. The event was promoted as a Red Star Studio workshop (www.redstar3d.com) which is the studio I work for at the moment. I would like to write a bit about the experience, which will also serve me to keep it for myself as a good memo!!
The city of Seoul is very modern, full of lights, people, cars, buildings...and screens! I felt for a moment like Lost in Translation, everything seemed surreal. The place where I stayed was "Myeng Dong", where apparently there is a massive japanese population.
Unfortunately there wasn't much time for sight seeing, but nevertheless the whole trip was a fun experience. I managed to meet some great people from all over the world, most of them film makers...some of them were really big in the live action industry, like Christopher Wyatt (film producer in the US, one of his well known films was "Napoleon Dynamite") and Randal Kleiser (great director, made films like "Flight of the Navigator" and "White Fang"). There were also some great talented directors from Europe, such as Nils Malmros from Denmark, Johan Bogaeus and Fredrik Edfeldt from Sweeden, and Luigi Ferloni from Italy.
The workshop sessions went very well, my schedule involved 3 days of presentation talks on one hour slots, and one of the days I also had to take part on a 30 mins Q&A session after the screening of Red Star's award winning short "The Curse of Skull Rock". My talks were about concepts of animation, stereopsis, and showing goodies of some redstar films (animation passes, renders, video captures of rigs, etc...) as well as screening "The Curse of Skull Rock". The results were very positive, and kids really loved it! I will never forget how one child came to me and was full of happiness confessing he wanted to become an animator when he would grow up...his parents even asked me to take a picture with them!
The experience was wonderful. Teaching audiences about animation was just fantastic. Korean audiences are very smart and seemed to understand very well. Both parents and children enjoyed and reacted to what I showed. Some even confessed to me after the talks that they got inspired. It all was surreal and I loved every minute of it.
I was also interviewed by a journalist from a national film magazine (see the pics above), and it was a lot of fun! Whoever knows korean could please translate the pages for me, I'm really intrigued!!
So yeah, now I'm back and hopefully will be posting more in the blog....oh wait, I've got another presentation next wednesday at the Bradford Animation Festival 2009 Games event!! Yep, though is not a big talk, I'll be contributing for 10-15 mins on a talk about my experience in animating characters for Broken Sword: Shadow of The Templars Director's Cut...Hopefully I'll see some of you in BRadford!!
Here, a nice 2 min. portrait sketch of myself, by Randal Kleiser!!
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