Siggraph is still going strong and it’s only Wednesday. The last couple of days have been amazing. It’s been overload of amazing.
Monday was amazing. I spent all day Monday doing Animation Mentor graduation related things. I met up with a bunch of people in the morning to run down to the convention center to start getting ready for graduation. Lots of random tasks but we were snapping pictures all through out it. Ninja fights in the hall. Awesome. Grads came for rehearsals and there was a lot of pointing at name tags and people saying “Hey! I know you!” We helped them run through everything, got a break to sit and chit chat, and then it was time for the actual ceremonies. 
The graduation ceremonies were amazing. Full of great work, awesome students, and man, that room was swelling with passion. It was awesome to watch Bobby, Shawn, and Carlos read the names and be quite emotional about it. But hey, look at these guys and what they’ve created - I think you’d be emotional too.
Spike, AM’s mascot actually was there at the end. So we danced with him and took plenty of pictures. Then it was time to head to the W Hotel, for the after party. The party was on the roof AND it was a beach. So we stood in the sand all night. A beach…on the roof. How awesome is that. Fire pit over there, trees over here…gah, so amazing. I ended up talking with an AM staff person for an hour about randomness and then I started talking around. I actually ended up talking to Robert Russ, an animator at Pixar for about half an hour, Kim, a recruiter from Dreamworks for half an hour, and tEric and Alfonso from Pixar for another hour. Really cool that they sat and chatted though, giving advice, talking animation, talking randomness.
After a little bit of sleep it was time to start again. Each night so far is even more amazing which I don’t think is possible. Last night was the parties. A friend form AM and I first swung by the Pixar party that I got an invite to earlier in the day. They had rented out an entire bar and inside they were playing Pixar movies - I bet you that was a first. We actually ran and got food when we first got there as the night before at the AM party we started talking first instead and never got food. So we sat across on the empty side of the bar and within a few minutes two of the Pixar recruiters we met earlier came over and started chatting with us and then the two TD guys came up and joined us. So we ended up chatting with them until about 10 when we took off. Lots of good tips and it was pretty cool to chat with them.
So we took off to the Dreamworks party, up to the roof for the party. Awesome. There were a ton of people and a lot of AM students there. I spent the night with them and then talked with Jason Schleiffer, an animator, Darcie, the animation director over all of DW, and then Jason Reisig, animation supervisor on Kung Fu Panda and Simon Otto, another animation supervisor for another movie, for the rest of the night. Those guys are hilarious and we chatted forever. It was a LOT of fun.
Oh, and earlier yesterday we met up with some A< people to invade the exhibits hall as it opened up for the first time. It was nuts. People rushed for the Pixar booth which was funny. My group and I wandered over there and ended up still getting the free poster of Ratatouille. Lol. Later on we got a teapot - a Siggraph-Pixar thing I guess. Wandered around the booths and talked to people at all the big studios as well as some little ones. I got cards from a few people here and there to keep in touch which will be cool.
We also had our Birds of a Feather meeting - group meeting for like people. So in our case, AM. they announced a bunch of AWESOME new features coming to the site and they also had recruiters from studios around that we chatted with. Again, a really inspiring time
So far it’s been a blast. Being around this huge group of passionate people has been excellent. They’re genuine people who like to have a good time - pretty amazing stuff.
