Post by Supertramp78 on Aug 22, 2014 12:49:41 GMT -5
I haven't had much to post here even if I was posting which I wasn't. As Tom Lehrer said, "If you can't communicate, the very least you can do is shut up." I'll try to keep out of the more contentious threads. My "WTF??" reaction needs to be offset with the "what the hell good would it really do" reality of this place.
Not a lot happened with me, but Cameron has been busy.
He was a TA for a summer class that had to cover game design, graphic design and computer animation in ten weeks. Brutal schedule. But, as he frequently told me, "It is a lot easier teaching these classes than taking them."
One big news thing was regarding the videos he works on last summer. Specifically the one with the robots. That was a summer industry class with ReelFX Studio and the Viz Lab. You get ten weeks to produce a finished 30 second animation and most years you just move into the lab and live there for the duration.
First his film was accepted to the Texas Independent Film Festival. Don't get excited. This was the first year event sponsored by an Aggie film group on Campus and held on Campus and I honestly think they were taking anything that even kind of looked good in order to fill a three day schedule. At one point Cameron had to take part in a media Q&A with a bunch of other filmmakers. Of the five people on stage, the other four had produced live action shows or documentaries. Cameron's was computer animated. The reporters would ask a question and all five would answer it. One of the questions was "How much did you follow a script vs. how much was adlibbed on set?" When they handed the mic to Cameron he said, "We didn't have a script. We just set the camera up and let the robots do their thing."
After that, he packaged up all three of the clips and wrote a description of the project and sent it to ACM SIGGRAPH for inclusion in their annual world wide conference Dailies presentations. It got accepted. The event was in Vancouver this year. ACM is a very old computer user group (the ACM stands for Association for Computing Machinery) and the SIGGRAPH part stands for special interest group graphics - back when computer graphics was brand new. This group has been around since 1974. So think back on what computer graphics have done since 1974. This is the largest professional group of its kind anywhere. All the special effect houses, animation film studios and computer graphics houses are members. Thousands of people show up every year and the new tech room is under a non-disclosure rule. In fact most of the conference is considered confidential. Cameron has been attending for three years now since over that time period he has been the President of the Texas A&M chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH.
viz.arch.tamu.edu/about/news/2014/8/11/global-graphics-conference/
You can find links to all three robot vids here.
Dailies are a big deal. There are hundreds entries and less than 50 make the cut. You get up and you have 90 seconds to present your clip and talk about what you did. Sometimes it is some technical whizzy you invented or a particularly difficult effect shot you created or a short animation that is very good. Most years SOMEONE connected to A&M gets something into Dailies. Or at least they try like the dickens to. This year it was the robots project from last summer.
Here is the trailer that SIGGRAPH did for the Dailies and a clip from one of the three robot shorts is in there.
There were three vids and each was 30 seconds so they got to show all three of them. This meant that all of the people involved could put "SIGGRAPH Dailies" on their resume and reels. It meant they had to give a talk and since Cameron did the submission and got it accepted and wrote the initial draft (and they only had 90 seconds anyway), he gave the talk. He pulled everyone up on stage with him who played a part in any way at all.
Afterwards they poll the audience to rank the presentations and clips and "Dam Robots" came in 8th overall. On one hand that sounds good but always the pragmatist, Cameron was quick to point out that there were a LOT of supportive Aggies in that room.
After this he got a lot more attention in the job fair portion of the show when they noticed that his layout reel included clips from that show. He made a lot of really good contacts and still has a lot of work to do.
He also will be working a different set of two jobs this fall.
The Viz Lab got a new prof last year from Electronic Arts - a very large game company. The guy was in charge of all graphics for their NFL game despite the fact that he was from Germany and was much more interested in soccer. He now teaches game design and concepts. In one recent class he told everyone that by the end of the week they had to write a grass simulation and their first job was to find reference material. Instantly, everyone in the class opened their laptops and started to Google images of grass.
"NO!!!! What are you doing?" he yelled. "Get off your asses. Shut down your computers. Go outside and look at some REAL GRASS!"
Cameron loves this guy. Anyway he got a grant to create a game that teaches Calculus because calculus not only sucks, but it is a major reason many college students drop out of college. They can't pass calculus and way too many degrees (like business for some reason) require calculus despite a good argument being made that they don't need it. But if a fun game could be created that actually taught you calculus, then more people might pass calculus, graduations rates might go up and whoever published the game would be rich as hell.
He ran into Cameron in a department meeting and asked him if he would work on the project as a project manager, artist, layout, general anything role.
Cameron has a book by some animation guy and the book lists tips on getting into the field. One of those tips was "Never turn down a battlefield promotion." No matter what it is, say yes. Even if you can't do it, say yes and learn how to do it. Always say yes. Be known as the guy who will always help.
Cameron said yes. It turned out to be a paying gig. They call it a GANT job. Graduate Assistant Non-Teaching position. This in addition to also having a real teaching job next semester running one of the studio classes - the continuation of the class he taught last spring. This resulted in him resigning from the graphic artist job he has had at the college of veterinary medicine for the last two years. But the pay will be better, the game project is expected to run at least a year, and the experience he gets on it will look great later.
On top of that he has nine hours of research class hours in order to still qualify as being a student. One of those three hours will be a project with an art history prof to flush out the coursework for a History of Animation class that Cameron generated last semester. Right now it is only five lectures and may not get too much better but the Art History guy sees a lot of potential (and the Viz department wants to keep teaching it and if Cameron ever leaves they can't) so he is going to try to package it up over the next year.
That's about it. Heading out of town in a few for yet another in what seems like a never ending series of funerals. Part and parcel to being my age I guess. This one is a very very close friend of Kelly's family. Sweet old lady. Her daughter played flute at our wedding.
That's all for now.
