Kooji does Boston - Day Five

Today was particularly special, not only because it was my 27th birthday but also because this was the day that the main event's show floor opened. We had prepared for this by stocking up with several carrier bags beforehand for all the DVDs, brochures, books, sweeties, lobsters, yoyos, walking teapots and all the other many free goodies that were to be had.

Outside the entrance to the ‘Electronic Theater.’

We began with a visit to the Electronic Theater. This is a major attraction at SIGGRAPH and the crowd making its way into the venue was huge. As part of the Computer Animation Festival the submissions made to this year’s Electronic Theater hit record numbers. We saw work from countries all across the globe including the Guinness ‘noitulovE,’ ad from the United Kingdom, Foster’s Austrailia ‘Big Ad,’ a short film called ‘My Date From Hell,’ from Germany and our favourite: ‘One Rat Short’ which won Best of Show and told the tale of two rats and their attempt to escape a laboratory.



Guinness Draught "noitulovE"



It's a BIG ad!



My Date from Hell (Trailer)



One Rat Short

Just as we were leaving the theatre we were stopped by two cameramen from the Computer Graphics Society and asked if I would say a little about what I’d just seen for a video interview that would be uploaded to their site. I was really excited about this and so I went on at length about our reasons for being at SIGGRAPH, how far we’d travelled, Leeds Met University, the Space-Time competition and how amazed by all the sights we were. They thanked us and gave us a link to their site:

http://features.cgsociety.org/siggraph2006/part_one/



Here's the CG Society's video in all it's glory - my interview is at 5 minutes 12. I sound like I've been on fifty fags a day but it's actually a bad case of laringitis!

We then spent the rest of the day exploring the main exhibition. Industrial Light and Magic, LucasFilms, Disney and many others were exhibiting and we handed our portfolios to LucasArts who were also busy recruiting. We asked them if they had any positions opening in the United Kingdom to which they replied “No, but we have vacancies in Singapore.” I don’t think we would be able to commute that far we said, especially since it’s further away than the United States! It took us several hours to get round every booth and when we finally arrived at the Pixar booth I was disappointed to be told that they had run out of the famous walking teapots. They assured us that there would be ample supplies tomorrow and so we said we’d return in the morning. We couldn’t travel all this way and not bring at least one back!

Johnny tucking into the Spaghetti Cow outside the Conference Centre.

On our way back to the hotel in Woburn, which is a little town just outside Boston, we bumped into our tutors Simon and Duncan in the train station. This was pretty surreal since at the time I was actually saying ‘I wonder what Simon and Duncan have been up to this week’ and then there they were walking up to us! We had already bumped into Simon on Sunday so to see them again by chance was very lucky. We told them about the interview with the AutoDesk Coach group from SEMAFX and the Computer Graphics Society video and we all agreed that the event had been phenomenal so far.

The Silver Line in Boston’s Subway – The ‘T.’


The evening consisted of a meal for two and drinks at ‘Polcaris,’ a lovely little Italian American restaurant in Woburn, to celebrate my birthday. It was the perfect end to the best birthday I’ve ever had.

>>> Kooji does Boston - Day Six