Fun at SIGGRAPH

I'm spending this week in LA at SIGGRAPH. It's really great to be at a conference where I can concentrate on learning. Lots of interesting papers and folks doing cool experimental stuff. One group that I ran into, OnLatte, had whacked together the mechanical bits of a flatbed scanner, an old inkjet printer and some bits of electronics to come up with a wild printer that makes images by jetting caramel syrup onto the foam on top of a latte.

Tuesday was "Pixar Night" at the animation festival. In a really classy move, John Lasseter started by not showing something by Pixar: instead he showed the phenominal The Man Who Planted Trees, an animation by Frédéric Back of the story written by Jean Giono. It really shook me when I first saw it years ago: this was a beautiful print on a giant screen with a great sound system at the Nokia theatre. Nothing digital in this one: hand drawn, frame by frame, by one incredible artist. After the screening, Lasseter brought Back up to the stage,to a standing ovation, and the two of them talked about the film for a while.

August 13, 2008