Damn. I already blew it and the convention hasn't even officially opened! I was supposed to attend my own company's presentation, this one on Hugo with the Pixomondo and New Deal guys, but as usual technology failed me, and despite the fact that I'm ALL set to be at the convention center NEXT Monday morning, I doubt the crowd will wait for me.
Alas, I hope the rest of the week goes better. I'm excited about this convention. Last year I attended SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, and despite the fact that everybody had funny accents and a strange affinity for hockey (even in the summer), the show was good. Small, but good. It's usually that way. The alternating philosophy of the organizers, namely an event out of Los Angeles, followed the next year with one back in LA, makes a lot of sense. Not everybody wants to come to Hollywood, despite what it appears, and it isn't fair for us to hog all the nerdy stuff. But needless to say, the Los Angeles years are usually huge! I intend to stand creepily in front of A LOT of booths this year, pretending to pay attention to some presentation on sub surface blah, blah, blah... while secretly catching glimpses of the aspiring actress in a motion capture suit.
I'm curious to see what the trend is. I teach a class at Gnomon, and make a pretty big deal of the fact that once we got to the King Kong era (Watts, not Wray), the industry had largely invented... well, everything. At that point we could do anything. Water, fur, explosions, annoying animals. All photo real. Sure, we've gotten even more real-er, as computers get faster, programmers' heads expand and technology continues to grow exponentially like the hair on that peach I left in the pantry. But nothing really NEW was left to actually invent. So each year at SIGGRAPH I hope for that "wow" moment. That revelation that makes me feel like there's something amazing still out there. Heck, if everybody is right, we'll have photo real game engines in 10 years! If you can do this stuff in real time on your XBox at home, what is there left to do?
But that's the wonder of this show. There's always a new frontier. Something great to discover, some toy still unannounced. I attend for that reason, with eager anticipation no matter what city they hide from me in.
Oh, and for the t-shirts. Gotta get some t-shirts!
John Parenteau is with Pixomondo. Check out the Website at: www.pixomondo.com.