On Wednesday, September 10, I attended "The Pursuit of Awesomeness" followed by a screening of Kung Fu Panda. This was the first event of SPARK, and Glenn Entis gave a wonderful welcome speech introducing SPARK and SIGGRAPH. The talk itself was actually an open Q&A session with the two directors from Dreamworks who created Kung Fu Panda, John Stevenson and Mark Osborne, moderated by Glenn. As a computer scientist, I was hoping for some insight into the technical aspects of the creation of the film, but they focussed mostly on the kung fu and cultural aspects involved, asking the audience to hold off the technical questions for another talk. To make the kung fu sequences in the film believable, they used much more realistic physics than most animated films, and to ensure cultural sensitivity and relevance, they completed a large amount of research on chinese history, culture, and kung fu itself. It was also interesting to note that the film is based on the "Hero's Journey" story template, which we learned about from George in our Visual Story class. My favorite quote from the talk was (paraphrased) "whatever medium you are working in, treat it as storytelling."

On Saturday, September 13, I attended "Braving the Waters of Independence While Staying Small, Adaptable & Creative" given by Paul Harrod from Bent Image Lab. As someone interested in starting a small company, I was hoping for a talk about the process of founding a small creative business, but it was actually more of a history of Paul Harrod and Bent Image Lab, detailing all the stop-projects that Paul has worked on over the past 4-5 years. The real takeaway for me was that they stayed small by having a few core staff and hiring other team members on a project-by-project basis. It was also interesting to note the timelines involved -- a 30 second stop-motion animated commercial would take about 8 weeks of development time for a small team.