(Mathieu Auvray, Ton Rosendaal and Sarah Laufer presenting “Cosmos Laundromat” at Blender Conference 14)

Here’s a report on the road for 20 to 26 October.

I’m in Amsterdam right now on the last night of Blender Conference 2014. It’s about 6:30 in the morning in Perth as I’m typing this and it’s 11:30 here. Even after most of a week to settle in, I’m still jetlagged. Somehow.

Part of the problem is that I’m staying in a hotel near a tourist district called Leidseplein and there’s always noise from outside. The best noise is the rumble of trams going by. But then you get noisy bastards out on the street at 4:30am blaring away like concussed farm animals. Somewhat belatedly, I’ve started sleeping with earplugs.

It hasn’t stopped me from waking up early, but at least I can’t hear the noisebastards so much.

Amsterdam itself is full of pleins. There’s Leidseplein. There’s Museumplein where the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk all are. there’s a Rembrandtplein featuring a statue of Rembrandt van Rijn and a string of conspicuous koffieshops with glowing Jamaican colours and marijuana leaves in neon.

Walking around Amsterdam it’s very common to get a whiff of the green stuff – not so much on Museumplein I noticed but definitely walking around the rest of the city I didn’t go more than a few minutes at a time between puffs of green vapour. Even at the zoo a guy lit up a joint and started putting off to one side. It was kind of hilarious. 🙂

The conference itself was fantastic. Basically I made a point of mingling with as many people as I could, especially if I recognised them from online, showing them the teaser for “A moment in the sun”. Sometimes I’d end up sitting next to someone at a talk or at lunch and the question would invariably be asked:

So, what do you use Blender for?

The answer is never not interesting. It’s a failsafe conversation starter at BCon. People are approachable, happy to talk about what they’re doing, and they’re an impressive and often accomplished bunch. I met American currency anti-counterfeit designers, Danish material engineers who worked with Lego, Portuguese linguists who used Blender for a text-to-sign-language demo system, German parents who got into Blender to help their son out with his short films… and I think I talked to maybe 1/5 of the people attending the convention, tops. Barely scratched the surface of all the awesomeness.

And of course many more Blenderheads now know about quolls. Mathieu from Gooseberry and Sebastian Koenig now have miniature quolls of their own.

It’s true that through the streams you get an idea of what the presentations are, but you don’t so much get a sense of what it’s like to enthusiastically talk to random people about what cool stuff they’re up to – for three days straight. You definitely don’t get the feeling of camaraderie, the sense of all being part of a greater collective force. On the streams you don’t get to go out for dinner with people, you don’t get to watch Sebastian hovering around coders getting them to work on features, you don’t get one-on-one coding lessons from Campbell (head code maintainer), you don’t get to meet the cat that hangs around De Balie, you don’t find out stuff like that you can hear wolves howling at the Blender Institute sometimes before it’s over the canal from the zoo.. all this stuff you have to come and experience for yourself.

It’s so been worth the 20 hour commute. I’m tired as hell right nwo but I’ve had a total blast. Huge thanks for all the people who came and helped make this an incredible trip. Hope I’ll see you next year, or possibly tomorrow at the Blender Instittute open day at 11:00am. 🙂