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Greetings from Amsterdam! A recap of 18 to 24 October 2015 is now in session.

Saturday and Sunday were mainly spent running around ensuring I could board the airplane on Monday morning with as little fuss as possible.

Monday lasted for 30 hours – I drew half a dozen gags for A moment in the Sun while I was in transit. I wanted to try for a gag every hout but it proved too ambitious.

Amsterdam feels different from last year and I think mainly it’s me: I
know the people better, I know the city better, I’m actually using the
trams to get around instead of just getting out of their way on
Leidsestraat. There’s a slow embrace going on. Even the tourists out on
the piss across Leidseplein tonight are funny instead of annoying.

As for the Conference itself? Also different, also because of me. I am no longer an excited newbie film maker with a dull animatic. I’ve been showing people my sketchbook of gags and they’ve been generally pleased with the material. One guy was so impressed that he flat out told me to just make the damn film and get it over with. I’m hearing “it’ll never be ‘good enough’ for you” a bit more than I like.

Today I did an honest-to-goodness pitch with Beorn Leonard (the director of “Glass Half“) to get his feedback. I’ve never pitched the movie before to anyone. Much more clear than “here, read this”. What really made me grin was when I said to him it was a plot in the vein of the old Road Runner cartoons – he warned me that those pieces live and die by the execution of their gags. Don’t I know it! It’s why I’m writing so many of the damn things.

The Conference itself has been great this year. Some of the tech being presented is fantastic – vrais.io and blend4web are two stand-outs. The quality of work at the Suzannes (the Conference’s mini-film festival) was incredibly impressive. Beorn’s “Glass Half” went off, “Alike” made everyone weep, and “Spin Da Floor”.. well.. let’s just say I generally hate watching stuff in movie theatres but that was the funnest audience experience I’ve had in a cinema for ages.

Every day I’ve added at least one gag or story draft onto the pile. Slow, steady progress.

Next week’s post will probably be late due to air travel, so I’ll see you when I see you. Tot ziens!

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(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. 🙂