Even though I'm supertired, posting this while I'm still thinking about it...

So I went to the various presentations they were doing at school today! First up was Blizzard, which kind of had a con-feel to it in that it was mostly a school representative talking about how they were recruiting talent. Apparently they're starting an internship program next summer, but I think it's only open to select schools. They talked a bit about the company history, what they're doing in the future (MOAR WoW DURR...oh, and Starcraft, too) and what they want from submissions.

I've started thinking about it, and I'm wondering if I should try and go for one of those internships. They're paid, and only 40 hours a week (although the commute would be killer.) I could try for the 2D Illustration one, since I think if I actually worked at it, I'd have a chance of getting in. The question is...should I make the effort to try for it or not? They pretty much said they want art submissions in their company style, so I'd have to look up WoW and Starcraft art and try to imitate it with whatever I did. On the offchance I submitted and got in, It'd also be an entire summer off from school; I'd be out of schedule-whack with my friends. Should I actually make the effort to draw some WoW-style stuff and submit, and would I enjoy doing that kind of thing? Argh, I don't know! Stupid decisions!

Otherwise...they also handed out free stuff, so I got a Blizzard keychain, a pack of cards, and a shirt I won with their raffle. My rankings of black-shirt-with-digital-production-company-logo-on-them grow larger! Soon, they will be big enough to make me look as badly-dressed nerdy as most of the guys here take over the world!

Hung around school and finished off the basic animation for my Animation final before the second presentation got kicked off. A ton of people showed up to the Pixar event (including some people from Blizzard, LOL) and there was such a big group that they had to hold it in the greenscreen sound stage instead of the normal auditorium. There was also pizza and sodas! No cheese pizza, WTF.

The presentation was by Apurva Shah, and wasn't a "come work for us!"-geared presentation as much as a step-by-step on their problem-solving for certain aspects of Ratatouille. Since he was an effects guy, it was all geared on how the effects department handled challenges: how they added effects into cutting up a vegetable, or creating dough that behaved like real dough, or how they worked the timing of sauce and how you went about texturing various kinds of soups. At least for the effects department, it was actually a lot like working on a live action film: it's too expensive and time-consuming to go back and forth with animation if there's a problem. Since it's the animator's job to get the best performance they can from the characters, it's then the effects peoples' job to work with what animation gives to them. Like, with the scene where Linguini accidentally knocks over the pot of soup and then tries (and fails) to fix it, the pot actually falls faster and at a steeper angle than a pot would actually fall with normal physics, so the liquid simulation program for the soup inside wouldn't follow with the pot: it'd either be left behind, or explode all over the place. So effects-dudes had to find a way to make it work with the animation, since the animation was more interesting "believable" than it was "100% realistic."

I thought it was really interesting how even the effects guys would get to work in with the story: for example, in the part where they introduce all of the different cooks in the kitchen, the effects people would match the steam and smoke of what they were cooking with the personalities of the cooks making them. Also, Shah described how all of the departments were involved in ensuring continuity: even they would look at storyboards and have objective people scan scenes to make sure that if a shirt was wet in one shot, it stayed wet three shots later. Just goes to show you how much that attention to detail and continuity really pays off in the final product! :D

It was all quite informative, and left me both excited to draw more and kind of intimidated at matching that kind of quality. @_@ But for now, I really need sleeps...

Drawing: Hooomework. About done sketching the environments I need, yay?!

Writing: Nothing new.