On my last day at the conference (I had to leave one day before it closed in order to get back to work in Wisconsin), I took a photography class offered by the Art Institutes (Ai) to promote themselves from their exhibition floor booth. I joined a class of 15 who were loaned some gorgeous cameras (10 Megapixel cameras with 1 GB memory cards) and went on a photography tour.

5:55pm Doors open for seating.

5:56pm I get my seat in the third row.

6:02pm They’ve laid out a quartet of panels covered with 8.5×11 panels of illustrations; I have no idea how they’re going to present those to all those assembled here

6:06pm Jerome Solomon takes the stage again

6:08pm Phillipe Glockman (Visual Effects Supervisor on Shrek III, Dreamworks) takes the stage.

No, it’s not the end of the conference that has these swarms of people leaving the Conference center: late in the afternoon someone pulled a fire alarm and the whole conference had to be evacuated from the building for a short spell while they worked it out. Whoops!

I realize I didn’t give the view of the convention center from my hotel. I am about a two block walk from the convention center. The view on the left is from my hotel parking lot; the convention center is on the opposite side of the street from the twin, slanted topped towers on the left of the street.

5:50pm So, I’m sitting here with a second-row seat waiting patiently for the special Siggraph session “‘Happy Feet’ Thawing the CG Pipeline” to start. Traditionally, these special sessions are more of a bragging session to showcase some of the more fantastic pieces that have been produced in the past year, so I’ve got high hopes.

5:52pm The presenter tipped his hand, killing the presentation for a moment; enough to reveal they’re running Keynote on a Mac rather than PowerPoint!

5:54pm They’ve got a presentation of some of the concept art from Happy Feet running, showing painted instances of several of the animals in the film and the background matte concepts. Looks like the concept art was done in pastels, as they’ve got a great soft edge to most of them. They’d likely be good art pieces on their own.

5:55pm One of the underwater ice caves that Mumble gets chased by the leopard seal through has a face frozen into it in the concept art; wonder if that ever made it to the film…

…and I was there at 7:20. Doors opened at 7:33am and we all filed into the registration area and a series of zig-zag barriers. 7:40am I got my badge after signing into a computer that seemed to recognize me (or at least the barcode on my registration confirmation sheet). 7:45am I got my collection of DVDs and other pamphlets for being a Full Conference member. 7:55am I arrived at Course 6: Anyone can Cook; Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen.

I did it! After four years of truancy, I’ve made it back to the Siggraph conference. Now that I’m gainfully employed and transitioned to a Multimedia role, it was in my company’s best interest to send me along to the conference to learn from the courses and to do some hardware and software vendor research at the exhibition floor. And tonight is Saturday, the night before the conference starts, and I’ve arrived at my hotel, which I was able to reserve in advance, so is right next to the conference center; walking distance for my course tomorrow that starts at 8:30. But it’s first-come-first-served, so I’ll be there early. And I need to get my badge beforehand too.