The real deal

I can't believe it's been four days since I last posted. Sunday was a very slow day except for the fact that my roommate arrived from Boston. He is a fellow Brown student and we had a class together this spring. He and the 2 other Brown students that are here just finished their Junior year. Other than that, we all had a very mellow day and tried our best to find things (besides the TV) to keep us busy. We ended up driving into Oakland to hunt down a Redbox to rent a movie.

Earlier in the day, I did try to get into the lab at Pixar to work on my final project, but the building was locked and I didn't feel like hunting down the number for security to have them let me in, so I just walked back to the apartment. Besides, our teacher strongly encouraged us to not come in on the weekend. So, I got up a little bit earlier than I normally would and got to Pixar at about 8:30 to continue working on the final. Last week, on Friday, we had to create a story, make storyboards, and submit them for a story review, then we weren't allowed to begin working on the project until our stories were approved. So, once I got that finished I began creating the set for my story using the 3D objects we were given to use. Once I had a decent set I added the lights to create a lit set. I got that much done on Friday, but I still had to layout, animate, shade, light and render the 4 shots for my film.

So, it was a long day, and even though I got "done" by about 5:00 I had some serious problems getting the renders to look how I wanted and ended up not leaving until shortly after 10:00. But, I got it completely done and submitted, so I got to sleep in since we didn't need to be at work until our film review at 10:30am. It was very cool, our teacher and several other veteran employees, as well as the 40 new interns that started this week all were present for our review. We even got to use one of the "real" screening rooms. I was very pleased with my final short and by the laughter and comments I think everyone enjoyed it. I got some very helpful suggestions from the veteran employees but was very happy with how it went.

Immediately after the review, I was scheduled to meet up with my department supervisor for lunch to get an overview about our current project. It was very informative and even fun to sit with him and talk about the history of Pixar and the life-cycle of our current project...Toy Story in 3D.

It's a relatively small group working on this project, but there is a lot of hard work to get done to get the whole movie ready for 3D. I'm sure I'll be busy all summer and if we happen to get done by the end of August, I will get to start work on Toy Story 2 (known as TS2) in 3D also.

Sorry I can't give more details about what I'm doing or the rest of my experience. Obviously this is a competitive industry with lots of secrets.

On a super exciting note...just this evening I bought the tickets for Jess to come to California and visit me in July. We are both very excited that it worked out. It will be fun to do some exploring with her and just to get to see her smiling face in person! Well, It's past my bedtime and I'm gonna exercise early tomorrow before work (something I've been pretty consistent with since I got here thankfully) so I should say goodbye and get to bed. Have a great rest of your week and I'd love to hear how you're doing since I haven't talked with most of you recently.