Siggraph emailed me today, 'Flip' has been selected to screen at Siggraph Asia in December. For those who don't know about these things, that's a very big deal in the animation festival circuit. The funny thing is I have been waiting and biting my nails over the Ottawa Animation Festival, they are supposed to contact us by the end of July, which is today. Actually it's North America so they're a day behind, but in any case sometime in the next 24 hours the dealine is up.
So it came as a complete shock when I got the email from Siggraph today saying 'Flip' was selected to screen in the electronic theatre, it's great news though. The thing that may throw a spanner in the works is that they require HD films for the electronic theatre and 'Flip ' is only standard definition, but I'm working on that. Because of the rough and fairly naive nature of the artwork I think it will upscale ok, and I can produce a new HD background with papergrain etc, then overlay the drawings on that and scale them up. If they go a bit soft it probably won't matter too much because of the nature of the drawings.
Anyway, as you may have noticed from the recent photos Ive been in Osaka and Kyoto the last few days. I went to Universal Studios Japan, which is really just like being at Disneyland in many ways, it's just a big theme park with rides that are mostly based on movies.
Next day I went to Kyoto, I was going to do the touristy temple tours, but then I saw there was an exhibition of paintings from the Louvre at the art museum. So I gladly dumped the idea of seeing more temples and went to that instead, it was great, but way too crowded. Worth the discomfort to see the paintings though.
Today I was just walking around Osaka, I got a bit lost and then suddenly recognised the hotel I stayed at the first time I came, almost a year and a half ago. Down from the hotel was a park with some play equipment and a few shady trees. It was stinking hot so I sat in the shade and then wandered around a little and took some photos. As I got my bearings I found they way to a shopping centre I remembered from last time, I headed that way to get into some air conditioned comfort.
