SOFTIMAGE PRESS EVENT

Softimage Press Conference in San Diego
Kevin G. and Karen Moltenbrey from CGW -
















Leonard Teo shares the news about XSI 6.5 Essentials & Advanced














JoAnna Scott from the UK interviews Greg & Marcin -
Winners of the SIGGRAPH "Best of Show" for their animated short "ARK"-
rigging and animation done in XSI

Softimage Production Challenge Time Lapse

Wednesday August 8th - Softimage at SIGGRAPH

We're in our third day at SIGGRAPH. Monday - Production Challenge -(awesome). Softimage Press Event (see photos) --the news is out! XSI 6.5 Essentials & Advanced. New features - new pricing - GREAT time to upgrade or subscribe to Maintenence.

Syd Mead came back to San Diego, (he was here last week for Comic Con to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Blade Runner), as our Key note speaker for the SOFTIMAGE user evnet. Syd gave a very nice interview to FXguide.com -- lots of sage advise for tomorrow's designers.

More to come after we catch our breath... Kevin G. PR

Softimage @ SIGGRAPH video part 1

And there is still a show to do?!?!

12am - and the discussions about the Production Challeng are still going strong.

Softimage Ladies of SIGGRAPH - Caroline, Christine, Anick & Sarah

Research Summit was a full house!

What you dont see - pre-event wackiness, illustrated here by Bill Roberts.

Reseller meeting was a packed affair.

We packed a LOT into yesterday. We started the day with a reseller meeting, then the Research Summit (Bill summed it up nicely, all i want to add is WOW) and a press conference. It was a crazy day

I was at the booth until about 730pm, Nicolas and Christine and Caroline Laberge (a godsend to have your Licensing Manager here... YAY Caro!!) wereat the meeting suites until bout 9pm.. but we are feeling officially READY for the show to begin!!

The results of the Production Challenge are so cool I can't get over it. We were up in Todd's room at midnight looking at the daillies.. Tick Toc Man is coming to life.... I can't wait to get that online and show all of you!

Tonight is the User Event.. Chris Watts arrived here in San Diego, waiting for Mr Mead now. This is going to be such a great User Event, I can't wait!! (well, except for the 1000 hings I need to do before it starts!)

Time to run - I need to get to the show and go over all the final details before the doors open in 90 min and SIGGRAPH 2007 begins!!

PS If someone sees me fling my mobile into the Ocean - is not my fault. it wont stop RINGING!! :)

Softimage Research Summit at Siggraph 2007

Time for my first post. After all the pain and hassle of getting the NDA's signed the penultimate Softimage uber-geek-out event is over. In a word - WOW!

Great day - about 80 industry leaders joined us for 5 hours of a future-vision immersion session.

Along with an amazing view of how the industry's hardware will evolve in the years to come our guests were treated to multiple demonstrations of how Softimage will harness all this power and deliver it to our customers to make the digital art of the future.

For those of you who have heard the name Moondust but weren't at the event, get ready for a re-definition. Our brilliant team of developers showed how this amazing piece of core technology will not only will provide a platform that Softimage can develop on – but also provide an amazing interface for any creative use with a vision to build their own custom tools. May sound a little vague, but if you were there - you know what I mean.

Also pretty amazing from a raw power perspective to see an 8 core machine use all available compute cycles and flatten all the meters - demos of the task manager are usually so un-cool....but not today.

For those who attend the user group you will see some of the Research Summit technology - but packaged into more tighter demos with the added bonus of Mark Schoennagel's witty repartee.

All in all - we had a great afternoon, our sponsors AMD, NVIDIA and HP all spelled out how the hardware would change and mental images and Softimage explained how they would "rock-the-box"

Bring on the show floor!

More photos..

Kevin G. Clark & Anick Gagne take a bite out of SIGGRAPH

Sarah, Brandon, Josh & Doug - our Avid editors

Ken Knobel & Nikki Bridgman

Bill Coleman & me

Alexandre Jean Claude, Ronal Berouti, Andre Foisy, Jean Beaudry & Dom Laflamme check out the booth construction

Production Challenge - What a blast!

Kevin's right - the Production Challenge was amazing. And our full capacity at one point was 110, but the amazing thing was that it went from 12pm-10pm. TEN HOURS - and some people were there for the entire time.

It was an amazing experience watching David, Greg, Todd & Brad in action. I spend so much time watching demos and customers present, but this was the first time I got to watch our clients work. Seeing Greg and Todd collaborate, David and Brad banter - and seeing these artists create a project in front of our eyes was just a complete delight.

I have never enjoyed an event more. We recorded a time lapse of the event, so we'll be putting that together for everyone to see. Brad and Todd will also be presenting the results of the Challenge in the booth on Wednesday - we haven't sorted out if we can fit this into the User Event or not.

The best part - everyone wants to do this again.

jen

Big news this morning

I finally do my first post since I'm in San Diego. Haven't had much time to go around the city, as we were making sure everything was ready for the show, but also on the web for our big announcement of the day: XSI 6.5 and Face Robot 1.8!

The press release Kevin prepared just hit the wires, and the team in Montreal just published on the web site all the info about the new products (thanks Jamal and Pat!). We're pretty excited about the new pricing and feature packaging for XSI 6.5, can't wait to get feedback about that when we hit the show floor tomorrow.

It's almost 7am here, kind of early, but we had to sync with the press release to go live with everything. And because of the jet lag, I can't sleep late anyway. I'm going to go for breakfast, and then will make sure, with the rest of the team, that everything is ready for tomorrow when the show floor start.

SOFTIMAGE Production Challenge_Huge Success!

The Softimage Production Challenge kicked off today at the HYATT Hotel - (the one Mike Seymore from FXguide.com was asking me.. where? when? ) Here's the link again to the awesome "Fantastic Four" artists who are a force for everyone.to behold! Brad Gabe (Stan Winston Studios), David Andrews (The Orphanage), Todd Akita (PSYOP) and Greg Punchatz (Janimation)-- are showing how a real life production works (no canned Master Classes here).
What we are most pleased about is that the room was FILLED to CAPACITY-- with over 75 attending! The "TickTock Man" modeled, rigged, lit and then animation with the Dali-esque clock faced man and Jelly beans flying will be shown at the SOFTIMAGE User Event on Tuesday, August 7th (7:00pm - 10:00pm). I got all our NEWS printed at Kinkos, but I left my USB drive there. I have to drive back up to Hillcrest Kinkos and pick it up. D'oah.. Kevin G.

San Diego Marine Layer on Sunday

Kevin: Woke up at 6:22am with the sound of airplanes taking off. Today is Sunday, and the SOFTIMAGE team is gathering to go over all of our news and activities taking place at the show. I am staying with some friends that live across the San Diego Bay in Point Loma, and today is KINKOs day; the bane of existence for any PR person before a Trade Show. This is fine, as we have some pretty awesome news to print up this SIGGRAPH! The Production Challenge starts today at 12:00 noon at the HYATT Hotel. Mike Seymore from FX Guide (www.fxguide.com) just pinged me wanting to know where & when! A complete list of EVERYTHING we are doing at SIGGRAPH is posted on our site at: http://www.softimage.com/events/sig07/default.aspx . Go Crazy!! More to come later today -- we'll of course post some images from the "Attack of the Jellybeans" Production Challenge later today- so check back after 12:00 noon!! Kevin G.

Fireworks!

Leo here: Just after my last post, fireworks started in the bay... here are some pics from my room. :)

Welcome to San Diego!

Leo here: Finally landed in San Diego late this afternoon after a long delay in San Francisco on the connecting flight. It's hot! :)

As Jen's been writing, things are heating up for SIGGRAPH. The action has already begun for our booth staff who are hard at work setting up the Softimage stand for the show.

Here are some snaps from me... stay tuned for more!

San Diego from my hotel room...


The lobby of the Manchester Grand Hyatt.


The Manchester Grand Hyatt, where we're staying.


The Gaslamp Quarter, where all the great restaurants are. :D


The view from my hotel room at night... nice :)

Lay of the land

I thinked I walked around San Diego a dozen times yesterday. Back and forth from the hotel to the convention center. San Diego is a great city to walk around in, everything s super close.

We stopped in at the Spreckels theatre where our User Event is taking place. Oh wow - its beautiful. It's an old-fashioned theatre on Broadway. It's an amazing venue - I can't wait for Tuesday!

Later we went over to House of Blues to do a walkthrough where our Wednesday Party is taking place. Again - WOW. It's a fantastic place - and I can't wait for that either! We have had a few parties over the years, and I really think this one is going to be one of the best. I wouldn't miss it!

Things are coming together nicely, today is the big push to complete the booth. Pictures will come later, I am waiting for Leo to come in and help me sort that out.

jen

Day One - Set-up is FUN!

My colleague Christine and I arrived in San Diego yesterday to start our SIGGRAPH journey.

San Diego is such a great location for SIGGRAPH. We are staying at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, which is a short walk from the Convention Center. Yesterday we went to the show floor and watched the beginning of booth construction. Fascinating stuff! The show floor looks the same but different from Boston last year. Soft is right at the front of the hall, next to Natural Motion and Autodesk.

Later, we walked to the locations of our two events - the Spreckels Theatre where our User Event is taking place, and House of Blues, where our party is happening the next night. Both are located downtown near the Gaslamp District downtown. There is still room to register for both if you haven't yet: http://www.softimage.com/events/sig07/default.aspx

I just had the nicest chat with Roger, who works with Syd Mead, to coordinate next Tuesday's presentation. They were just here for Comicon, and are both very excited to come back for SIGGRAPH. Funnily enough, just last week Syd and Roger attended a screening of '300' in LA, where they were promoting Blade Runner as well, and there they spent some time with Zac Snyder. So our user event next Tuesday already had a dry-run of sorts, at the PetCo Stadium!!

Syd will be selling copies of his new DVD at the Softimage User Event, and will be signing them in the Softimage booth on Wednesday at 10am. If you are registered for the VIP cocktail before the User Event, you might be able to get your DVD signed there by Syd as well!!

Anyhow, back to work. We have a bunch of meetings today to make sure all details are covered, as we await the arrival of our colleagues from Europe, Asia and some of the Special Projects team from Venice, CA. The majoriy of the Montreal team arrives tomorrow.

See you soon -

jen