Update!

Hi again!

I guess this post is quite late, well...actually very late.. it's like the second last day of the trip. here's a summary of what has happened.

DAY 1(monday, 14-DEc-09 )
We left singapore on monday, and the flight took about 7 hours. when we arived it was about 10 degrees. yes, really cold. then we head down from the airport to a bus station where we then travelled to the hotel. took us quite a while to find the hotel, shinjuku prince hotel. One thing to note is that not all japanese people know english. I'll explain this later.

We stayed at the hotel for a day, basically the day we arived, we walked around the shinjuku area, looking around the area.

Day 2(tuesday 15-dec-09)
The next day, we met the square enix tour guide at the hotel lobby at 9am. sadly i and izak overslept and we met up late, so by the time we arrived at toei, we had to skip out some parts of the tour, cos the staff had to work. Heres some interesting fact, they are very very proud of digimon. They are the creators of one piece, and one piece has a very strong following in japan. it takes 2 weeks to do their animation. there is 3500-5000 character drawings and 2500 backgrounds that had to be drawn. their first anime which is done using computers is Digimon. before the use of computers and wacom tablets it would have taken at least 6months to do an episode of a tv series.

after that we skipped out of the sega amusement park, and instead we went akihabara where it's really the world of anime and manga stuffs. however we didn't spend alot of time there, cos after that we went to harajuku to a place called kiddy palace which is a shop. did a fair bit of shopping there. there, they have really amusing items from all types of licences. this includes the general floor, where yes, there's a humping dog usb drive. the second floor is another character and so on. until the last floor where there are cool gundam stuffs.

after visiting there we headed back to the hotel and packed as the next day, is siggraph day.

Day 3(wednesday 16-dec-09)
We packed and left this time...on time. but edmund had a sudden stomach attack and he needed izak to be with him... no idea why. we then were left at the yokohama station waiting for them, it took longer than we had anticipated as they went missing. turned out that the toilet was on the inside at the platform, so they had to enter to go to the toilet. They went missing for quite awhile, and we sent out 2 search parties for them. apparently izak had some problems with the suica card. which is like the ezlink card back in singapore.

once all that is over, the clock was already ticking for the opencl talk. when we arrived to the hotel it turned out that we couldn't check in. check in only starts at 2, here at the yokohama intercontinental hotel. after much arguement, that i believed we could leave the luggage with the concierge, i and the girls went off to the registration booth. the rest decided to stay behind with the bags. i really don't understand why we can't just leave the bags with the hotel. quite a number of the other people didn't want to leave the luggage alone with the staff with some unknown reasons and i got into an argument with him, i shall not name names.

after being annoyed about the whole episode, i left my luggage with izak and left with the girls. registration was quick and swift, which then we went to the conference hall. i went to the first quarter of the whats your story talk, which after a while i started nodding off to sleep, that was when i changed over to the opencl conference. i stayed while they were talking about the syntax and how opencl works with opengl and how in some ways it's better than using the standard opengl shaders. when it started getting way too technical, i switched back to what's my story where i encounter the speaker coming up a story about a gay school boy with super powers where he fights against a bully of sorts.

we had lunch after that then i went back to opencl. once again it started getting way too technical, i switched over to the The look of UP: the film maker guide to the pixar process. it was an interesting talk as i never noticed these things about the movie. though i have yet to watch UP. basically, they use shapes and camera angles and keep to it across the movie and vary it abit based on how they want to add emotion to a scene. for example, during sad scenes, they keep the camera facing at a downward angle and during happy scenes there is a look up camera angle.

they also talked about the different characteristics of each character of UP. how the main character is square in design, to mean sad while circle and round is to means happy. they ensure that the main character stays away from other characters, creating a partion off for every scene, untill he gets closer to the boy, at that point the partition goes away. There are other things, but at this moment that's all i can recall.

after that we went back to the hotel dumped our stuff then headed out to pokecenter. i gotten myself magikarp, 2 togepies, 1 merril. we headed back and the day ended.

Day 4(thursday 17-dec-09)
we started the day going to the tips for successful voice recordings for anime and CG. it was fairly entertaining as they acted out problems these professional voice actors faced which includes, no aircon in the studio, lousy equipment and lousy direction and lousy script. it was fairly more like complaining than anything. but in an interesting way.

after which i went to encountering the cutting edge of japanese video game development. one of the special program talks at the auditorium. briefly, here's some interesting information. in japan, old development methods emphasises on originality, thus it is important for japanese studios to spend alot of resources on originality, however it is inefficient. they showed a chart that mentions that the japanese market is selling more western games that emphasises on more advanced technology and thus, japanese game studios are moving towards this western model. this was mentioned by the square enix researcher.

after the talk i had lunch then went off to the games educators program. IT was a series of presentations by lecturers from different universities talking about thier case studies. the first one was about a game combatting HIV for the mayans. they did extensive research in what the community wants in the game. they created the hero's profile based on what the people wanted.

the next talk was by a NUS lecturer from the SADM in singapore. they produced a walking with dinosaurs game. he mentions the challenges faced when producing the game. such as that the programmers were computer science and in mechatronics, the artists did not have degrees so they couldn't be hired, and students that are part of the team left cos they are not interested in continuing the research and are more interested in pursuing works at lucasarts and other companies.

i left midway, because i realised that majority of the people in the room, were lecturers. i snuck out and went to the art gallery first. there were a number of amazing things there and some quirky, while some downright scary. there are some cool ones, like the post apocolyptic use of a mosquito to create sound. really interesting. while another one was about sexuality in dolls. really freeky stuffs.

I left then headed down to the jobfair. lucky i went there as the third day of siggraph, square enix has left. The first thing that caught my eye at the fair, was the equipmentless mocap. there was no equipment to hinder the actors from performing. they didin't have to wear uncomfortable suits. there are a series of cameras that capture the data and send it back to the software.

alot of the technology on display are Augmented reality and 3D stereoscopic technology. nvidia had a booth there show casing their CUDA technology. Square enix's booth was there as well. i discussed about the game development an internship program at square enix.

omfg it's 2.26am am going off to sleep. i'm gona continue posting my epic journey thus far tommorow.