Whee! Tonight, we had the first storyboard meeting for "Dusty," our computer animated short film for SIGGRAPH. I was pleased to see that the members were a whopping 1/4 female, and even more pleased to be again in the presence of kindred spirits. When I walked in the door, the first thing I heard was a group of guys quoting the "Dangeresque" short from Strong Bad Email, and throughout the meeting, we kept making references to Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and X-Men, among other nerdly delights. At one point, when I compared a shot to Gandalf's battle with the Baelrog, one of the guys jokingly suggested "And then we just stop animating and cut to Lord of the Rings." I was also delighted by the amount of contribution I was able to make. I found that I'm good at synthesizing ideas and paring down to the essentials -- a skill I probably picked up while massacring the plot of "Men at Arms."

So yay, this was definitely the high-point of the day. The SIGGRAPH crowd is crazy fun. I'm now overjoyed that I didn't make Penn Singers and the Counterparts, because it means I can fully immerse myself in the storyboarding process, then animation and music and such. Whee!

Other anecdotes of note: Drawing class. We spent two hours doing a bunch of drawings of vegetables that had been strewn about on a table, and after an hour and a half, I was going nuts. I amused myself by coming up with bad puns to describe these feelings. I confided to Jing: "If I have to draw any more Legume of Doom, I'm going to commit vegicide."

See? This is what happens when I'm away from my pun-crazed dad and uncle. I have to overcompensate for the lack of pun-age.