PICCA Festival Day 2

ＰＩＣＣＡ祭ー２日目。（ＰＩＣＣＡさいー２にちめ）PICCA-sai 2-nichi me. trans. PICCA Festival - Day 2.

So this weekend is the 4-day festival of PICCA, Philippine International Cartoons, Comics and Animation held at simultaneous locations. SM North Edsa plays the central role of housing exhibits, trade fairs and talks at The Block, The Annex and Sky Garden. Kai and I volunteered for the event and attended the first day together over at SM.

To give a brief recap of things yesterday (before going to the actual entry of today's events), it was simply this: WALKING WAS HELL! Considering that at present, SM City North Edsa is practically the biggest mall in the country, the distance between The Annex and The Block is quite a distance. And we had to go back and forth and back and forth quite a few times. @.@ Woooo. But otherwise it was fun. Sadly we didn't get our loot bags and shirts since we had to leave early.

ANYWAY, today!! Today I went alone to the Animation Talks over at my school (Ateneo). The reason I was alone was because it was raining hard in Marikina so Kai wasn't able to leave the house. D8 Wah.

I stayed there the whole day, even though I was debating to go to The Annex afterwards or sometime afterwards or whatever. The talks were actually quite diverse and very intriguing! The first talk of the day on Creation and Production of Japanese Animation (not necessarily anime) was given by Nomura Tatsutoshi from Japan. One of his trademark works is the TV series Stray Sheep, and he shared works of his co-workers of the studio CAGE, including Kunio Kato's Oscar winning short film La Maison en petits cubes. During his talk I was upstairs in the technician's booth assisting one of the point persons of Japan Foundation who handled the cuing the playing of the animators' works.

Nomura Tatsutoshi and me

After lunch the next speaker was Jeffrey Agala, creator and creative director of the upcoming game Shank who resides in Canada. He talked about animation in games. Immediately after him were two more Canadians; Trevor Bentley and Mauro Caselese, co-founders of Atomic Cartoons who talked about how to get into the animation industry.

Mauro Caselese, me and Trevor Bentley

Following them was Chinese delegate Liuyi Wang, who discussed how China supported its creative content industry and presented professional and student-made Chinese animations.

Me and Liuyi Wang

Wrapping up the talk were Ben Carandang and Ramon del Prado of Tuldok Animation Studios who gave a talk on independent animation studios, and talked about their own personal experience of establishing their non-stock non profit organization.

Two talents from Creativoices played hosts while promoting their own company of voice acting in between talks (whose names escape me because they're not listed in the souvenir program).

Liuyi Wang (left) and Nomura Tatsutoshi (Stray Sheep!)

Trevor Bentley

After the talks that ended at sometime past 4 o'clock, I managed to snag some autographs from Nomura Tatsutoshi, Liuyi Wang and Trevor Bentley, some pictures with the delegates (both above) and even got to give the Chinese delegates a quick tour of the university via car. 83

All in all it was a good day.