000098 - semi-permanent 06

late last week, i took a flight up to sydney with a bunch of my uni friends for the semi-permanent design conference and it was a pretty fun 4 or so days away.

thursday

met up with my friends at the airport. i had gotten my e-ticket earlier, so i sat like 2 rows away from my friends. luckily the guy who sat next to me on the flight to sydney pretty much kept to himself and his copy of people magazine or whatever it was.

lunch was kindly provided during flight, which was a panini sandwich with pastrami, cheese, capsicum and lettuce. it went down quite nicely with a small bottle of water.

after finding our hotel, checking in, located where the convention was being held and how much time we have to allow for to get there, we just walked around darling harbour and the city. this included visiting a local krispy kreme because one of my friends has made it her new obsession. we did some snacks and breaky shopping at the woolworths as well.

our dinner plan was originally heading back to darling harbour and just picking one of the various restaurants there, including one aptly named "thai foon"! we weren't really sold by any of them, including this mongolian buffet place that required us to make decisions and do some work. i suggested to take them to this food court up in the market city building in chinatown that i know where we can just pick what we want to eat ourselves and it's relatively good value there.

dinner, i went for a korean mixed rice bi bim bap, which was absolutely delicious and filling!

after that, it was back to the hotel just in time for an episode of my name is earl. we are all pretty much buggered by this point, so we just stayed in and watched tv for the night.

friday

first day of semi-permanent. very excited since i've never been to one of these before. the convention centre lobby was already filling up with people by the time we got up the escalator. we got our free showbags and made our way to the auditorium entrance. at this point we found out that 2 speakers had unfortunately pulled out, including one we were all really looking forward to, stereo skateboards (jason lee) and fafi.

first speakers up were anyhow, they were pretty entertaining as speakers and their work is pretty cool. i like all the non-collage stuff they did, especially the tongue-in-cheek humour in their designs. i was a bit put off by how they can get away from using some of the unoriginal images and copyrighted stuff...

second speaker was the creator of a magazine called dumbo feather. since i've never heard or seen this mag before, it took me a while to get what she was on about since she didn't show or explain what dumbo feather clearly was until she got to her moment of epiphany in her talk. what her presentation lacked in eye-candy compared to the other speakers, she definitely made up for for her conviction in persuing her dreams.

lunch, we headed back to the food court and it was busy as. i went for a baked potato with a bean sauce with melted cheddar cheese and a side of greek salad. again delicious.

next up was ABCK who are couple of designers from surfers paradise. claudio (CK) was like a ball of energy or high on sugar (or something else entirely) and really made the talk fun. both their works and projects were very interesting and very entertaining.

the glue society was up next. i had heard of them first from an article in desktop magazine about their direction and production on the canon digic tv ad with the lego-like cowboys. their presentation was excellent. great body of work and eye-candy and they've done quite a few successful and award winning campaigns for their clients. one of my favourites from the conference.

during the short break, i was able to catch up only very briefly with pirochan and stikman.

and after that, was the speaker i was most excited about and pretty much the sole reason for me deciding to travel up to sydney for semi-permanent. paul pope. he talk kinda surprised me a bit with a bit of insight about his childhood and his influences. for whatever reason, he seemed very enigmatic to me. i found his talk to be very interesting since he went into a bit of detail in how he researched and the thought process from concept to finished page or design. the time-lapsed sequence of him working at his drawing board on a couple of projects in a day, was fantastic! i'm looking forward to his next projects like the erotic coffee table book and battling boy.

last speaker for thursday was the orphanage. again, they have an amazing portfolio of works/projects. they showed some project breakdowns in terms of the VFX they help make for movies such as superman returns, harry potter, sin city, hell boy, sky captain and more! really cool stuff. their animation studios sounds really cool, too, with the creator of samurai jack, i don't think they can go much wrong! they also showed some of their work on this upcoming korean movie with a mutated godzilla-like trout monster which looked and sounded really sick!

after having a quick rest and dropping off our gear back at the hotel, my uni friends and i decided to find a nice place to have dinner. after passing on korean bbq, a japanese sushi train restaurant that had huge lines and a spanish bistro near our hotel that was too busy, we decided to try our luck at the star bar. this was where planet hollywood sydney used to be according to my memory banks, and it looked like they kept most of the decorations inside the restaurant. it was cool how u ordered the food at the bistro bar and then they gave you this rather large pager that buzzed and flashed when your food was ready to be served. and it was damn good for value, too. i went for a char grilled porter house steak with creamy mash and a mushroom sauce. all washed down with a bottle of heineken. of course i had to overdo it later on, with a golden gaytime ice cream...

saturday

the second day program of semi-permanent began with a speaker from stiletto. for what was probably in my opinion the dryest and straight-forward presentation, i really liked their work, especially the motion works. i also like their print and general design style a lot.

wieden&kennedy were up next. the speakers were 2 guys from their amsterdam office. bascially wieden & kennedy is the ad agency that does most of the nike ads you see as well as other big name brands. they showed works for nike, electronic arts and coca-cola. my favourite was their coca-cola "the cola side of life" campaign. you can check out the cool tvc made by one of my all time favorite motion & broadcast design production house, psyop, here.

for the lunch break, 2 of us decided to head into chinatown again but this time for some takoyaki balls and pancakes! first, i had a "half & half" special from colotako consisting of 4 takoyaki balls and 4 ebiyaki (prawn) balls which were absolutely friggin' delicious!! unfortunately my impatience to eat them led to me burning my mouth. i followed this up by ordering 3 flavored filled pancakes from hontou pancakes. these reminded me of one of my favourite hong kong snack, the egg puff, but bigger and with fillings in them. i only got to eat 2 custard ones and couldn't wait for the green tea one as we made our way back to the convention centre.

third speaker for the day was beci orpin. she does a lot of t-shirt and fashion design for labels such as dangerfield, genki, and her own clothing line, princess tina. she started her presentation with a quick video of like "a day in her life" kind of thing, which i thought was pretty cool.

next up was patrick hoelck, who's like a mv director and photographer. his photography is really really amazing. great choice of colour and lighting in my opinion and he seems to have a great talent in making almost anyone look great. while his presentation was probably the least organised, i liked his work and he seemed like a genuine guy, to me at least.

after a quick toilet break, we came back and got better positioned seats for rising sun pictures presentation. a visual effects production company from adelaide, south australia. much like the orphanage from day prior, they seem to be building up quite a nice portfolio of international film credits. they showed quite a bit of breakdowns and shot by shot of what they did exactly, which is great for those of us whom are really into those extras you get on a dvd.

last but certainly not least, was joshua davis. now this guy definitely knew how to present and get the audience going. he was very funny and entertaining and i can see why some have referred to him as a rock star designer. i've only seen his work on the bmw z4 project, which looks fantastic but i never knew his working process until his talk that day. pretty inspirational in terms of how a designer can think so laterally by using programming and software to create random but controlled patterns and repetition.

we were all pretty tired at this point and decided to head back to the hotel and see if we felt like going to the after party. on the way back, there was actually a free concert being held at darling harbour, the band playing was the whitlams. there were already heaps of people there both sitting and standing and as we got to the crowd, they started playing their first song, which was "no aphrodisiac". we didn't stay long though because it was getting cold and we were all quite famished.

after deciding to at least check out this after party, we went to our favourite food court in chinatown to grab some dinner. i went for a seafood & wonton rice stick noodle soup from happy chef.

after a few quick enquiries as to which direction broadway was and a small detour in finding a harry's cafe de wheels (one of my uni friends wanted to try their famous pie and mushy peas, but we were all way too full). the after party was held at the abercrombie hotel. it was pretty packed by the time we walked there which was just before 9pm (i was later told that they stopped letting people in soon after that). we saw a lecturer of ours, matt, which was a bit surreal, having drinks and sharing jokes with one of your past lecturers. highlights of the after party included getting free tiger beers, watching at least 3 live bands play some pretty rocking music (i particularly liked this melbourne trio band called children collide), and shaking hands with fitzy from big brother!

sunday

overslept the next morning but luckily wasn't enough that we didn't make the check-out time. i made my way to kinokuniya. i can pretty much spend a whole day in a bookstore, especially one that stocks so much comic books, manga (in both english and japanese) and magazines. i brought the latest mpd psycho vol. 11.

for lunch, i had a shio butter corn ramen with a glass of iced coffee at the ichi-ban boshi japanese noodle shop. it's one of the yummiest bowl of ramen i've ever had. butter corn?! how can you not like that as it melt in your mouth.

with still a bit of time left before my flight, i decided to pass through chinatown and pick up the latest utada hikaru - ultra blue cd. then caught a train to the domestic airport, checked-in electronically and waited to board my flight home which ended up running about half an hour late.

overall, i had a great time in both sydney and at semi-permanent. sydney always somehow reminds me a lot of hong kong for some reason or another and the weather for the days i was there were fantastic. my only regrets for this trip would probably for not bringing my camera (hense the lack of pictures) and for not bumping into or at least trying to find paul pope including that night at the after party.