squeeeeeeeee!

This weekend Makoto Shinkai, one of my favorite anime directors, came to Doha and gave a presentation on how to do animation. It was astounding to see the amount of work that goes into producing even a very short anime clip. For example, a 15-second advertisement he made for his hometown took him and four others a month to make. 5 Centimeters Per Second, which is an hour long, took a staff of 30 a year to create: that's basically a lifetime's work! It filled me with the same sense of awe as the first time I saw an old-style newspaper printing press and realized the amount of fastidious, detailed work that went into making newspapers before the days of PageMaker.

If you want a very short introduction to Shinkai-san's work, you can see the first piece he ever released, She and Her Cat, on Youtube. It's not as pretty as his later work, but it has the same general tone.

LOML

I was 5,438 days old when I persuaded Justin to go out with me.

I am 10,876 days old today.

(I will let you do the math.)