SFiFF: SF SuperCollider (SF360 Panel)

* Although I saw [Street Fight](https://www.marshallcurry.com/) at [Min Jung’s](https://minjungkim.org/) house, I still haven’t had a chance to screen a film at the [SFiFF](https://sfiff.org/) as part of the Citizen’s Media Press Corps (there’s a few I plan to check out tomorrow), but I did get off work just in time to step in for the SF SuperCollider panel. As I walked into the panel, Karen Schwartzman, the moderator for the panel was talking about how the Bay Area is the center of a New Media insurgency, and that the panel would explore how the Bay Area is central to the future of media. She then intomated that the panel was somehow connected to an event that would be happening in the fall. It’s important to note that she brought up the event, in such a manner that one would expect her to provide some details at a later point in the panel. She didn’t. Nor do I know quite why someone thought the title SF SuperCollider* would be apropos. Sitting next to me for the panel was my friend [Niall](https://niall.org/) who writes for Wired, and behind me was [Schlomo](https://echoplexpark.blogspot.com/). I should’ve taken a cue from my seasoned campanions when sometime early in the panel they realized the scope of the discussion and one by one made their exit, but no, I wanted to stick around and hear what this event in the fall was going to be… The panel featured: Jeff Fino, Co-Founder of [Wild Brain](https://www.wildbrain.com/); John Vegher, Co-Founder of [Giant Killer Robots](https://giantkillerrobots.com/); Joaquin Alvarado, Director of the SFSU Institute of Next Generation Internet, Scott Singer from PDI DreamWorks and Chris Farmer the Production Designer for the upcoming film *The Wild.* SF SuperCollider pretty much began with a rather awkard series of self-introductions; I think Karen Schwartzman prompted the guests to “tell us about something.” So they told us about *something*, and then showed us their reels so that we knew that whatever they were talking about would have absolutley know relevence to anyone who doesn’t work on multimillion-dollar films. A few interesting facts were brought up: Some of the highest grossing films ever were shot in the San Francisco bay area, there are about 50 CG companies in the bay and some 4,000 odd employees, and Scott Singer pointed out that PDI started out in the 1980s with a few Stanford graduates who wanted to make pictures with computers (at the time this was apparently a radical concept). Joaquin Alvarado spoke about the replacement to the Internet, and said that the internet is going to be much much faster in five years. Of course, these high-speed paths will probably be walled off from independent creators who can’t afford to buy into Internet 2.0 (not to be mistaken with Web 2.0), but he didn’t mention that… no, the future looks bright and everyone’s gonna be sucking down media from a much bigger pipe. After that the conversation seemed to deteriorate into talking about how big of a pipe these guys at these multimillion-dollar institutions had access to. John Vegher mentioned something about paying $10,000 a month for a 100MB/s connection and to my surprise none of the panelists resorted to calling out who’s got the biggest pipe. Sometime around this point, I stopped paying much attention in the hope that the Q & A at the end would offer some practical information that I can use before I can afford a $10K monthly internet bill, but that too seemed to focus on what we can do to get Hollywood to come play in our foggy city. Fuck that. Instead of trying to get Hollywood to come to LA, we should think about how we can support the filmmakers that are already here… Tag: [sfiff](https://technorati.com/tag/sfiff)