This one was a great deal of fun. I found out about the existence of
Giga-Con after it had been held 2 years in a row in DC, which was a bummer because
Bryan Tillman, the Department Chair of Media Arts and Animation Game Art and Design Visual Game Programming Visual Effects and Motion Graphics at the
Art Institute of Washington has brought in some really interesting guests in the past. I had no idea what to expect, but the public was invited, so I wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to see pros like
Freddie E. Williams II. The format of this "Con" is really more educationally-oriented in that the students of AIW are the target audience and the guests provide tutorials or lectures on their respective industries (which ranged from comics to animation to cell phone gaming development to sculpting and more). I missed the morning portion of the show where all guests did some sort of panel discussion, but, in addition to seeing
Jennifer Dutton do a speed-sketching demonstration (which was really interesting), I attended Freddie's lecture on breaking into the comics industry. He did a brief spiel on how he broke in and then answered questions from the audience (most of which were students, but Mike Rhode of
ComicsDC asked a few too). The Q&A was really interesting, and was all over the place, not just on breaking in but on how to make panels flow on a page, how to make characters "pop" if they're in among a bunch of characters on a single panel, how to use tangents to move the readers eye along, etc. At the end, when the session broke, he just had "one on one" time where people could ask him questions or get sketches or whatever, and I asked him for a sketch. He did this awesome "quick" Wolverine (which he took plenty of time with) while the students looked on (instead of sketching themselves!), asked questions, talked more about the industry, etc. I had a great time, and walked away with this spectacular Wolverine!
