So here I am, sitting in the kitchen at the studio with my laptop after the first week of project Peach, sipping at some orange juice. And I'm thinking this: holy shit, this is going to be awesome.

The apartment I'm staying in is large. Very large. Which is something I didn't expect. It even has a proper dining room, for goodness' sake. Admittedly, I'm sharing it with three other people. But that's awesome, because I think the size of the apartment would be intimidating otherwise. Moreover, I really like the guys I'm sharing it with. We even sat down and watched "Be Somebody Or Be Somebody's Fool" one night. We had a blast. I hope to introduce them to UHF at some point.

The apartment is about 3 kilometers from the studio, which makes for both a nice walk and a nice bike ride. Speaking of which, everyone bikes in Amsterdam. I hadn't ridden a bike in quite some time, so the first couple of trips were a little interesting. But I'm starting to get my biking feet back. It's nice that they have dedicated bike lanes everywhere here—they even have a tiny concrete divider to separate them from the road.

The first week of Project Peach was a workshop led by Arno Kroner. He gave us a crash course in story development, visual story telling, and animation production. For many of us it was mostly review, but it was still very valuable. He went over a lot of stuff that had gotten lost in the recesses of my mind, so it was valuable and important to dig them up to the forefront again. The team also now has a common vocabulary to communicate with, which is good. And just in general I think the workshop has prepared us to be more organized and efficient than we might have been otherwise.

Next week we'll actually start working on the film in earnest. I'm really excited.

Next weekend is the Blender Conference 2007. The Peach team will be giving a short presentation about the project so far and what we foresee in the future. On my own I will also be giving a 2 hour workshop on rigging in Blender, which I am currently preparing for. It will be a bit different from what I think most Blender users might expect. I'll be focusing more on designing a rig to be nice to use rather than covering specifics like weighting and mesh deformations. Of course I'll cover some specifics as well, but I'll be focusing on design concepts and general approaches to rigging.

So, all in all I'm having a blast. (And I'm on a sane sleep schedule for the first time in about two years.)