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La Luna de Miel Larga
Chris and Aviva's travels through South America and beyond
About
Chris and Aviva got married in September of 2007 and immediately abandoned everything they know to move to Cuzco, Peru for a little over a year. Aviva is conducting her fieldwork towards her PhD in anthropology and Chris is bumming around shooting some short films and trying to look busy.
Digital Raymi
January 18th, 2008 by AvivaChris was invited in early December to give a talk at a conference on 3D and visual effects technologies, put on by the local university here. Although he was first told that he would be speaking in front of 500 people in Spanish for an hour, and he had only 12 days to prepare a presentation, they ended up moving the conference to January 17-20. With a sigh of relief, we promptly got caught up in all our holidays travels, so we got back to Cusco last Sunday (January 13th), with only a few days left for him to prepare. Luckily he had written and translated about 2/3 of his presentation, and was set to spend the week working on his slides and the other 1/3. That was until we received a phone call on Sunday night that they wanted Chris to come to a press conference on Monday morning. And so it began. A press conference and three tv interviews—it turned into quite the publicity circuit. The conference organizers were really pushing his name and credits when trying to get people to come to the conference. They said that if it is a success, they want Chris to put together a proposal to teach a few different classes at the university. He is thinking right now of doing a two-month introduction to Maya in February and March, then doing more intermediate and advanced stuff when we come back at the end of May. We’ll see.
The press conference was a bit overwhelming, since they said his name every other sentence and he had no idea what they were saying about him. He sat in this big throne next to the university president and conference organizers and I sat off to the side and supplied him with words every once in a while. He ended up explaining to the audience what movies he had worked on and what he would talk about at the conference. Afterwards, a bunch of reporters took statements from him (basically wanting him to invite people to the conference) and one took a video of me answering questions about his motives for being in Peru (that was an awkward question to field, since the university is making it sound like he is here just for them…INVITADO CHRIS PAUL!!!!).
The first tv spot on Monday night was a little rushed, but Chris did really well and they showed his tank and some of his other work too. (Our friend Mario sat next to him and helped him understand the fast-talking tv host.) Besides Chris, they have been interviewing the conference organizer and another invited guest from a Lima 3D company called Peru3D.
Tuesday’s spots were slightly more difficult because Mario couldn’t be there. The early one was hard because they asked such vague and general questions that Chris had trouble coming up with interesting answers (even in English). That was about five minutes. The second spot was much better: a longer interview with a nicer host. They showed Chris’s reel in full and gave him an opportunity to explain it (which he had prepared notes for in Spanish). And they asked everyone for general words and Chris had time to look to me for guidance on what to say while the other two were answering. He froze a bit at the end, but it came off well overall.
At the conference on Thursday there were only about 150 people, but Chris’s talk got such good reactions (he fielded about 10 audience questions and then had about 4 people take their pictures with him), that he was asked to give the same talk again on Friday. They rearranged the schedule for him to speak again, and said that they were sure more people would now come when the word was out by word of mouth. He was awesome: he had them clapping for him from the beginning when he asked them to be patient with his Spanish, and everyone seemed to enjoy the slides and film clips he showed.
Go to this website and click on the DIGITAL RAYMI link (ver notas) and see how they have advertised Chris (unfortunately, all the press misspells his name as Christ).
PS: And from this link, you can see the commercial work that he did as a result of some contacts he made at this conference.
svgallery=Chris_interview
One Response to “Digital Raymi”
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January 20th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Hey, Aviva & Chris. Somehow I missed entirely that you have this blog, or I’d have been posting right along. But since you sent an email a few minutes ago, I’m now alert! It was all fascinating to read, and congrats to Chris on the conference! We float our love across the miles.
Aunt Lois & Uncle Tom