Garden Timelapse: Sugar Ann Peas

Time-lapse video of sugar pea plants growing from tiny sprouts over the course of six weeks.

I’ve continued to shoot timelapse video of the various veggies we grow in the garden. Here’s one more from last fall, of some sugar snap peas. They grew so fast I had to shoot twice a day! I was blown away by the origami-like way each pair of leaves unfolds as the vines grow, and the branching tendrils that whip out and grab on to whatever they can find. You might also notice some sudden changes in early September: we had a brutal heat wave that almost killed the plants. Some quick thinking and an old kid-sized umbrella saved them from total destruction. Not all of the plants survived, but the ones that made it produced crunchy pods as sweet as candy. Will definitely grow these again!

“Believable Acting” video now online

ACM SIGGRAPH has posted the video of my April 12 talk about our team’s work on believable acting for autonomous animated characters. This was a really fun one to do. Most conferences limit you to 25 minutes for technical talks, but we’ve always had a lot more material than that! The San Francisco SIGGRAPH chapter’s talk format is comfortably open-ended, so I was able to spend a full hour and go a lot deeper without rushing through it, and still leave plenty of time for Q&A.

Huge thanks to Henry LaBounta and the SF SIGGRAPH organizers for inviting me, and to the audience for showing up and asking such thoughtful and interesting questions!