The European student gathering was an awesome event for the people who attended it. Now I can't speak for everyone or describe everyone's reaction so instead I will try to give you my experience, and how the day looked, from my perspective. A person that had never met another animator face to face, never seen a studio, and got the opportunity to interact with people who shared his passion. To me, it was a blast!

The day started off early, not knowing my way around London, I got up nice and early and started getting ready for the day. I had everything nicely planned out and ended up walking around in circles looking for the animation art gallery which was our first visit, and the gathering point for the group. And of course I was late!

As I walked into the gallery I was overwhelmed with the number of people that had shown up, from all over the place. I tried to walk around and greet everyone and shake everyone's hand, but in all the excitement I may have missed some, and will use this opportunity to apologize for that :) The gallery people where really, really nice and after visiting them the day before, giving them a heads up that a bunch of crazy animation students were going to storm the place the following day, they had looked up the school and were able to ask the students a bunch of questions and answer any questions we had about the art of course. The gallery turned out to be a great place to meet up. Thanks for pointing the place out Peter :)

After spending an hour getting to know everyone we were off to our first studio tour. The group split up at this point, Peter took some to Passion while the rest of us went to check out Double Negative. Once we got there, Paul Franklin, head of 3D over there talked about the studio, how they have grown, what projects they have done and got into a little technical stuff also. Then we got the grand tour. They showed us all the fancy offices on the top floor, and then took us downstairs and showed us what can only be described as a dungeon of animators, modelers and other artists, with the feeling that in that room, a whole bunch of cool stuff was being born. The tour at Double Negative turned out to rock :)

Now, the day was far from being over and we met up with the rest of the guys and headed towards what I had thought of as the high point of the day, a visit to the theater at Framestore CFC. There we sat down and watched some of the work they have done, including my all time favorite commercial, the Esuvee. Martin Parker, our host was kind enough to answer out questions and really got into what it was that they specialised in and gave us a good perspective of the European market, from their standpoint. I must say, only a year ago, sitting here all alone in Iceland, I could only dream about getting past their lobby and there I was, sitting in their theater, asking questions -- simply breathtaking.

After that we all headed to Rizzi, a fine Italian restaurant, where we took over the place and started to unwind from the day. The food was good, the day had been good, the people were excellent, and it was a shame that this day was coming to an end. I can only end this by saying, when are we going to do this again? IŽll be there for sure!