A few hours before the start of the workshop, Shahab and Zubair are making sure that everything is set up well at our end.

Remote speakers had varying requirements for video conferencing, so the setup at our end was fairly complicated.

Fortunately, the instructor who had a class scheduled in our hall an hour before the workshop was nice enough to reschedule it so that we had ample time to set everything up.

We also recorded a video of the whole thing. It's being digitized as I type this.

This is what the hall looked like before everyone came in.

And here's a picture of it about an hour later...

Hmmm...

Shehryar was the first speaker at the workshop. He gave an insightful and sobering picture of the computer graphics industry in Pakistan.

He spent a lot of his time answering questions from the audience, which was very useful.

Mashhuda was the first remote speaker at the workshop, and she did a wonderful job. We had been worried about how successful the remote talks would be, and felt a lot better after her talk.

Erik was the only speaker to use polycom, and the audio/visual quality of his talk was the best. Many people in the audience were already familiar with his work, and were thrilled to bits that he was presenting :)

Through each remote speaker's talk, someone from our side would synch the slides being shown locally with the talk. For Erik's talk, Sohaib controled the slides.

Asif flew in from Karachi for a few hours to present at the workshop. His encouraged the audience to ask questions, and his talk generated a lot of discussion among the audience.

Myra talked about what it takes to make it in the computer graphics industry in Pakistan. She also showed work being done by one of the sponsors of the event: Anivista Animation Studio.

James' talk went really well. Several colleagues have told me how much they liked it. This image is a poor capture of the scene and is serving as a place holder at the moment. I'll replace it with a better one soon.

Holly sent us a pre-recorded video of her talk, and was available to answer questions by phone at the end of her talk. I enjoyed her presentation a lot! Her video also gave us a desperately needed breather from video conferencing.

Irfan's talk had a few minor technical glitches. As the video/audio quality wasn't good enough, we had to stop sending video to him, and later also asked him to send only audio. As a result, he had no feedback of any kind from us for long stretches of time. Those must have been difficult circumstances to present in, but Irfan did really well.

Amy was another one of those speakers who woke up really early to present. She had a huge mug of coffee with her, but that was the only sign that this was a weird hour for her to be presenting. After each remote talk, I was struck by how well the speakers presented despite the lack of feedback from an audience.

I gave a short talk about the different activities at SIGGRAPH, and informed the audience about possible places where they could submit their art work.

Charlie woke up very early in the morning to give his talk. He also had a bad cold, which made talking difficult. He still managed to wow the audience with interesting work being done at UCF.

Joseph's talk went very smoothly. There were gasps from the audience when we played the videos from his talk... everyone was quite impressed.

We didn't charge any registration fee, and also served free refreshments during breaks on both days. This was mainly thanks to Shehryar, who got us two sponsors for the event. They were: Cisco Pakistan, and Anivista Animation Studio.

During the breaks, some people sat around eating...

... others discussed the talks that they had attended so far...

Everyone had a good time...

Close to the end of the second day, volunteers sat outside the hall so that when the attendees came out, they could collect their certificates before leaving.

Meanwhile inside, Dr Shafay Shamail (department head of CS) gave concluding remarks.

When it was all over, we quickly took the setup apart, and went for dinner...