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 2011 marked the first time the French students came to the United States for the workshop. An enthusiastic and talented group of EESI students touched down in Philadelphia to spend over two weeks working on Claire's project "Pod'Orange," an animated documentary of her trans-Atlantic voyage with a small crew of sailors as they served as an assisting vessel in a race from La Rochelle, France, to Bahia, Brazil.


The UArts and EESI teams shared tasks, with the French team largely taking on coloring, rotoscoping, and compositing duties, with the Americans engaged in animating as well as the other tasks. In terms of the theme of cultural difference, we observed at close hand the not-always-similar approaches to working of the two teams. The French team showed up in the lab, put their headphones on, worked straight through lunch time, headed out en masse to enjoy the fine Philadelphia cuisine of pizza and hamburgers, while the Americans "multi-tasked," attempting to work all the time while juggling Facebook, e-mail, and YouTube.


At times tense, but held together admirably under Claire's dynamic and personable direction, the workshop ended with a party at Professor Karl Staven's house, including a screening of the finished section of film, where Claire's boat encounters a storm.