February 27th - Pokémon Day

Pokémon day has been pretty easy to celebrate. Framestore is currently working on Detective Pikachu (which I’m super excited for) so the company is pretty all over Pokémon at the moment. When I got into work I was greeted by these:

Jess knew Pokémon day was coming up so she’d brought them in from home to live on my desk for the day. Adorable. While I was working today I watched the edit of our sequences. Obviously I can’t show anything but I can say that it’s looking great and link to the trailer:

It’s the film I’m most looking forward to that we’re working on this year.

The final Pokémon thing to cap off the day was on my commute home I fired up an emulator I have on my phone and played Pokémon Crystal. It was fun. Pokémon blue was the first Pokémon game I played when I was a kid and it’s pretty similar. I’ve sunk too many hours into this emulator over the last year which I why I hadn’t played it in a bit. I also beaten the Elite Four a while back and the game just hasn’t been as interesting after that. Check out my line up:

I wandered around for a bit, battled a few people, and then I was home, Pokémon day successfully celebrated.

Pokémon day...9/10 one of my favourite franchises.

January 17th - Kid Inventors’ Day

Today has been Kid Inventors Day! Unfortunately I know basically no children and my friends that do have them all have tiny babies that are a bit young for inventing.

In an effort to find a way to celebrate the day I had a look online at what things have been invented by kids.

The most notible were popsicles, trampolines and earmuffs. I figured I could celebrate one of those things to tick off the day. Popsicles would be easy. Trampolines harder without some planning (and I currently have a fractured tailbone so probably not advisable). Earmuffs also seemed easy until I realised I couldn't find mine and was loathed to buy more when I know I have some...somewhere! So that left me with popsicles but for some reason it just didn't sound that fun and like a bit of a cop out.

So new approach... Kid inventors sounds pretty interlinked with STEM to me and that is a thing I know about! I've worked in tech for quite a while now and I love it, but it can be a hard graft to get in the door, especially into VFX and especially as a woman . I'm really lucky that at Framestore in the departments I span (R&D and Pipeline) we have 9 whole women! I know it doesn't sound like a lot but it really is for the industry. So in this vein I googled STEM for kids schemes and came across stemettes.org!

There's a number of different ways you can volunteer with them depending on your experience and gender. The one that seemed like the best fit for me was this one...

So I signed up!

Can't wait to be assigned and meet my Sherpee in the next few weeks!

Kid inventors... 8/10. Looking forward to helping the next generation!