Tag Archives: crayola

Conferences, Photo-A-Day, Toys, Travel

Toy Fair 2015 – Day 1


Photo-A-Day #3600

For the third year in a row I attended Toy Fair in New York City. And for the third year in a row there was a major snow storm. I had worked overnight from home while the snow was falling and even got out and shoveled out my car at 2am. I got out a couple hours early and headed down to the train station. It was blizzard conditions and I was one of only four cars on the road. I did arrive safely and I was very surprised that my train was actually running. It was an hour late but it got me down to New York and I had time to make it to my appointments for the day.

I spent the rest of the day at the Toy Fair meeting with many different companies including Modarri. They have some new repaints and also some new body kits and even a tire pack coming out. The booth was set up with some PlayTape which looked like roads and also there were a bunch of custom made Modarri cars that artists in Santa Cruz created.

I then went to a bunch of appointments all over the main floor of Toy Fair. I hit Playmobil, I was not allowed to take any photos there and I really wanted to. There is a set of motorcycle figures that I really want to collect. They also had much more including some very cool stuff coming soon which I can’t talk about.

I went to the Crayola booth and was blown away by the Animation studio. This upcoming product incorporates the technology from the Virtual Design Pro studio and then allows kids to create animated movies by making a few simple moves to a wire-frame figure. This will be amazing and I am looking forward to working on movies with Eva.

I also visited the Playmates booth to see all of the great Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that are coming for the year. I saw a little preview of where the line is going for the fourth season of the show. There were also some new Half Shell Heroes toys and all new playsets.

I finished up at the convention center and went to my hotel. The walk seemed shorter this year, which was good because I was exhausted. I got myself a couple of slices of pizza and ended up passing out dead asleep at 8:30pm. I woke at 4:30 am so I didn’t get the full amount of sleep I was hoping for but I slept pretty well.

Photo-A-Day

Use Every Crayon Team Builder


Photo-A-Day #3318

Tonight I ran a team building exercise with my co-workers. I modified my “Use Every Crayon in the Box” project to use it with a group of people. I bought three Crayola giant sized coloring pages: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Hot Wheels and Disney Fairies. Each person got to select one of the pages that they wanted to color. Once I explained the rules I gave everyone a crayon and turned on the one minute timer app on my phone. Every minute a sound would go off and I’d hand out the next crayon. I did this twice tonight, the second time around I colored one myself.

It was interesting to see how people approached this task. Some filled up their whole page halfway through the experiment and didn’t do much more. Others adapted to the concept right away and used all the crayons in so many fun ways. It was cool to see all the talent being shown by everyone.