lineofaction

Wherein Ryan talks about a school project winning at SIGGRAPH…

I just found out from a friend of mine, Ryan Heniser, who works at DNA Productions in Texas (Jimmy Neutron and the new feature film Ant Bully), that our student piece “The Audition” was not only accepted in the Visual Effects category at SIGGRAPH 2005’s SPACE Competition, but won first place in the whole freakin’ category! That makes two pieces I’ve worked on that have made it into SPACE - the first being “The Machine” in 2004. I’m really excited that we managed to take the category. We put a lot of time and love (not to mention a fair bit of conflict) into that piece and it looks like it finally paid off. Congrats to the team! I’ll try to have a full copy of the movie up sometime this week. 

Wherein Ryan reads the latest Harry Potter book…

Last night I attended the Harry Potter Midnight party in Phoenix’s local downtown Border’s. It was a cool experience, to say the least, and I had the honor of being the first person in the store to buy the Deluxe Edition of the book (apparently I was on the News, but I don’t get local stations). I read 3 chapters of it Friday evening (I guess technically Saturday morning) when I got home, and finished the book today. I will not post any spoilers here, but I will say it is compelling. Rowling suffers from her usual expository “info-dump” issues, this time more midway into the book then at the end. But its still about the characters and the story remains excellent. No more info for now. Don’t want to ruin it for anyone.