Harry Potter and Sundance

Well, it's getting late in the evening here, spending a couple of hours after work finishing up our Sundance project. We hopefully will be done with everything at the end of this week, possibly next week. The shots look cool, and it's definitely a break from the monotony of comping CG creatures! Lots of creative development for this project. Flaming hearts, flying bugs, some sweet work from a small team here working on our own time.

I went to the theater last night to catch the new Harry Potter film, now that the hype has died down and there isn't too much of a crowd. It was a decent film, with wonderful effects. Those guys did a great job! The story seemed to jump around quite a bit, and also seemed to drag in places. I prefer the previous film to this one, in terms of storytelling and pace. Some really spectacular compositing and integration, in addition to all the sweet, sweet CG creatures and animation! The dragons were wonderfully animated, and I really enjoyed the underwater action as well. Unfortunately the live action portions of the film did not stir the same type of emotions for the previous films. Maybe I'm getting jaded with Harry Potter and his gang, who knows.

During the previews before the film, we saw no less than four trailers for full CG animated features. Monster House, Over The Hedge, Hoodwinked, and one other one whose name escapes me. They all seemed quite mediocre, and I can't help but wonder who these films will cater to? I guess everyone is trying to ride Pixar's coattails, but we'll see how effective these films become.