Way to go, Jimbod!

Yesterday, I learned that one of my friends from my undergraduate days was up for an academy award! My friend, Jim Berney, or James Patrick Berney, or Jim, or Jimbod, as we called him back then (don't ask), received a nomination for visual effects for his work on the movie THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE! I wasn't able to view the Oscar telecast but my other friend from those days, Pete Claar, did and he wrote to say that he was able to see Jim during the telecast multiple times sitting there in the audience having a good time!

I'm so proud of him! I still remember the day he told me he was moving to San Luis Obispo to get his Masters degree in computer graphics; I also remember when he came back to Los Angeles that his first job in the graphics industry was to create a flocking algorithm so that he could realistically render the flight pattern of bats flying out of Batman's cave in the original Batman movie. (It was cool at the time waiting in the theatre to see Jim's name scroll up the screen after the movie!)

Since then Jim has worked on such movies as Contact, the Harry Potter series, and the Steven Segal classic Under Siege 2: Dark Territory! The first shot of that last movie is a scene in outer space just above the earth with a sun rise taking place from the vantage point of the camera. As the sun rises, a sinister government satellite comes into view. As Jim said at the time, "That's my sunrise! How many people can say something like that?" :-) Click on Jim's name in the first paragrph of this post to see a list of all the movies for which he has received visual effects & animation credits.

Well, Jim has come a long way since our days at the computer science department at UC Irvine and I'm really really happy for him! Congrats Jim on receiving the nomination! I can't wait to see Narnia and I can't wait to see the movie that someday will let you bring home an Oscar!

Ken