The Shard

AS a result of the redundancies at Double Negative, a series of events ensued, and I was contacted by Walt Disney Feature Animation.  At the beginning of January, I accepted their offer to return to Los Angeles and take up work at their studio. 














For our last weekend in London, Tony and I celebrated some of our favorite restaurants, and also went to see the newest skyscraper in London - The Shard. 

We reserved tickets to go to the top of The Shard to the observation platform.  The half hour slots go quickly, so you need to reserve your time in advance. 

 It was evening, and the views of St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tower Bridge were wonderful. 

 It was a neat vantage point of many monuments that I'd seen from the ground level, but now could see them from the air.

Redundencies and Departures

Double Negative went through a large series of redundancies(layoffs), and many of the people that were laid off were dear friends. 

It was sad to see so many great artists and friends leaving the company.  As our presence in the UK is based on employment at a UK company, without that employment,  all foreign nationals have only 60 days to leave the country.

Some landed jobs at other UK companies.  Most of these people were UK citizens, and many of the others took positions at the new VFX companies forming in Canada. 

I hope that we will all have the opportunity to work together again.

Ireland - Belfast - The Titanic

 We took the morning train from Dublin to Belfast.  It was inexpensive, and we'd set up our return flight to fly out of Belfast.  We were staying right across the street from Belfast City Hall - the site of many an uprising in the past weeks just prior to our trip.  Luckily, all was very peaceful the weekend we were there. 

The Albert Memorial Clock Tower is a very cool Victorian structure.  It has a bit of a lean however.

 Tony and I stopped in for a break from the Irish damp weather at The Crown Saloon, which is a beautiful Victorian pub, which somehow managed to survive all of the bombings across the street at the Europa Hotel.  It is a wonderful throwback, and a lovely place to have a Hot Whiskey to shake off the chill.

It doesn't take one long to find a Titanic tribute, as the Memorial Statue is on the grounds of the City Hall.












The main purpose of our trip to Belfast was to visit the Titanic Museum, which occupies a space on the Harland and Wolfe shipyards right next to where the hulls of the Titanic, and her sister ships, the Olympic, and the Britannic were built. 

The exhibit is more a salute to the amazing ships built by Harland  and Wolfe Shipyards over their 100+ year existence. 

 The most famous ship that they built is undoubtably the Titanic.  They do a great job explaining the process of how these large vessels were built over 100 years ago.

They have one great view at the museum, where they show where the ships were built, so you can picture what it looked like at that time. 

 Nothing remains of the construction location except the foundation of the structure and a memorial to the ships, which show an outline of the size and shape of the hull.  Even though it was sleeting, it was neat to walk around and get an idea of the size of the vessels.  An amazing achievement for that time.

Just across the street from the museum is the original design building where Thomas Andrews would have worked on the blueprints for the Titanic.  Unfortunately, this isn't open to the public.






The Museum also talks about the numerous Titanic movies over the past 100 years.  Included is the James Cameron version which was releasing on BluRay at that time, so several costumes from the film were on display. 

Belfast still takes great pride in the fact that they built the Titanic, and they should, for as they say, "it was fine when it left here".