Rugby World Cup

All Together Now

Next weekend, the Rugby World Cup begins. The first match is on Friday, however the first in which I have any national stakes takes place on Sunday: USA vs Ireland. Being a dual citizen, I sort of have my pick of loyalties in this case. Being someone with hopefully a sense of morality, I must throw my full support behind the underdog, in this case the USA Eagles. A confident performance this year could give the US Rugby team the visibility it needs to grow the sport in the US (as much as I do enjoy American Football, there is room for the NFL and a healthy Rugby culture in a country as big as America.)

I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how the extremely talented USA winger Takudzwa Ngwenya fares.

This rather fanciful image is, if you haven't yet guessed, a bit of a take on the famous photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, with a beam of sunlight standing in for the flagpole. While I'm waving the flag, I may as well appropriate such things in the process, right?

I seem to have an unhealthy obsession with flooding an image with ridiculous backlighting, don't I? I'll have to start playing around with other ideas soon. I think it was that I found in animation it was quite a nice way to pump a bit of thick atmosphere into an image, and create almost a live-action sensation of light.