The S&V Interview

Located in the Soho district of lower Manhattan, the Savant Experience Center is an actual living space complete with a media/living room, home office, master bedroom, kitchen, dining room and a dedicated 800 sq. foot theater. Close to the Apple store, the Experience Center showcases the latest technologies in home entertainment and control to dealers, architects, designers, industry associations, and prospective clients.

Who says you can't get quality work completed in less than a week? Talk to David Frangioni, CEO of Audio One Sound & Video in North Miami Beach and he'll tell you anything is possible. He knows because he's installed a world-class home theater with high performance AV in only three days.

Constructing a theater from scratch in a custom-built home can be a challenge, but remodeling a room in an established home can sometimes be even more demanding.

A kid who went from racing go-karts at age 7, to becoming the first Rookie of the Year to take home the Shootout victory at the 70-lap Budweiser Shootout, to scoring the highest-points finish ever for a NASCAR rookie in 2006, Denny Hamlin, age 27, is loving life. And with that success has come the means to enjoy his home in a way that suits his ultra-fast-paced lifestyle. For Hamlin, that means technology.

During a time when movies were made entirely by hand, Ray Harryhausen knew better than anyone how to make the most spectacular cinematic creatures come to life. Inspired, like so many, by the original King Kong, Harryhausen honed his filmmaking skills on a variety of short subjects before he tackled his first feature film, Mighty Joe Young, working alongside Kong's stop-motion maestro Willis O'Brien. For you kids reading at home, stop-motion animation is the painstaking process of moving one or more specially designed models a precise fraction of an inch for each frame of film. Do it perfectly 24 times in a row (which can take a full day or more), and you've created one second of a movie. Along the way, Harryhausen even invented the Dynamation technique to more realistically combine his creations with live-action backgrounds, and his work became the gold standard that continues to stoke Hollywood's collective imagination. His 1957 black-and-white, monster-attacks-Rome opus 20 Million Miles to Earth was colorized and released on Blu-ray disc, the first Harryhausen title in high def, along with a new DVD boxed set that adds colorized special editions of Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and It Came From Beneath the Sea, all from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.