I love this conversation with Lana Bachynski (Associate Art Director, Riot Games) — because it's not really about animation, even though she's one of the best in the business at it. It's about what happens when you decide to be the person who shows up.

Lana grew up in a house that banned video games, which somehow made her more obsessed with them, not less. She talks about rotating on footstools with her siblings waiting for a turn at the family computer, about a teacher who connected her secret animation habit to an actual career, and about landing a Blizzard internship with a demo reel full of monsters instead of the walk cycles everyone else submitted.

But the part that stuck with me most was after Blizzard — when Lana got to Riot and found the studio's animator community was basically three people in an empty room. She didn't shrug and move on. She built it into something dozens of people show up for every week.

Highlights:

• The banned Super Nintendo that started it all
• The mentor who connected animation to a games career
• Why she chose games over a Pixar-track path — it comes down to replayability
• Rigging and animating a Blizzard test character in seven days, on a bicycle with no seat
• Turning three people in an empty room into the Riot Animation Team

Go give this one a full listen — it's one of those episodes that's really about community dressed up as a career story.

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