Weblog:
I get requests from people asking me to write photography tutorials all the time, but I always felt a bit silly about it because I’m not exactly a seasoned pro. Today, I decided to write a quick one because the guys at the Sijun Forums asked. You can see it here. The whole thing actually started in another thread, where I posted other photography tips.
Weblog:
I’m a real sucker for great video editing set to awesome music–be it a movie trailer, video game trailer, or music video. I see so many badly edited game trailers that I feel most game marketing departments could use a lesson or two in video editing. Many just slap together footages and then throw music on top; calling that editing would be an insult to the art of video editing. A great edit would sync itself to every significant changes in the music–both the subtle ones and the obvious ones–noting the changes in mood, complexity, use of timbre..etc. Anyway, I came across one recently that I really enjoyed–the latest trailer for EVE Online, using music by JunkieXL (featuring Saffron, the chick from Republica). You can grab the video from the website’s download page, or download it directly here (118 MB). All footages are in-game, and looks gorgeous (if you’re a fan of epic spaceship sci-fi). The video editing itself isn’t complex, but whoever did it really grasped the pulse of the music and worked closely with the changes in soundscape. And speaking of the music–although this might sound strange, but the highlight of the piece is a very simple but highly effective 2-note melody. Yeah, that’s right–two. You really have to listen to it to see what I mean (I recommend watching that trailer at full-screen size, with the music turned up). If you want to find the music by itself, it’s a track titled Beauty Never Fades (Animatrix Edit). Make sure it’s the Animatrix Edit version–the original version isn’t nearly as atmospheric.
One of my favorite movie trailers was the one for Dark City. It really showcased the feel of the film very well, and the music was composed specifically for the trailer. I was so taken by the music and the trailer that I had contact New Line Cinema about it (that’s how I found out it was composed especially for the trailer by Hughes Hall). If you’ve never seen the film, I highly recommend it–one of the most underrated sci-fi films in the last decade.
News:
After too many hours of wrestling with CSS coding, I’ve finally got this baby up and running. I’ve gone and converted some of the recent entries into the WordPress archive, but since this website dates all the way back to 1999, I’ll probably just convert the entries starting with 2006. If anyone’s bored enough to read the older entries, he’ll just have to do it without the benefits of WordPress’s categories, archives, or other nifty features.
Weblog:
I’ve never been very good with technical stuff–particularly anything to do with coding. To this day, although I’ve designed and maintained my website for well over seven years, I’ve yet bothered to learn a single line of html code (hey, blame it on WYSIWYG editors like Netscape Editor, the very first web editor I used, and Dreamweaver, what I’ve been using since 2001). I think at some point I was forced to learn simple java scripting because I needed that extra something beyond the capabilities of html, but by now I’ve forgotten it all. I thought I’d never have to deal with that kind of headache ever again–until now.
Most of you tech-savvy kids already know what CSS is, but for those of you who have been living in a cave, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, which is like a set of rules that governs the design of a webpage. The beauty of CSS is that you make any changes to it, that change will automatically be applied to any webpage relying on that particular CSS as its set of rules. I’ve known about CSS for years, but like I mentioned, I’ve been spoiled by WYSIWYG editors, so I never had to deal with CSS as I never used it–until now (see the pattern here? I avoid any techie stuff for as long as I could, until I’m forced to learn a new trick).
This whole CSS business happened because I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect blogging software–one that could be installed on a server of your choice instead of being hosted by a company like LiveJournal or MySpace. I visit Ragnar Tornquist’s blog regularly, as I’m a big fan of his (The Longest Journey rocked my world), and I was immediately drawn to the simplicity and the practicality of his blog, which is powered by WordPress. I just knew I had to give WordPress a whirl, and what a whirl it turned out to be! See, WordPress uses CSS, and if I wanted to use it, I’d have to learn it (unless you just use a pre-made template like Rangnar does, which I couldn’t because I wanted to intergrate it into my website, so some heavy customization is required on my part). Unfortunately for me, WYSIWYG doesn’t exist for CSS–at least not in the way that something like Dreamweaver is capable of. I searched high and low and tried a bunch of CSS editors like TSW WebCoder, EngInSite CSS Editor, Style Studio, Amaya, Topstyle..etc, and none of them gave me the kind of immediate feedback I needed. Finally someone at the WordPress forum pointed me to a lovely little free CSS editor called CSSVista. Bingo! It wasn’t 100% what I wanted, but it beats everything else I’ve tried into a bloody pulp. CSSVista is incredibly simple and elegant–it does just one thing, and does it very well. What it does is give you a live view of your CSS in both IE and Firefox at the same time in a split screen, with the CSS code on the side. Any changes you make shows up instantly in the live view–simply fucking beautiful. What you see now as you read this is the result of hours of me learning CSS and tweaking (I started with the Classic template from WordPress). This is probably a one-time thing, and I’ll soon forget all I learned just like I did with java scripting. Let’s hope whatever next techie stuff I need to learn won’t happen for many years to come (wishful thinking. Everytime I work on a piece of new music, I’m forced to learn some new features on some sequencer/softsynth/sample library).
News:
I’ve finally gone and added a guestbook (on the menu strip to the left). I had been thinking about it for years now, but never got around to actually adding one as it seemed unnecessary. However, I found out a lot of people felt silly writing me an email when they didn’t have a lot of things to say, and a guestbook would be perfect for people that only have a comment or two. Until I figure out a way to implement a blog commenting feature into this website, the guestbook can also double as a quick & dirty solution. Anyway, it’s up, and there’s fun to be had.
Weblog:
I’m looking into some of the established blogging systems out there (livejournal, wordpress..etc) at the moment because I want to add the commenting feature to this blog. However, after spending some time dicking around with them, I’m not sure if they’re a better alternative to what I’m doing now. I’ll investigate a bit more and see what happens.
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While checking the web log, I noticed that some people have been downloading the Sakamoto Ryuichi mp3’s from my Share the Love! directory without going through the actual download-enabled page, which is only available if you emailed me requesting it. I don’t know how they managed to do it but they were using bandwidth without my knowledge (I disabled direct downloading in the first place for that exact reason). I really do enjoy sharing music I love and introducing people to artists I’m a fan of, but it’s only worthwhile to me if it’s a two-way communication–that’s why I made it so you had to request the download-enabled page. The mp3’s have been deleted from the server for now–this is the second time I’ve had to do it. I have a feeling there won’t be a third time.
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BSG and Lost needs to pick up the pace. I hate it when I feel like I’m watching one filler episode after another. Let’s see some new progress with all that Lords of Cobalt and The Dharma Initiative business. I’m all for in-depth character development, but at the moment my patience is wearing thin.
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I wanted so much to like Mirrormask because while growing up as a teenager, I was a fan of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Unfortunately, both Elena and I found it so dull that we popped out the DVD before we even watched half of the film. I’m the type that wants to see the underdogs win, but in this case, if I had been the guy funding the production, I probably would’ve pulled the plug on the whole thing had I known how it would turn out. A distinct feeling I had while watching was that the whole film should’ve been a graphic novel instead. I used to believe that a truly talented creative mind should be able to cross mediums and genres easily, because creativity at its core works on similar principles. I no longer feel that way, and I think Mirrormask was the nail that sealed the coffin. Both Gaiman and McKean are successful and respected in the creative circle–two people that have more than proven they have both the talent and the wisdom to lead that talent to form financial success and critical acclaim. But then how do you explain Mirrormask?
Gaiman and McKean are not strangers to the medium of film, as they have both dabbled in it at different times in their creative careers, yet what they ended up with was worse than some of the student films being made around the world every year. The pacing, the dialogues, and in fact the entire premise–nothing worked for me. I probably wouldn’t sit through it again, and I doubt I’ll ever finish the second half of the film. I still don’t understand how Gaiman could write a fantasy film that dull, especially when he’s considered a modern day master of fantasy storytelling. The plot wandered aimlessly, and what should’ve had me in awe of its imagination and wonder, instead made me want to pop in a different film into my DVD player altogether. At no point did I feel any ounce of emotion from what’s going on in the film, and I just didn’t care what happened next–despite the continued bombardment of clever visual designs that McKean piled on. Much of the imagery in the film were so self-indulgent, to the point where it seemed like they felt they had something to prove. On the other hand, some of the principle photography were so lackluster that you wonder if it’s really directed by the talented McKean, who’s one of the most talented visual artists of his generation. What it looked like was misplaced priorities–they should’ve made sure their principle photography kicked ass before they went buck-wild with the special effects. A film in its bare-bones state has to be as solid as possible before one starts to worry about all the extra stuff. The lighting in some of the scenes were so bad that I wonder if they had spent all the money on special effects and didn’t have any left to rent decent lights and accesories (which isn’t possible because principle photography happens before visual effects). I understand that they were working with a very low budget, but the problems displayed in the principle photography weren’t ones borne of budget problems. Simply inexcusable for a director who’s also an accomplished photographer.
Another thing that bugged me about Mirrormask was the fact the main character Helena, a young teenager, was depicted drawing the kind of drawings that only a mature master visual artist like McKean would be able to pull off (McKean obviously drew/painted/photographed everthing that appreared in the film). Although what she drew weren’t the kind of stuff most people associate with superior artistic skill (the average person believes that realism is a sign of superior talent/skill), but to anyone who knows anything about art, those drawings contained an obvious amount of experience and knowledge–something that McKean didn’t bother to hide. I know for a fact that a good artist can “fake” inexperience if they wanted to, but it looked like either McKean didn’t even think about it, or he felt it wasn’t a concern at all, as the film’s supposed to be a wild fantasy anyway. Maybe my priorities are different, but it is a pet peeve of mine. Depicting a talented kid is one thing, but it’s just unrealistic to see any teenager on this planet capable of drawing skill like that–she’d be getting full scholarships from every single art school around the world and wouldn’t need to be in the damn circus in the first place. James Cameron’s got them beat hands down when it comes to that detail, because although he’s a pretty good artist, he’s nowhere near as good as McKean, so it wasn’t a problem that he personally drew all the drawings that were used in Titanic as Jack’s drawings. It felt about right that Jack’s drawings looked that way. In fact, they probably should’ve looked even better, as for a guy that age who’s traveled around drawing whores everywhere, he should be a kickass portrait/figure artist–which Jack wasn’t by the looks of his drawings. This is not a dig on James Cameron or anything–he’s one of my favorite filmmakers and I think the man’s just brilliant. Maybe McKean should’ve done Jack’s drawings, and Cameron should’ve done Helena’s drawings.
As much as my ranting about Mirrormask sounds like some form of diatribe against Gaiman and McKean, it just couldn’t be further from the truth. I really wanted to see them make a film that was both critically acclaimed and financially successful, and it makes me sad that even the critics found the film completely dull and irrelevant (the reviews were split exactly 50/50).
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Now, on to something that’ll turn my frown upside down–Dreamfall, the sequel to the The Longest Journey, one of my favorite video games of all time, is almost here. I regularly read Ragnar Tornquist’s blog (creator/writer/designer/director of The Longest Journey), and although he’s pretty tight-lipped about Dreamfall in general, he’s given away enough enticing details to hold fans off until the game goes gold. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it looks like a real winner.
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