Hello!

I am alive. I am busy. Thanks for stopping buy.

Client

This is dead on. Welcome to the VFX client vendor relationship.

Nine

If you've been reading this blog for a looooong time, you might remember me saying how much I loved Shane Acker's animated short "9" and you'll know how excited this must make me.


9 - Official Trailer

Face

JJ Abrams has not forgotten the face of his father.

Unfortunately, the way the work in the new Star Trek movie looks, I don't think there's any way this will go anywhere besides ILM. Too bad, I'd love to work on this movie.

Why

OMG. O ... M ... G. Why do things like this only happen when I'm not living in the US? Satch, Michael Anthony, Sammy Hagar and some guy from th Chilli Peppers are going on tour to support their album.


Chickenfoot

On Tour


OMG, how the hell did I not know about this?

Half

So, Mel Gibson is a little crazy, we all know it. Fine, who isn't? Obviously his wife of 30 years knows it, because she wants a divorce, and since the state of Southern California is oh so forward thinking and progressive, and since there's no pre-nup, she gets half of everything. Everything being a billion dollars. Biggest ... Divorce ... Evah. Good for her, she doesn't want to be married anymore, she can walk away with five, hundred, million, dollars. The thing is, she wants spousal support. Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of evil bitch takes five hundred million dollars, and then asks for alimony? Is there some diamond plated house you're afraid you won't be able to buy? Is there a small African country you're planning on supporting? Or perhaps overthrowing? Maybe she could take some of that five hundred million and HIRE A PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRM.

Away

Am super busy.

Trying to buy this house.

more pix

404

Best ... 'Page Not Found' error ... evah

Snap

Some asshole from AIG-FP decided to resign, on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. He made the mistake of trying to play the sympathy card. Big mistake. He gets absolutely fucking told by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. It's a must read.

Apocalypse

I'm not sure what the hell they were thinking with this title (the original Manga is called 'Apocalypse Meow' and based on the Vietnam War) but this looks interesting.

Cat Sh*t One

Review : Watchmen

6 / 10

Up

Lizst

Hungarian Rhapsody #2 just came up on iTunes. WTF? I'm pretty sure that Lizst either sold his soul, or he had like, six or seven arms. I can play a little, and that song is ridiculous. It's so obscenely complicated that it's almost distracting. I'm trying to listen to the music and all I keep thinking is "how the fuck do you even play that with only two hands?"

40

I just ate a cheese scone ... with butter and jelly. That's about as close as it gets to pouring out a 40oz for my great aunt Al. If it was bread, she put jelly on it. Garlic toast? Pass the jelly. Good times.

Valley

So, it's sometime odd to work in this business, especially when you're working on something like the Lord of the Rings movies, or Avatar. With that kind of film the studio is always walking the line between keeping everything hush-hush to build anticipation and hype for the film and 'leaking' enough tidbits and on-set pictues and general info to keep the fan-boys happy. There's a 3D cinema blog called marketsaw that has heaps of Avatar related posts and it's always fun to check things like that out to see how wildly off base they usually are with their guesses and predictions. Anyway, that blog had a link to a really good youtube video on 'The Uncanny Valley' or 'Why Doing Character Work Is So Expensive'

List

Flight to Auckland : $XXX
One Night Accomodations : $XXX
4th row tickets : $XXX

Crossing Counting Crows off The List Of Bands I Love And Never Got Around To Seeing Live? Fucking Priceless.

May 21st in Auckland. Counting Crows and some British Band, The What? The Where? ....... The Who! that's it, The Who. I suppose we'll stay and watch them as well, unless there's something better to do. Let's see, who's left on the list?

1. Pink Floyd
2. Huey Lewis and the News
3. Aerosmith
4. Brad Paisley
5. Indigo Girls
6. Van Halen w/ Roth
7. Maynard Ferguson (crap I think he's dead)
8. Boston (crap, more dead guys)
9. Smashmouth
10. Bryan Adams

Waves

Last week I bought a couple of kids size wetsuits for RC and RJ. Nothing fancy, got 'em used on trademe.co.nz, a fancier NZ version of craigslist. I wouldn't compare it to ebay, anyway. They've got spring suits, but the spring ones just don't cut it here. Since the suits came, all they want to do is hit the beach with the boogie boards. We went out Saturday for a while to break in the new suits. I was at work for half the day on Sunday, but I was home early enough so we went out to eat and got home at about 7:00pm. "Can we go, can we go, canwegocanwegocanwego?" So we threw the stuff in the truck and hit it until we lost the sun. Not as nice as the three to four footers on Saturday, but still some twos and a lot of threes.

Fast forward to Monday afternoon at work. I get a random email from one of the compositors with the subject "is this you?" well, actually, yes it was me. Turns out that he was down at the beach at the same time taking some pictures and he had taken a few of the boys and me boarding.

Before I get to the pictures I've got to give props to

Karim Sahai, Travel Photographer

whithout whom I could not bring you these amazing pictures

The Boys patiently waiting.

RC and I catching a wave.

RJ dropping in on a nice one.

They're going to be ready for learner surfboards pretty soon.

Steam

Wow


Awesome steampunk case mod

Review : Burn After Reading

I've been pretty remiss in doing movie reviews for the last copule months so I'm going back through some of the one's I've missed.

I was pretty hesitant seeing this after the fiasco of a movie that was the last Cohen brothers offering but hey everyone deserves a second chance right? Especially a second chance with a cast like this. Well they almost lost me with this one, I wanted to not like it. There's quite a few things going on, different plot lines, but the reality is, this is movie about how fucked up people are. Regardless of their station in life, or their circumstances. People are not only fucked up, but they bring it on themselves.

Now, however true that maybe, it's not exactly a recipe for a great movie. Frankly it makes for a stupendously grating movie, no matter how much humor you try to shoehorn into it, it's a movie about idiots. I found myself rather unsympathetic to, well, everyone in the movie. Except maybe for Malkovitch, but his ex CIA agent Osbourne Cox is pretty unlikable anyway. It's a whole movie of anti-heroes.

J.K. Simmons and David Rasche, however, were the saving grace of this movie as sort of the Deux ex Machina of the film, watching the idiocy unfold from afar. They don't have a lot of screen time, but, man, those two were the best part of the movie. Not only that, the way they look at the goings on, helps you look at it in a way that you can appreciate the humor in the situation. J.K. Simmons in particular is brilliant. If you missed it in the theatre, and judging from the box office, you probably did, you should still give this one a try at home.




Five out of Ten

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

I hadn't heard anything about this movie until it won a bunch of Golden Globe awards. I honestly didn't know even what it was about when we went to see it. As it turns out, it's a sometimes funny, sometimes gritty, always engaging story about a kid from the slums of Mumbai. Directory Danny boyle (Trainspotting) took a good story, and made it a great movie by simply telling it in an interesting way. To avoid spoilers for those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'll just say that it can't be more highly recommended. I give it






A) 2/10
B) 4/10
C) 6/10
D) 9/10

I'll go with D, nine out of ten, final answer.

Picinc

Ahh, the good old days. Crew Picnic at Pelenor Fields. Link goes to 3k original.



Can you find me?

Diablo Rojo

Holy crap. I'm never going back in the ocean ever again.

10 foot long squid with thousands of needle sharp teeth, that will fucking eat you. Not like, on accident, like, look Juan fell in the water and one squid distracted him while he was flanked by three more squid that don't care what he is as long as he's made of meat. Oops now he's dead. Just remember boys and girls, mother nature hates you and wants you to die, preferrably in as gruesome a manner as possible.

Seven pt 2

Less inspired rugby on Saturday. The US reverted to form and got destroyed by Argentina and South Africa, though their final result was still better than last year. We might have gone a bit hard on Friday so it was a little more laid back on the second day. England pulled off a shocker and stunned the Kiwis for the title at the end of fulltime. It seemed to put a bit of a damper on the crowd, although Courtenay was still packed untill three or four in the morning. Us oldtimers didn't even make it untill one.


Here's some pix.

Seven

The International Sevens Rugby League is in Wellington this weekend. Two days of seven a side rugby with seven minute halves. It's awesome. Some of us cut out of work early (at five, leaving work at five is early, *sigh*) last night. There was some fantastic rugby, The US went 2-0 in group play, which is unprecedented for the historically weak US side. Kenya came from behind to stun South Africa in an epic first round match, much to the delight of the local crowd who are not big fans of the Springboks. They like the Austrailians even less and took great pleasure in the beatdown the NZ side laid on the Austrailians. And it's really just a big party. I don't know why but it seems like there's a rule somewhere that says you have to dress up so just about everyone is in some kind of costume. Good times. Got a few pix from yesterday. I'll get some more today and get them up on flikr when I get a chance.

Fruity

I've been playing around with some digital music tools, mostly a software sequencer called, of all things, Fruity Loops. I'm totally hooked. This sounds pretty crappy because all I did was plop down the camcorder with my amp on one side and the computer with horrible sounding little game speakers on the other. I'm on the lookout for a used mixer so that I can balance everything out and feed it straight into the camera. I'm also waiting for a 5m optical interconnect so that I can feed the computer into the stereo for those times when it needs to be, shall we say, a bit louder? :)

Over

I give Israel 10 years, tops, of existance. Expanding settlements in the West Bank preclude a two state solution and while some may argue that there's already a system of apartheit in place, given current demographic trends, apartheit will be a numerical reality in about 10 years. Virulent nationalisim and extreme religious orthodoxy continute to drive West Bank settlement building at rates that are increasing by five percent per year. Stopping the building and negotiating a two state solution is the only hope Israel has for long term survival. I doubt that it will ever happen. I just wonder who will get to keep all the nuclear weapons.

Tough

It's hard being right all the time.

LONDON (AP) -- Bill Gates and other donors are giving more than $630 million to the international effort to eradicate polio, after the disease spiked and spread to seven countries that were previously polio-free......

Otaki

The gang went pseudo-camping at Otaki this weekend with some families from work. We were trying to go Friday night to Monday morning but some crazy rain Saturday night had us home by Sunday morning. We were at a campground about 100m from the beach. RC is getting pretty good at catching the waves on the boogie board, it will be learner surfboard time pretty soon. It was dog friendly, which is nice. Although I forgot the rain cover for the tent and had to go back home and get it Friday night, luckily it's only about an hour North.

Pix are here

This just in ...

People are stupid.

It's called "Herd Immunity" and people who don't vaccinate their kids deserve a good old fashioned Polio outbreak except, oops, it's not just the people who aren't immunized that will get sick, it's everyone. You have a social responsibility to vaccinate your kids. Welcome to the 21st century, these aren't your ancestor's Dark Ages.

Joe

So my friends Eric and Beth have family in San Diego. They usually go home every year around Christmas time. Get back to the states, see the family, eat some real mexican food, that kind of thing. Well, we're pretty busy right now, and Beth isn't working, so she took the kids and flew back to SoCal a couple weeks early to stay with family. Once we wrapped up some stuff at work, Eric flew back by himself. So, he's sitting on the plane, in business class, and he ends up talking to the guy sitting next to him, as you do, it's the Auckland to LA leg, you can't really ignore someone for 12 hours that you're sitting next to. Anyway, Eric asks the guy what he does for a living, and the conversation goes something like this.

Eric: What do you do for a living?
Person: Oh, I'm a singer in a rock and roll band.
Eric: That's awesome, what kind of music do you play?
Singer: Like Billy Joel.
Eric: That's cool. It's great that someone's keeping his music going since he retired.
Billy Joel: No, not like Billy Joel, I'm Billy Joel.

Ouch.

I love how Joel tried to play it off since Eric didn't know who he was. "I'm just a singer in a band". Of course Eric is the kind of person who always seems lucky, so when you hear a new Billy Joel song, and he's talking about the guy on the plane who doesn't know who he his, you'll know where the story comes from. The icing on the cake though, was this.

Eric: So, how do you like travelling with your dad?
Mrs. Joel: I'm his wife.

Twelve hours is a long time to sit next to someone on a airplane.