THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Finishing off the storyboards this week. My director liked my shots which made me feel good. Now all I have to do is put the board together and I’m done. Then it’s back to doing character layout.

Had a nice little discussion about Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and The Lord of the Rings this week with my director and an assistant director friend of mine. My director had Fellowship of the Rings playing in his room and it got us talking. Things like this always happen at work. Often times these discussions praise or “fix” (because we are guys and know how to fix everything) every movie ever created that we like or dislike.

SOME THOUGHTS (Cyberpunk)

So I got Darknet in the mail this week and started reading it. I’ve only read the first two chapters so far and I’m very interested in reading more. The thing is that as I was reading it, a thought struck me. I’ve read a few William Gibson books (he invented the Cyberpunk genre although he didn’t coin the phrase). Many people have written in the genre for years and have also riped off many of his ideas and made great careers from it (The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell), even the term microsoft comes from a William Gibson novel. Thing is, so much about what Gibson wrote has become such a reality, that now, I’m reading a book that starts out exactly like a Cyberpunk novel, with a guys who plays in a game in cyberspace (a.k.a MMORPG), is a celebrity in that world and yet, it’s not science fiction. Since I haven’t read the rest of the story, I can’t say that it won’t become science fiction later, but the fact that this guy is walking around with a laptop, jacking into the internet (the Matrix as Gibson called it sometimes. He also called it the Net) and playing games in it in a cyberworld is something that was Cyberpunk fiction in the 80s. It’s just really weird. All we need now is big corporations to be our government and we’re living in a Cyberpunkworld.

MOVIES

I did not like The Hulk movie that came out a few years back. I thought it was slow, boring, and I didn’t care about the characters at all. I also thought that the idea of using different shots from different angle on the same screen to simulate comic book panels, was poorly done.

The point of having all those “panels” should have been to show the totality of what was going on at a given moment rather than just showing you the same exact thing from different perspectives. For example: the shot near the beginning of the movie with the helicopter landing was mostly shots of the helicopter landing. It was like, five shots of the exact same helicopter from different cameras. Why? What new information are you giving me that I can’t get from seeing it in one shot? That’s so dumb. It would have been better if it was one shot of the helicopter and maybe one of the pilot and some close up shots or long shots of the spectators and main characters as they watched the helicopter land. That way, we get a more complete picture of the moment. They did it a little bit, but nowhere near the amount that would have called for it. The way they used it, was more gimmicky than necessary and it added nothing to the movie.

I also found that the only time in the movie that I was interested in what was happening was when the Hulk was on screen, and then only, if he was smashing things.

Needless to say, I wasn’t very excited about the fact that a new Hulk movie is coming out. Until I watched the trailer. The trailer makes the new movie look pretty darn good. It even looks like the parts without the Hulk in it will actually be as interesting as the parts with him in it (the key to making a good superhero movie). Now I’m getting excited.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnBNTtgo2mY&eurl=http://www.hulkmovies.com/trailers/

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