visiblog

Kenna and I went to see Daybreakers last night on a whim.  If 70mm over-the-top blood explosions are your bag, this is the movie for you.

Directed by another Hollywood  brother team, Michael and Peter Spierig, I got the feeling they watched Zombieland and the last Rambo movie a bunch of times before they shot this.  I’m still unsure of whether they were attempting true horror or just going for the gross-out.  Tons of “gotcha” moments where a bat flies by or something jumps out at you.  So many, in fact, that by the ending bat fly-by with shriek, I didn’t even jump.

The makeup and creature VFX was done by Weta Workshop and was excellent but the post compositing of some of the outdoors shots and explosions by Postmodern in Sydney, AU looked pretty bad.

So unless you’re looking for in-your-face spatter on the big screen, you can probably wait for the DVD.

My buddy Erik has a witty and thought-provoking blog post about the drug-like phenomenon of microblogging.

I’m posting it on Twitter and Tumblr…

Best.     Movie.    Evar.

Two very helpful pieces of info that I learned in the past 24 hours:

1. Western Digital drives are preformatted with NTFS.  In order to install them on an Airport Extreme, you must first reformat them so they are writable by your mac clients.  Use Journaled (Extended).
   • A side note: Time Machine actually WILL work on the airport shared drive.
2. In Autodesk Maya, if you want to load an image sequence, you need to insure that it’s naming convention follows this rule: [filename].####.[extension]
   • If you use a standard naming convention like [filename]_####.[extension], it will pretend to work but give errors like:

//"Warning: Texture file /Volumes/AQCC/video/act04Tiff/act04_00000.tif doesn't exist, node file1 //

1. • This is arcane knowledge that took me hours to figure out.  Use it wisely.
   • An appropriate filename example would be: “act04.0003.tif“

A really excellent interview with several of the concept designers for James Cameron’s new Avatar. Super cool to see that Wayne Barlowe was on the team!

So this morning, I looked outside and thought it might rain.  Heading over to Wunderground.com (the best weather station around, BTW), I tuned into the “wundermap”.  All these choices for overlays of Tornadoes (we’ve had three in the past twenty years!), Fires, Hurricanes, Brimstone, Illegal Aliens – it’s amazing.  So I fired up every single overlay they offered and goggled (not googles) at the insanely overlayed map.

Pat Watson and I are teaching a Maya Character Bootcamp this spring over at CSUMB.  Given this course outline (thank you Graffle), would you be interested in this class for $200?

Short post here.  I upgraded the blog to the latest version of WP.  What a pain.  It may be that I’m just a bonehead, but good GOD what a process.  No fun.

In other news, the Tumblr Blog now has comments.

What a boring post.  Sorry your RSS woke you up for this one..

There’s a need in my life for more complexity. So I’m starting a second blog.

VISICHUNK

Today marks the first day of an entirely Apple tooled lab for Lindsay Digital. My last interaction with an MS-based PC was unbelievably painful and, as this computer is most likely laying in wait for me to trust it during some important crunch time, I am removing it from the network and installing this new thing.

Unlike the iPod or iPhone purchases, this was a little less “candy-like” in its packaging.

The new Mouse is pretty weird.  Definitely going to take some getting used to:

The new Remote is also pretty space-aged, heavy, like it’s important:

Can’t wait to move this into its place in the Lindsay Digital Command Center of Wonder…