Welcome back! I hope all of you had a wonderful Holiday season, and a sweet New Years. :) Please browse the new site, tell me if you like it or hate it, and any thing that might seem broken or disconnected (in all browsers!) At the moment I've been testing with Firefox, and things are looking good. The recommended resolution for vewing this website is 1280x1024 or greater. Some new additions to the website include a improved commenting system which include the ability to subscribe to comments and add your own avatars! I've also added the ability to browse this site from an iPhone, fancy. I think some images might need to be reduced in size for mobile capability, but if you're on a wi-fi network, it'll be quick. Also added are a Most Popular section of each category (when you view individidual posts), and independent entry views. There are a ton of changes under the hood which make it easier for me to add posts and other neat little things. Depending on what the immediate future holds, I may put up a small forum which ties into everything here. Give me your comments on that. It won't replace VFXTalk of course, but it might be interesting.
If you follow the extended entry link below, you'll find a nice holiday treat for you!
A special treat for all of you that are subscribed to this blog via RSS or email! Last night I attended a VES screening of I am Legend. After the screening there was a discussion panel from Imageworks showing and describing some of the work that went into creating the creatures and environments.
The film itself was great, much better than the book/novella by Matheson, I felt. Even the ending was better than the book. The supervisors described how they created two endings to the movie, and didn't find out which ending the production would use until a couple of weeks before the films release! The film switches between the present and the past, the past being of a thriving New York metropolis, unspoiled by a cure for cancer that goes wrong. The present is of Robert Neville, a soldier and scientist who is immune, trying to find the a current cure for all the creatures that only emerge at night. The sound design is excellent, and conveys a definite sense of loneliness, his only companion being his daughters dog that he was held custodian of when he put them on a chopper out of the city in the past. Through his basement research lab, we find the reasons and his attempts to solve the mutated cancer gene which cause aggression.
This is my last post for the year. It just hit December, and I've been doing a bunch of things that don't involve DigitalGypsy. Come back in the New Year to see Digital Gypsy's new look, new commenting system, and new community! It's been busted for a little while since the upgrade from 3.2 to 4, and I definitely need to fix that.
Feel free to comment in this entry what you'd like to see more of starting next year. Thanks for visiting, and have a happy holiday season!
Ah, my last day of vacation before I head back into work. And what do I do? I end up writing a post about it. Lots of little things happening here and there. On Friday I saw Beowulf in Imax 3D. It wasn't as bad as I envisioned going in, and while the screen was fairly dim, the imagery was quite good. Some characters weren't as believable as others, most noticeably the secondary characters, but that makes sense. Beowulf himself was well done, as were his immediate friends.
Coming back from Phoenix over the weekend, I coined a new term.. Traffic - The Great Equalizer. I was going at a pretty good clip down the I-10, and there were a number of cars that passed me here and there. They would be pretty adamant about letting me in when we got close to passing big rigs, but my small car fit in right where it needed to. Anyway, here I was, going around the speed limit, and a mess of SUVs comes blasting by me, at least a good 20mph over me. Needless to say, I didn't give chase, because, in the end, the almost stop and go traffic around Palm Springs equalized it all, and I ended up passing them.
