Archives for the month of: October, 2004
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Bill and Ted

October 29, 04 //
5

Bill and Ted“Socrates strolls through the crowded high school audi­to­rium in a bathrobe, nod­ding hello to Sig­mund Freud, as Genghis Khan swings his bat­tlestaff nearby. Abra­ham Lin­coln, Napoleon Bona­parte and Billy the Kid sink back in the plush seats, while Joan of Arc plays with her dog. On stage, Beethoven faces a large array of syn­the­siz­ers, with a com­put­er­ized light­ing sys­tem to intro­duce him to the MTV generation.

The cen­ter of atten­tion, how­ever, is two teenage boys who have brought these leg­endary fig­ures to the present-day to help them pass a his­tory class.

It’s all part of the mad­ness of Bill & Ted’s Excel­lent Adven­ture, a high-spirited comedy-adventure rang­ing from the Dawn of Time to the 27th cen­tury. With the futur­is­tic assis­tance of Rufus, played by George (Out­ra­geous For­tune) Car­lin, Bill and Ted travel the cir­cuits of time to round up the ingre­di­ents for a suc­cess­ful his­tory project. But are the likes of Billy the Kid and Napoleon Bona­parte ready for shop­ping malls and water­parks?” Star­log Mag­a­zine (May 1998, Num­ber 30)

Noth­ing sums up the late 80s and early 90s like Bill and Ted’s Excel­lent Adven­ture (1989) and it’s sequel Bogus Jour­ney (1991). Star­ring Alex Win­ter and Keanu Reeves as Bill and Ted, the movies depicted their “excel­lent” adven­tures and the char­ac­ters they meet along the way and ulti­mately take back with them to their own time in San Dimas, Cal­i­for­nia, dude.

Nowa­days, San Dimas is only known for Rag­ing Waters and sadly no futur­is­tic Acad­emy ded­i­cated to Bill and Ted, although the city coun­cil should con­sider such a gov­ern­ment invest­ment. You’d have to see the sec­ond movie to appre­ci­ate that com­ment, oth­er­wise its just con­fus­ing, isn’t it?

As far as the stars are con­cerned, since Bill and Ted they’ve approached a mul­ti­tude of projects. Alex Winter’s Freaked, a movie about freaks stars Win­ter as a nor­mal Joe who is trans­formed into a green dis­fig­ured winged crea­ture. He meets other freaks along the way and even­tu­ally, through care­ful sluething, fig­ures out why the freaks exist. As far as Keanu Reeves is con­cerned, he’s done quite well with the Matrix tril­ogy and of course that role in Steve Martin’s Par­ent­hood in the early 90s. George (Out­ra­geous For­tune) Car­lin has been mak­ing com­edy appear­ances all over the globe and var­i­ous guest spots on tele­vi­sion and in the movies.

Let us not for­get the role of Death (aka Grim Reaper) in 1991’s Bogus Jour­ney played by the fan­tas­tic actor William Sadler. Sadler’s most recent movie appear­ance was in the Green Mile play­ing Klaus Det­t­er­ick and as the Sher­iff in WB’s ex-Alien series Roswell.

Despite the 12-year gap from Bogus Jour­ney to now, accord­ing to Keanu and Win­ters they plan on revis­it­ing their char­ac­ters in a movie that will depict Bill and Ted in their excel­lent 40’s. Con­sid­er­ing both of the actors are near­ing their 40s (pend­ing mid-life cri­sis), it’s a bold step for each but a wel­comed one at that. Let’s hope that they craft a excel­lent script and ulti­mately cre­ate a most excel­lent of a movie.

Dude.

For more Bill and Ted-related info, please visit BillandTed.org and XE’s Bill and Ted’s Excel­lent cereal write-up. 

Dreaming

October 27, 04 //
7

Eliz­a­beth Coatsworth once said, “When I dream, I am ageless.”

Dream­ing is essen­tially imag­in­ing the unimag­in­able, obtain­ing the unat­tain­able and break­ing the bound­ary of what is real and what is not. I know when I dream, most of the time I’m aware of the fact that I’m dream­ing, but in most cases I’ll tune out that aware­ness and let the events of my dream unfold.

I know for a fact that my dreams are engag­ing to the point where they have plot­lines, drama and fore­shad­ow­ing. Alot of this has to do with my imag­i­na­tion and on a scale of 1 to 100, my imag­i­na­tion would fall some­where around 99. Ever since I was lit­tle I’ve had an active imag­i­na­tion. Not nec­es­sar­ily to the point where I was inter­act­ing with imag­i­nary peo­ple, but I could turn a somber or dull moment into an excit­ing adventure.

For instance, when I was younger I’d some­times hide in the closet, close my eyes tightly and imag­ine I was trav­el­ing through space at light­speed. In my mind I’d see stars, comets and galax­ies speed­ing by my periph­eral vision and when I’d open my eyes I was no longer in the closet but drift­ing in space.

I’m sure you’ve met peo­ple in your life­time that reveal their lack of an imag­i­na­tion, or it was some­thing that dimin­ished quickly when they became an adult. I’d like to believe that every­one, no mat­ter their age, has an imag­i­na­tion but it’s the degree at which it flour­ishes that makes a difference.

When you dream, your imag­i­na­tion takes over and takes you far beyond any­thing that you could visit or expe­ri­ence in real­ity. I’ve never been to Venice, Italy nor have I climbed Mauna Loa in Hawaii or walked along the edge of the Nile but I’ve seen pho­tographs and doc­u­men­taries to the point where in my mind I can basi­cally form an image or expe­ri­ence and visit these places in my dreams. You could argue that dream­ing about an expe­ri­ence is incom­pa­ra­ble to the actual, phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence and I’d agree with you, but until I’m actu­ally there dream­ing about it is the next best thing. 

Gourmet Ramen

October 22, 04 //
11

Top Ramen, Maruchan, and Cup o’ Noo­dles are the pri­mary food source for a col­lege stu­dent and any­one on a bud­get. Just look at cin­e­matic his­tory and you’ll find this ref­er­ence to instant soup on the run in the movie The Jerk with actor and writer Steve Mar­tin. The slow, mild-mannered Navin John­son is the only adopted son of black share­crop­pers. He decides early on that his des­tiny awaits him as he leaves the farm and begins a jour­ney full of hilar­ity and invention.

Navin (Mar­tin) lives on Cup o’ Noo­dles through­out the extent of this hilar­i­ous mad­cap of a movie. It’s his favorite food and you really can’t blame him, he is an idiot. Yet, we as the audi­ence love him for his sim­plic­ity and good nature.

If you’re in the mood for Top Ramen, I’d sug­gest pick­ing up a copy of The Book of Ramen: Low­cost Gourmet Meals Using Instant Ramen Noo­dles by Ron Konzak. 

Hollynet

October 20, 04 //
5

HollywoodIt’s hard to believe that Hol­ly­wood, the mecca of film and enter­tain­ment, has only uti­lized the Inter­net for less than ten years and yet within that time frame they’ve man­aged to increase aware­ness of upcom­ing films and thus increas­ing their rev­enue ten fold.

Yet, it’s no secret that Hol­ly­wood has been using some form of adver­tis­ing for their films, even before the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927. To increase aware­ness, Hol­ly­wood has in the past and still to this day use mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als such as full-page spreads, bill­board ads or pro­mo­tional press packets.

In 1994, when Angels in the Out­field was due for release, Dis­ney sent auto­graphed base­balls signed by stars Tony Danza and Danny Glover to sev­eral local busi­nesses and even shared a few left­overs with their employ­ees (I still have mine). This pro­mo­tional strat­egy, in addi­tion to other mar­ket­ing meth­ods, worked in the effect that the film had a good run at the box office earn­ing about $50 mil­lion in 1994 ($8 mil­lion of it’s total gross was earned in its first week).

Cut to 1994, when at the time only an esti­mated 30 mil­lion peo­ple were using the Inter­net and a newly formed com­pany, Dig­i­tal Planet, sought out movie stu­dios with a lucra­tive offer; they would build web sites to pro­mote upcom­ing movies. Dig­i­tal Planet, a group of adver­tis­ers, graphic artists and web design­ers saw the poten­tial in using the Inter­net as a means of mar­ket­ing for Hol­ly­wood. In doing so, they intro­duced their tal­ent to Hol­ly­wood know­ing full well that if Hol­ly­wood took the bait — hook, line and sinker — this would change the course of film dis­tri­b­u­tion and adver­tise­ment for the better.

One of the first film sites cre­ated by Dig­i­tal Planet and mar­keted by Hol­ly­wood was the sci-fi hit, Star­gate, star­ring Kurt Rus­sell. The site in com­par­i­son to today’s movie sites was noth­ing more than a few .gifs scat­tered on a grey back­ground, with the pos­si­bil­ity of a “sneak peak” trailer. At the time, when broad­band wasn’t as much as a comod­ity as it is today, it would take any­where from 45 min­utes to an hour to down­load a 20 sec­ond clip. Even then, the qual­ity of the Quick­time file was poor and choppy and the sound was barely audi­ble, but as tech­nol­ogy improved over time so would the qual­ity of the video.

Hol­ly­wood and Dig­i­tal Planet real­ized that users would seek out these sites for insider infor­ma­tion and behind-the-scenes back­ground on the pro­duc­tion process. There­fore they prod­ded direc­tors, writ­ers and cast mem­bers for first-hand encoun­ters and back­story mate­r­ial. Even­tu­ally, impres­sions (or web traf­fic) increased and before they knew it the film’s site was being spread via email, news­groups and word of mouth. Years later, the cre­ators of the Blair Witch Project would expand upon this idea and use the web site as a pre­tense for their film, which went on to earn over $140 mil­lion world­wide while the pro­duc­tion of the movie only cost a mere $60,000.

Today, with the advent of cheaper broad­band, file shar­ing net­works and tech­nolo­gies like Bit­tor­rent, down­load­ing com­plete films which range any­where from 500MB to 2GBs, is just a mat­ter of wait­ing a few hours and even­tu­ally the film is on your hard drive. File shar­ing of copy­righted works, includ­ing movies and music, has sent a shock­wave of ter­ror through Hol­ly­wood. In the process of adver­tis­ing their films, they are spend­ing just as much money on try­ing to stop the file shar­ing and find­ing that it’s a dif­fi­cult task con­sid­er­ing file shar­ing in it’s sim­plest sense is more akin to an unstop­pable and spread­ing virus.

Only time will tell what the out­come of file shar­ing will do, but if it’s up to Hol­ly­wood to stop this epi­demic they might fol­low the advice; “If you can’t beat them, join them.” More or less, giv­ing peo­ple the oppor­tu­nity to pur­chase films over the Inter­net, which is already being accom­plished by sites like Movieflix which allows peo­ple to down­load a movie cheaper than most rental costs. This might not stop file-sharing, but it’s pos­si­ble that it might decrease the file-sharing per­cent­age some­what. How­ever, as down­load and upload speeds increase so will the abil­ity to share movies and music at higher res­o­lu­tions with bet­ter sound qual­ity. That said, the beast has been unleashed and once Pandora’s Box has been released the only way to stop file-sharing is to stomp out the con­sumers, which most times are also the same indi­vid­u­als who pur­chase $90.00 DVD col­lec­tions and spend $7.50–9.00 a ticket to see the next block­buster at a the­atre near you. 

Green and Purple Tentacles

October 18, 04 //
6

Day of the TentacleThe year was 1993. My brother and I were brows­ing the soft­ware sec­tion at Com­pUSA, thumb­ing through var­i­ous CD’s, see­ing if any of them caught our eye. Off in the cor­ner of the store I can remem­ber a kid play­ing Prince of Per­sia 2 and my brother and I stand­ing behind him in utter amaze­ment. As an observer, the game looked extremely dif­fi­cult and com­pletely dif­fer­ent than your stan­dard Mario adventure.

We decided that while it looked cool enough, we needed some­thing with less action and more humor and game­play. Since we were fans of the King’s Quest series, we opted to search for an adven­ture game in the same vein as the Roberta William’s clas­sics and yet some­thing with spunk. Sev­eral min­utes of search­ing finally yielded some­thing of inter­est. The game, enti­tled Maniac Man­sion: Day of the Ten­ta­cle stood out like a sore thumb.

On a side note I should men­tion that most of the time I pur­chase a prod­uct based entirely on the pack­ag­ing, which is both a good and bad thing. In this instance, the pack­ag­ing for Day of the Ten­ta­cle had a great color scheme (deep pur­ple con­trasted by “slime” green) with what appeared to be a pur­ple ten­ta­cle, ray gun in hand, chas­ing a nerd off the bot­tom right cor­ner of the box. It was pack­ag­ing genius in the purest sense of the word and after scan­ning the box we real­ized it was the sequel to one of our favorite Lucasarts adven­ture games, Maniac Man­sion. At that point I think we both turned to one another and real­ized we were hold­ing some­thing spe­cial and how right we were.

Day of the Ten­ta­cle, also known as DOTT, was the brain­child of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert, bet­ter known as the duo respon­si­ble for the orig­i­nal Maniac Man­sion released in 1988. Maniac Man­sion was pow­ered by the Script Cre­ation Util­ity for Maniac Man­sion, SCUMM for short, devel­oped by Ron Gilbert and Aric Wilmunder. In later years, SCUMM would serve as the foun­da­tion for sev­eral pop­u­lar Lucasarts titles includ­ing the Mon­key Island series, Sam & Max Hit the Road, The Dig and another Schafer cre­ation, Full Throttle.

In recent times, thanks to the rec­ti­fi­ca­tion and per­sis­tency of fans, a group of devel­op­ers have cre­ated Scum­mVM, a vir­tual machine for clas­sic Lucasarts adven­tures. In a nut­shell, it allows you to run older Lucasarts adven­ture games on mod­ern rigs (PC and OS X), emu­lat­ing to the ‘T’ the SCUMM engine with­out so much as a sput­ter. Due to the fact Scum­mVM is released under a GPL license, the soft­ware has been ported over to run on the Dream­cast con­sole, not to men­tion other gam­ing machines, hand­helds and cell phones even. 

Last Resort

October 15, 04 //
6

Road Less TraveledAs I coasted off the high­way and came to a halt at the light, there was a hitch­hiker hold­ing a card­board sign with his dog chained to a sign­post. The man, who looked to be in his mid-30s looked worn out and tired, his expres­sion reminded me of a pro­pa­ganda poster for hunger depre­va­tion. The sign’s mes­sage, painted with shoe pol­ish or a vari­ant of, read:

“On the road. Need food, help or transportation.”

The man walked the side­lines, inch­ing closer to the line of cars wait­ing for the light to turn green. As he approached my car my first instict was to look away, ignore his pres­ence and for­get about the issue at hand. Imme­di­at­edly I started form­ing my own thoughts of his sit­u­a­tion, com­ing to the con­clu­sion that he was either a trav­eler with a lot of hard­ship or a con artist scam­ming money from those will­ing to donate to his cause.

I glanced over at his com­pan­ion, chained to the sign­post, itch­ing his feet and wrin­gling in the grass. The dog, a yel­low labrador, looked clean and hap­pily wagged its tail and jumped up and down excit­edly as cars passed by a few feet away.

As I pulled way from the scene I felt bad for the man and his dog and won­dered what their story was. What led them to the point where a makeshift sign was their last resort, and who, if any­one, would be will­ing to help? 

My Brother

October 12, 04 //
17

Look­ing back before I can remem­ber when, the thought of a guardian pro­tect­ing me has always sur­faced in my mind. Whether it was from the forces of evil, or from the mon­sters in my closet, I have always seemed to need some pro­tec­tion in my life. Through­out most of your life, you have many pro­tec­tors will­ing to flex their mus­cles to help those who are in need of it, but I believe the two most pro­tec­tors in my life have been my father and my brother Erik.

Now hold up, up until now I’m sure you thought it was Erik writ­ing this entry, but I think you were a bit mis­taken. This is Erik’s lit­tle brother Matt writ­ting, why you may be ask­ing? Well, I wanted to let every­one know that it was my brother’s birth­day on the 11th (yes­ter­day) and even though I was plan­ning on writ­ing about it with­out him know­ing I totally veg­ged and thought his birth­day was on the 13th.. Do’h!

So, I made a story up that I needed his pass­word to change some set­tings and here we are! Let me tell you, Erik is one hell of a brother, always will­ing to be there when times get tough and has always been the best brother I’ll ever have or known. He’s one of those guys you aspire to be, with a lov­ing wife and a beau­ti­ful child, at times I’m semi jeal­ous. (But, I’ll be damned if I’d admit it! hah). I just wanted ALL his read­ers to wish him a belated Happy Birth­day. He deserves it, he’s one hell of a guy, a best friend and best of all, a big brother.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERIK! 

Flaky Hacker

October 12, 04 //
9

To the per­son that feels it’s funny to con­stantly reset my admin­is­tra­tive pass­word, you are being watched. Hon­estly, I really don’t see the humor behind it and if you’re try­ing to log into my account, good luck, con­sid­er­ing the pass­word that you reset is sent to my secure email account I don’t see any ben­e­fit in doing this other than for your own amuse­ment. An odd sort of amuse­ment if you ask me.

I sup­pose you know you’ve reached a cer­tain sta­tus, of which I believe is cur­rently “psuedo known”, when peo­ple lift or steal your work and/or fid­dle with your admin back­end to retreive per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion. My advice for you is to please divert your atten­tion and time to some­thing else, you’ll find that focus­ing on some­thing worth­while might incur more inter­est­ing results.

Update: The mys­tery has been solved. It was my “up to no good and in the Navy” brother Matt who reset my admin­is­tra­tive pass­word and broke into the MySQL data­base that runs this site. 

Panorama Llama

October 6, 04 //
16

A client of mine recently con­tacted me in regards to putting “inter­ac­tive” panoramic videos on their web site, sim­il­iar to those typ­i­cally found on realty sites. The prepa­ra­tion for this kind of job isn’t extra­or­di­nary nor is it dif­fi­cult but it is time con­sum­ing and in this instance patience is cer­tainly a virtue.

First, you have to decide whether or not you’ll be using a con­ven­tional or dig­i­tal cam­era. Depend­ing on what you use, the results will vary in qual­ity clar­ity, and res­o­lu­tion. Using a tri­pod is rec­om­mended and impor­tant in order to line up your pho­tos and mea­sure your shots incrementally.

For 360 degree images, it’s sug­gested that you take between 12–15 pic­tures depend­ing on the lens of your cam­era. The eas­i­est way to accom­plish this is to think of the num­ber posi­tions on a clock and take each photo at these posi­tions, sim­il­iar to the mil­i­tary tech­nique of plot­ting points on a landscape.

Each photo should over­lap about 15% 33–50% (thanks Erik) and with a decent tri­pod it’s just a mat­ter of mea­sur­ing and esti­mat­ing. Most panoramic soft­ware will blend these images seam­lessly and allow you to line up (using an onion skin effect) adja­cent pho­tos. Some­times this is referred to as “stitch­ing” and depend­ing on the soft­ware you use this is either han­dled auto­mat­i­cally or man­u­ally, but you’ll find that no mat­ter how per­fect it seems you’ll most likely have to fid­get with the pho­tos in order to pro­duce the desired effect.

If you’re savvy enough with Flash and would much rather not pur­chase off the shelf soft­ware, you could always use Action­script to pro­gram a panoramic viewer. For the less tech­ni­cally inclined or for those who have a shorter time frame you’ll find that most panoramic soft­ware, like Panorama Fac­tory will out­put the results in the Quick­time for­mat, which has built in VR capa­bil­i­ties (zoom in, zoom out, pan).

That said, have you ever cre­ated panoramic pho­tos and if so, what soft­ware did you use? 

Why I Love E.T.

October 4, 04 //
9

etcover.jpgI’ve always been intrigued by the fan­tas­tic. More specif­i­cally, movies that explore ideas out­side of the box (such as ET and Con­tact) and allow me as the viewer to also think out­side the box. With the mediocre scripts that have been cir­cu­lat­ing Hol­ly­wood cou­pled with sub-par act­ing it’s no won­der the pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies are hurt­ing. The mate­r­ial isn’t alive. It doesn’t shout cre­ativ­ity or imag­i­na­tion. Why? The stu­dios are bank­ing the suc­cess of a movie based on big name celebri­ties, hop­ing they will in fact draw in the crowds rather than focus on writ­ing with sub­stance and pro­duc­tion qual­ity material.

E.T. at the time fea­tured a cast of mod­er­ately ‘unknowns’ — aside from Peter Coy­ote and Dee Wallace-Stone — includ­ing younger cast mem­bers Henry Thomas, Drew Bar­ry­more and Robert Mac­Naughton. Henry Thomas’ per­for­mance was notably excel­lent because he emoted fear and sad­ness suc­cess­fully onscreen, all in front of a mechan­i­cal puppet.

I love E.T. and it will remain my all-time favorite film out of every movie I’ve seen in my life­time. It’s as sim­ple as that with­out com­pli­cat­ing things. The movie is a con­stant reminder of the spe­cial attrib­utes of friend­ship. Look­ing past the fact that it was a movie about an alien and his first-hand encoun­ters on Earth you start to peel away at the lay­ers and find some­thing spe­cial, almost inde­scrib­able and more impor­tantly, heartwarming.

To this day I still see it as one of the pin­na­cle movies of the early 1980s. 

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