My amount of free time has increased drastically considering most of my intense classes are on Wednesday and Thursday and that there's no "Animation" class of sorts for this semester of Pratt's 3D curriculum. Not saying that rigging and story boarding class are any less of a headache than last semester, just its a lot less time consuming than doing 8-10 seconds of hand drawn animation per week on top of whatever 3D animation assignments I've had.
As a result, I'm able to get to work on the things that I've been holding off for months in the back of my head. The first of which being that I've made a new layout for The Movie Watch. If you've been following my Twitter feed, you'd probably know that I contribute a post or a review every Thursday alongside a few other people. While I loved the editorial content, I felt that the layout was a little too basic (and by that I mean, it used one of Blogger's default layouts) for the site to be taken seriously.
Hopefully with the layout out of the way we'll be able to start a podcast for the site this coming summer. Being on a podcast is pretty much my movie fanboy dream at the moment.
There's my new layout up there. The biggest change was that I added a scoring system to the reviews that are sorted out by tags on Blogger. I'm always cautious about adding a score to a review because I feel that it may force the reader to skip down to the number and miss out on the pros and cons mentioned in the review. In this case, I think it's working pretty well. I wanted a 2 or a 3 out of five to be about what the average movie should get and I'm extremely pleased to see that not every movie was given a four or a five.
My other layout was for Adam Warner's blog "Best Burger on Myrtle". Despite him being a vegetarian this should be a pretty fun blog which will review the food on Myrtle Avenue and record our adventures to the sleaziest restaurants that Brooklyn has to offer.
This new site will launch as soon as I finish my Video Editing project which is a short documentary of sorts on a visit to Crown Fried Chicken; the restaurant with the most health code violations and robberies on Myrtle Avenue. I went during the day, but as you can see in my camera work, I'm as nervous as ever after I saw a man pull down his pants and gesture at his exposed crotch towards my camera...yes, that will probably make its way into the movie.Apart from that, yesterday I watched about six or seven hours of The Powerpuff Girls from that new complete series box set that Entertainment Weekly mentioned as their DVD pick of the week. I'm actually really surprised how well the series is holding up for me. Even though most of my Powerpuff Girls watching occurred in middle school, I feel as though I missed out on a lot of its sarcastic humor, either that or slight jokes get magnified when your surrounded by others laughing at it. The weird thing about it is the show both functions as a parody of formulaic Saturday Morning Cartoons and as just a fun action cartoon. I have no idea how they were able to pull it off so well.
I've also seen Coraline last week, which was totally worth the entire day's worth of looking for a 3D showing of it that was not sold out. Quality wise, the film landed somewhere between Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas. The writing was certainly better than Corpse Bride but the animation was a lot more rigid, relying more on replacement heads than rubber armature faces yet the visuals never really came off as strong or inventive as Henry Selick's other film The Nightmare Before Christmas or even parts of James and the Giant Peach. Yet as a 3D movie it was absolutely phenomenal and the chances are its one of the strongest 3D glasses movies I've ever seen, either that or IMAX's Deep Sea 3D.
I'll post the Crown Fried Movie up here whenever I get done with it. I'm pretty pleased with how my group project storyboards for Rip Van Winkle are coming. I drew most of the characters for the panels, while three or four were farmed out to a friend of mine. Also the backgrounds are looking quite nice I might add.
