Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Sin City looks very cool, an intense, high contrast graphic novel noir opus. It appears that the team of innovative directors, Robert Rodriguez and comic book artist Frank Miller have pushed the envelope of how films can look. Both directors are cartoon artists, so strong comic book layout and storyboards should influence the crafting of this movie.

In my city, I’m taking a class at SF’s Academy of Art University, “The History and Technology of Visual Effects.” The syllabus is Richard Rickitt’s excellent book Special Effects: The History and Technique. We are studying visual effects in older films amd writing our comments in discussion essays. I’ve enjoyed the writing, and will edit and publish them as part of this blog soon.

A film covered in our reading, the 1978 Superman – The Movie based on the early Action comic book hero looks really awful upon DVD review. With a John Williams soundtrack the Superman movie struggles to mimic the contemporary Star Wars greatness. Starting with an overly long, boring opening credit sequence (during which I could have read 2 or 3 pages of a comic book!), and then a fly over into an obviously miniature set of planet Krypton. An art director was given too much range in creating a crystal Krypton world of an orderly civilization wearing glowing outfits. Senior scientist Jor El (Marlon Brando) manipulates mysterious glowing crystal rods with little cinematic results.
Next up, Fantastic Four. Flame on?!

Back online after moving across the bay to Pleasant Hill. Offline for over a week was weird, but rattled my cage in many good ways. My fingertips are sore from lifting, moving and handling too many cardboard boxes.

Enduring the conditions of disaster recovery from moving many boxes of life’s accumulations requires more forethought than I had prepared for. For example, these adapters are becoming more and more common, and their fine in their place, but dislocate them from their intended connected mate, and Jim, we’ve got a problem. The conversion of AC power to DC batery storage has created an explosion of these wall socket devouring devices. One might wonder, why can’t these items be made smaller and more tidy. My Sony Cybershot camera AC recharger is larger than the camera! I had several panic atttacks trying to find misplaced the special AC chords that connect into the DC rechargers.

The philosophical words of Swami Sivananda, “Adapt, Adjust, Accomodate” came to mind while dealing with the gross material details of relocating my life. Practice this and you will be rewarded, and better yet be sure to package batteries and cables with their respective tools.

For more tales of adapters, see my pre-blogging story, “Beta Test”, in Media Spin’s Horror Story section.