Speedracer Rocks!!!

Awesome film. You got cars, explosions and girls. Perfect mix! Everything about the artwork is so fresh, and the CG cars - wowtastic. Ignoring the over-the-top drifts, jumps and spins, the cars were extremely well animated and felt just right. This ranks right up there with the good stuff.

If you do watch it, you may wanna skip the credits 'cause that gave me a headache =)

Next film will be Zohan or Get Smart. Which one first? Hmm....

Alvin

I hate color management

My pics look great on my laptop LCD, but at work, they kinda suck, or have a color shift of sorts. Asking one of my friends, Maung who is a lao-chiao at DSLRs, he immediately caught my problem - the possibility that my monitor is not calibrated right. Most of my pics he says are underexposed. But they looked fine on my lappy :( So I got the Spyder2 to properly setup the gamma and color temp. And lo and behold. Indeed, LOTS of my pics are like .5 to 1 stop underexposed :(

I've got a few hundred pics online, i'm not sure I'm in the mood to re-process all at this time :( Not to mention the captions. ARGH!

New "color managed" pics up @ http://picasaweb.google.com/GallenWolf/SouthAustraliaPics/photo#5212476828461651346

The Happening, Prince Caspian

Watched the Happening over the weekend, and let's say, there needs to be a 5 mile keep away warning. It was absolutely pointless to watch, and it is up there with crap shows like Mimic and Sound Of Thunder. The premise of the show was really good, but the ending is utter crap. Something like The Mist - where the main part of the show was pretty enticing, but the ending. OMG. Was BAD. Someone should do a skit of people knocking their heads into windows after watching the show. I know I wanted to scoop my brains out.

Prince Caspain, OTOH was a different beast altogether. Now the first show had awesome effects, but I wasn't really in love with the story. Caspian though isn't as magical as the first (I'd compare it to HP1 vs HP5) - but this did not sully the taste of the film one bit. In fact I thought it gave the show much more down to earth flavor. Throughly enjoyed it. Excellent story, and the effects don't seem to be the major driving point. It really touched my heart though, and I did leave the cinema feeling a tad sad at the ending. My only nick was that there isn't enough Aslan! During the standoff of Aslan VS the bad guy, I was really hoping he'd magically transform into a burning lion and like burn everything away. :P This is a PG rated film after all. In fact there was a lot of slashies, but no blood. Definitely a kiddy show. Ah well he did return with a pseudo LOTR trees vs humans ending.

It's up there with Ironman - the OMG it's awesome I don't mind watching it again kinda show. I think I may pick up the first dvd just to rewatch and re-live the show again.

Watched Hulk 2

Can't say I liked the film, effects and all were alright, but the plot.... what plot? And there wasn't enough smashy going on. Not that funny either :(

Ah well. Let's hope speed racer will be better :)

Alvin

Adelaide - Melbourne Road Trip

Quick post. It was a long weekend - Queen's Birthday, so a bunch of us took a nice drive down to Melbourne.

Pics here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/GallenWolf/MelbourneRoadTrip

I'm on OSX! Psych!

I'm kidding! I saw this website a real long while ago, it's a total facelift for XP to have the look and feel of the mac. Given I'm running Virtual Box, I though I'd try it out. But first, I cloned my XP installation (Virtualization FTW!!!) - hence I have a safe spot should I screw up.

It's a 30 odd mb download, and installs pretty fast. When I boot up xp in vbox now, which is rare since I do save-states, it boots up all pretty and white :) One wonders if that is the same screen you get on a real mac.

GW

Adelaide Zoo!

Well, seemingly I actually went out on a Sunday. So no gaming today, but lots of snapshots and had a great fun time doing lots of processing at home.

Today I set my D40X's color settings to Vivid+, from the usual setting of nada. Can't really tell much on the LCD, but back home, whoa, uber saturation! It's very nice for all the greens - I get the kind of saturation and kick that I like, but it over enhances the blues and warm colors. I now need to de-sat or pull down the blues, and some times the warm colors as well, else they are a mish-mash of near-solid colours.

Is this better? I'm not sure, I need to do more shoots, but overall I am very pleased with the results. I much rather decrease saturation than pump it up, but this also does have it's own drawbacks like sucking out areas of color where you DO want it there.

Anyways:

Pictures here!