(no subject)
Sunday I went to the Museum of the Moving Image with tsukechick to check out the Jim Henson/Muppets exhibit, which was a little disorganized in some aspects but still fascinating and well worth New York admission prices. The multimedia aspects were handled very well, so that you could look at Henson's concept art and storyboards for a particular commercial or sketch and then watch it on video. His early work in commercials and Sam and Friends (the show where Kermit first appeared) was particularly interesting, as were his college-era screenprinted posters (beautiful works of art in their own right). And of course there were muppets on display as well -- it's funny, I wasn't expecting them to be quite as large as they were even though I've seen plenty of footage putting them to scale with people!
If I have any criticisms, one is that the timeline of Henson's career could've been more clearly delineated -- there was a placard at the beginning of the exhibit, but it was tucked away in a corner and tsukechick missed it entirely. We both agreed that there could have been a lot more detail about Henson's collaborators and their professional/personal relationships with him -- the notable omission was Jane Henson, who was only mentioned a couple of times in brief even though she was his first major collaborator and deeply influential on the early years of the Muppets. Not to mention the whole "wife and mother of his kids" part.
The permanent exhibits were super-enjoyable as well. They had galleries of pretty much anything you can think of -- costumes, make-up, advertising, portraits of screen stars -- but like the Muppets exhibit, probably the strongest point of the museum is how well it uses multimedia and interactive exhibits. The ground floor is a semi-independent cinema with two screens, and there was a screening room for a Mandrake the Magician serial as well. For the section about how cinema owners attract audiences there was a block of arcade games for which you could purchase tokens. The entire top floor was interactive with different booths to let you play with video editing, adding score to a film sequence, etc. There was a Monty Python-inspired stop-motion booth where you could make short films with goofy paper cut-outs; here's the one I made.
After that, we went to Panera for lunch and then home, with plans to see each other again later. Lots of fun!
Since then I've been, uh, playing Dance Central and fretting over my brother's cat, mostly, since she's been suffering from separation anxiety and refusing to eat now that he's away for the week. Finally got her to eat a fair amount by eating dinner in the kitchen with her.
If I have any criticisms, one is that the timeline of Henson's career could've been more clearly delineated -- there was a placard at the beginning of the exhibit, but it was tucked away in a corner and tsukechick missed it entirely. We both agreed that there could have been a lot more detail about Henson's collaborators and their professional/personal relationships with him -- the notable omission was Jane Henson, who was only mentioned a couple of times in brief even though she was his first major collaborator and deeply influential on the early years of the Muppets. Not to mention the whole "wife and mother of his kids" part.
The permanent exhibits were super-enjoyable as well. They had galleries of pretty much anything you can think of -- costumes, make-up, advertising, portraits of screen stars -- but like the Muppets exhibit, probably the strongest point of the museum is how well it uses multimedia and interactive exhibits. The ground floor is a semi-independent cinema with two screens, and there was a screening room for a Mandrake the Magician serial as well. For the section about how cinema owners attract audiences there was a block of arcade games for which you could purchase tokens. The entire top floor was interactive with different booths to let you play with video editing, adding score to a film sequence, etc. There was a Monty Python-inspired stop-motion booth where you could make short films with goofy paper cut-outs; here's the one I made.
After that, we went to Panera for lunch and then home, with plans to see each other again later. Lots of fun!
Since then I've been, uh, playing Dance Central and fretting over my brother's cat, mostly, since she's been suffering from separation anxiety and refusing to eat now that he's away for the week. Finally got her to eat a fair amount by eating dinner in the kitchen with her.