Who wants... to live... forevaaaaar?
I finally watched (Safari Guy's DVD of) the original Highlander movie recently. I watched a lot of the TV series when it was on Space (Wrenkin was very amused by the fact that my bicycle back then was - purely by coincidence - a "Highlander" model), so the spinoff (and the hilarious Robot Chicken parody of the movie - "My alcohol!") made the movie feel very familiar, even though I'd never seen it before.
The thing that really caught my attention was the impressive shot of the wrestling match at the start of the movie, where the camera flies in an arc around the arena. Highlander came out before decent CGI, you can't use a helicopter indoors, and the range and speed of motion was too great for a crane shot, so I was really curious how they pulled it off. The director commentary helpfully explained that they used a Skycam, which is basically a Steadicam that gets pulled around in various directions by computer-controlled cables. It would have been totally pimp if I'd got to use one back in my year of TV Broadcasting at college, but sadly our equipment was all roughly the level of what they used to make The Littlest Hobo.
Oh yeah, and this really deserves its own entry, but on the subject of 80's nostalgia, it turns out that the annoying kid from Voyage of the Mimi was none other than Ben Affleck. (Man, the deaf chick on the show was really annoying. Yes, yes, it's very impressive that you learned to vaguely approximate normal speech despite being deaf, but it'd really be easier for everyone if you just wrote stuff down on a notepad. Or if she'd used sign language throughout the show and was subtitled.)
I ended up largely ignoring LJ over the summer, so don't be surprised by a flurry of comments on your old posts.
The thing that really caught my attention was the impressive shot of the wrestling match at the start of the movie, where the camera flies in an arc around the arena. Highlander came out before decent CGI, you can't use a helicopter indoors, and the range and speed of motion was too great for a crane shot, so I was really curious how they pulled it off. The director commentary helpfully explained that they used a Skycam, which is basically a Steadicam that gets pulled around in various directions by computer-controlled cables. It would have been totally pimp if I'd got to use one back in my year of TV Broadcasting at college, but sadly our equipment was all roughly the level of what they used to make The Littlest Hobo.
Oh yeah, and this really deserves its own entry, but on the subject of 80's nostalgia, it turns out that the annoying kid from Voyage of the Mimi was none other than Ben Affleck. (Man, the deaf chick on the show was really annoying. Yes, yes, it's very impressive that you learned to vaguely approximate normal speech despite being deaf, but it'd really be easier for everyone if you just wrote stuff down on a notepad. Or if she'd used sign language throughout the show and was subtitled.)
I ended up largely ignoring LJ over the summer, so don't be surprised by a flurry of comments on your old posts.