Spring winter cleaning.

Stacey and I might have house guests for the next few days, so we've been trying to get the condo cleaned up. That includes organizing and packing up a bunch of Interplanetary props. We've acquired quite a collection of... stuff while making this movie. After it's finished, be on the lookout for lots of space suits and shit on eBay.

Continuing the cleaning motif, I just moved about 18 GB of music off the trusty MacBook to a 500 GB USB drive. Man, I love cheap disk space. And the MacBook is actually usable again (before the music move, it was down to about 1 GB of free disk space).

Trap's been teaching himself how to rotoscope, and I just rendered out his first three test shots. Rotoscoping is, basically, using a program like Photoshop to touch up movie footage one frame at a time (removing an errant mic cable from a scene, for example). You can read a detailed explanation on Wikipedia's rotoscoping page. I wish I could post the video, but the three shots are all kind of spoiler-y. I can say Trap's already got a good handle on the process.

I'm watching Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer as I type this. The problem with the FF movies isn't so much that they're terrible--they're just terribly mediocre. Especially as they were produced after The Incredibles and Sky High, two excellent movies about superhero families. I actually think they perfectly cast the Thing (Michael Chiklis) and Human Torch (Chris Evans). But Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman? Really? And then the screenplay paints the Woman as a total shrew. And they still haven't figured out how to make Mr. Fantastic's stretchy effects look good. And I don't like the word "rise" in movie titles. Oh, well. Maybe somebody will make a good Thing and Torch movie with Chiklis and Evans someday.