Well it's been a while but I've started doing some more work towards the early plot layout for Zombie Stories. I have actually started over on the plot layout for Zombie Stories as I wasn't really happy with how things were going with the original plot layout I was doing. The problem with what I was doing before is that things seemed to be going rather slowly, and it was becoming rather hard to work out how things should work. Their was also the problem I mentioned in the last one of these post of it possibly not working as a zero budget film script, which is something I'm interested in having it be. This new plot layout has a completely new opening and a new first story in the set of short stories that will make up the structure of the film.

Just as I did in my last post I also have another film idea that I want to just put out. The film would follow two separate people who have been victims of this serial rapist who has recently turned up dead under some weird circumstances. since their rape the two have not been outside in the really world for sometime. It's until sometime after their attackers death that they decide to go out with their respective friends for a bit of a night, but then for each something happens that courses them to realize that they have both become vampires. The film then follows the two different characters as they deal with this new change in that one night.

This a concept that I've really been thinking about fair bit recently, more than the shock therapy idea I talked about in the last post. Since that post I've done really nothing towards that idea as their really isn't much I've got in ideas towards it, all I've got is an idea of what is it kind of is, how it could probably be visually presented, and how it could end. With this new one I've got more of an idea of how it could start, how it could end, what could happen in between, and how that could be visually presented. And as this is mostly set at night this one could be easier to achieve. Once I've worked out a title to put to this idea I'll start going into early plot layout mode, as I am with Zombie Stories, and hopefully will produce something good from that.

Finally if you're interested in seeing some films this week or so, I have two films I have to recommend. I know I did film recommendations in the last post, but I strongly feel these are must see films. The first is No Country for Old Men. I saw this film when I went to see my brother in Canberra towards the end of last year, and it made me wish I had held off on doing my Best and Worst of 2007 - Film & Media post for just a couple of days more, especially since that film has also been label best film of the year at a number of other places.

The second would have to be Cloverfield. I saw this on Saturday and I have to say I loved it. The only problem with it is that people are going to go it to see this and expect it to be like your average special effects driven monster film where you get to follow heroes as they battle and successfully take down the monster, which it isn't. Cloverfield is more about a small group of friends who decide to try and save love interest of one of groups members, all made out to be shot from one hand held camera that is being operated by one of the group members. If you're interested in reading more from me on this film, I have posted a review on the Flixster Movies app on Facebook, so if you've got all that going you can read that.

Today's links are:

• My brothers post on No Country for Old Men
• Trailers for Cloverfield on Apple Trailers
• Odette Yustman, Actress in Cloverfield and a damn good reason to risk life and limb.

Recently I got to seen the new film 'I Am Legend' and I have to say it was pretty good. The film follows Robert Neville, the last surviving human on earth, except he's not really the last survive, he's just the last person on earth to not be infected my some weird virus, though that note right ever as it turns out later on in the film their are more people than him not infected in other parts of the world. This may have seemed like a bit of a spoiler to a number of people but I feel it was necessary as the advertising for this film promotes it as being about the last man on earth, which is likely to leave people going WTF when it suddenly turns out that there are some people still alive who are not infected.

So quite clearly marketing is one of the falling points of this film. Other falling point is Will Smith. It's not that he's a bad actor, he's is actually quite a good actor in this film particularly around the last half of the film. It's kind of a hard thing to workout. It's something me and my brother will talking about every so often and is something more effects his opinion of films than mine but I do kind of agree with him, it is this when Will Smith is cast in a film, the film for some reason feels somehow like it might be less good. The closes I can come to for some sort of reasoning to this is that Will Smith has modeled some elements of his career after Arnold Schwarzenegger's, with the most notable thing being copied from Arnold being the use of common lines in every film, though instead of saying "I'll be back" Will uses the line "Aw hell no".

Now this worked alright for Arnold because he pretty much played similar characters in almost every film he has done (isn't really much you can do with a large Austrian bloke anyway), but for Will Smith, not so much, especially when he tries to do things the are somewhat different from what he has done in thing likes Independence Day and Men in Black, roles in such films as Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness, Enemy of the State, and I Am Legend are unfortunately negatively affected by this aspect of Will Smith's career, the feeling that something Will-Smith-ian is going to come into the film, and unfortunately for I Am Legend it does. The opening scene is Will Smith speeding through an empty New York in a Ford Shelby Mustang (the only scene with it), though this could be more because of an advertising agreement with Ford as they provide all the cars for the film, then you have the dummies Will Smith's character has set up in a DVD rental store, with which he pretends to have conversations, which are not a bad addition to the film as they play a somewhat major roll later with setting up one major plot piece and then demonstrating a change in Will Smith's character after that event, but his characters why of acting towards these figures, as well as his dog that he has with him for most of the film is somewhat more on par with the way some of his more well know characters in other films act than how you would expect a possible of professor or doctor would act.

But I have to say, if their was to be one major thing wrong with this film, it's not the advertising, and it's not Will Smith. It's the zombie/vampire creatures of the film, which is the last thing you would want to be wrong with this kind of film. The thing is the zombie-like creature in this film have for some reason been done using CGI. Why? beats me, the only thing I can think of is that maybe CGI zombies are considered to be less shocking that humans and therefore could allow the film to get a less restrictive rating than the average zombie film. The CGI zombies however do not work that well and feel ridiculous. If you are going to make a zombie film, do your zombies as real people in make up not CGI thing that look ridiculous.

Despite those things, I Am Legend is actually really good, not as good as No Country for Old Men, but good as a more mainstream alternative to No Country for Old Men should you have already seen it. Other films that will probably be worth checking out that are out or will be out soon are American Gangster, Cloverfield, Juno, and 3:10 to Yuma. Also keep an one out for another Will Smith where I feel that stuff I talked about with Will Smith before, might actually work for it. The film is called Hancock and in it Will Smith plays a superhero who is pretty bad at actually being a superhero.

Movie to avoid though this year is Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. I know I put up a somewhat positive, or at least optimistic, post on this film but seeing at it has been rated lower than the last one and that the pred-alien is nothing but a regular alien suit with just a couple of extra bits stuck to it's head to show its an alien born from a predator, the film has just proven to be another couple of nails into the coffins of the Alien and Predators franchises, and showing their is no way their will ever be a good Alien vs. Predator film done right.

Today's links are:

• Hancock trailer on Apple.com
• Funny Bill Gates video from CES

Well here we are at the end of another year. Hopefully everyone had a good year. I know for me this has been an alright year, though it did have a few bad points. I also know that a couple of my friends managed to have a very good year, getting to go overseas and see England, Europe, and other places.

And now it's time to move into 2008. With some hope 2008 will be a good year. Already I've started applying for jobs and will hopefully have some luck in that area, if not I've got a couple of other things I'm looking to play around with, one of which you should already know about from my "This Hopefully is the Beginning to Something" post, which may also go on to include some of the other stuff I'm considering.

For now though, I'm mainly going to be looking at to do on the next couple of days, which will mainly involve staying at home. I might do something new NYE but, the moneys, she's kinda low (one of the down sides of Christmas). I guess this is as good time as any to work on those other ideas a bit. anyways, wish you all a happy new year, and good luck with what ever you plan to do next year.

Today's links are:

• A couple films I'm probably going to look out for on DVD in 2008.
• A couple films I'm probably going to look out for in the cinemas in 2008.
• Some more stuff on films for next year, with trailers.

Well after doing all that stuff discussing the best and worst of 2007 I feel like doing another "This Hopefully is the Beginning to Something" update. So I've managed to finish the plot layout for the first of four shorts that will make up the story for 'Zombie Stories' and am now a reasonable amount into the beginning of the second story which is getting to be a bit of a hard one to get out because in this story I'm trying to details a bit about the zombies, as well as carefully setting up connections between stories and characters.

The basics of the four stories are that the first story establishes how the zombie outbreak begins, the second establishes the idea of containment, and what it is that is turning people into zombies, third details one groups attempt to survive within the containment area/town, then the fourth details another groups attempt to get out of the containment area/town. That is sort of the structure of what I'm going for. Once these plots have been properly set out I plan on doing a bit of review of then and rewriting of parts of them, then moving on to producing a proper script or series of scripts for them.

The problem with 'Zombie Stories' is that if it's to be done, as a single film or a set of short film, it isn't going to be a basic low low budget/zero budget affair, which is a shit because I was hoping to be able to have this script as maybe something that could be done with a small group of people. Essentially I was looking to do this as my 'Clerks' or 'El Mariachi'. But with some of the stuff I've got in 'Zombie Stories' at the moment I don't see that happening.

So now I'm thinking of also do some work towards two other video project ideas. One is sort of a short film idea I've had of looking at how a comedian may deal with the death of a loved one as humour usually plays a major part sometimes in help people out of the sadness of loosing someone. The idea was something I started thinking about when TV presenter Rove McManus lost his wife Belinda Emmett, my intent however is not to try and make sorry based complete off that, though that probably would be interesting. The key things I would like to have with this is have a story that at least deals with the loose of a loved one and uses to Split Enz music should it get done into an actual shot film (specifically the songs 'Charlie' and 'Message to My Girl').

The other story is something that could be a short and/or long form piece. The basic description I could give for it that it would be like a if Chris Cunningham was to do a version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The story follows a woman who is in a mental care facility for reasons she doesn't know and is receiving a weird form of shock therapy that sends her into a series of weird recollections of her past. As time goes on the main character find herself forgetting thing she has been made to remember in the shock therapy, this doesn't just affect the way she acts in the real world, but also affects the way things are in her shock induced recollections. This would be a very visual based piece and at the same time could also be much cheaper than 'Zombie Stories' as it could mostly be contained to one location with little required in cast and such.

So their is a bit of what's going though my head at the moment, along with other things about the future and stuff, as it's look as though I maybe on the dole again, but this time if don't find myself in a position by May I'm going to be looking to see if I can get into a TAFE course RMIT delivers into screen production. RMIT has a mid-year intakes for some of its course, information for which becomes available about May. If I do get any form of employment during the time between now and May, then that's likely to be better as I would get more money in a job than I would possible get while on the dole, or getting student allowance, which would allow me to by my own equipment, which I would prefer to do rather than borrow equipment. As for time to be spent on the projects when and/of if they go into proper(ish) production, well that probably would be that much different if I'm employed or not, as I would probably have to work around other peoples free time (weekends and/or public holidays) anyway as I can't really do all of this on my own.

Anyway, it's time to finish this all off. This really has been a long post, that has taken a long time to get out. For the next couple of days work on this stuff is going to be slow as it is the end of the year, and I'm taking advantage of this time to also relax a bit and get through some other stuff. I'm also going to be heading up to Canberra on the weekend to stay at my brother's for a while and sort out some stuff for him with his computer. 2008 will be when thing will hopefully start to be on the go, along with working on one of two of the thing mentioned here, and applying for jobs, I'm also going to me working on some web and tech stuff and ideas, including a possible resurrection of the old Crazy Research blog. Lets just cross fingers and hope 2007 will be a good year. See ya.

Today's Links are:

• The course I'm looking at from RMIT
• Today's special at Warehouse One in the US (and before you go saying photoshopped check out the Warehouse One site too)
• Here's a surprise sighting while at the Servo (also posted on Digg)

Update 17/12/07: Due to the late time I posted this I didn't manage to get in all the stuff I wanted to get in, like all the links, so I'm making that update now.

Well here it is, the final review of the best and worst of 2007. This time I'll be looking mainly at films of 2007 but my also brings in a bit of TV.

Best: Ratatouille

I'm not exactly sure what it is about this film but it just feels right. Ratatouille is the second Pixar film to be directed by Brad Bird, the man who gave us the Pixar film The Incredibles and the Warner Bros. animated film The Iron Giant. This film follows a rat in Paris who has a thing for cooking. This film plays out well with great voice acting work from its cast which includes Ian Holms, Brian Dennehy, Peter O'Toole, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo, Will Arnett, and John Ratzenberger (who's in pretty much every Pixar film there is). This coupled with a great visual style makes for a great film. This, along with every other Pixar film is a master piece, much like some of the old Disney films use to be, and now that Pixar is a major stake hold in Disney it would be nice to see them take the lessons learned in Ratatouille and us them to revamp Disney's old 2D animation work, maybe even have Brad Bird do something there as he seems to understand both types of animation quite well.

Runners-up for Best

Transformers comes in second as it has great visuals, some great scenes, and Megan Fox, but looses points on have some gimmicky story points, long play time, and some bad directing by Michael Bay. That's not to say Michael Bay is a bad director, he's quite good at directing films that are mainly action driven, but when he is given something that is meant to have some more substance to it, he becomes quite befuddled. I have to say this was possibly saved by the involvement of Steven Spielberg and his team. If it weren't for him this could have been worse.

Other runners-up would be The Simpsons Movie, 300, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

Worst: Spiderman 3

Spiderman 1 and 2 were great films detailing the life of Peter Parker and his hero alter ego, Spiderman, and Spiderman 3 is a continuation of that, but somehow director Sam Raimi stumbled with this one (maybe over a Sony exec pushing for Venom to be in the film). This film really should have been just Spiderman vs. Sandman (with a bit of New Goblin stuff) as I feel that was what Sam Raimi was interested in doing but pressure from the studios saw him having to quickly put together a story involving Venom (Black Spidey and Eddie Brock versions), Sandman, and new love interest Gwen Stacy. The result is a film that attempts to jam a lot of stuff into a set time amount that, while it felt long, was not enough to properly balance out and cram in everything. To make things worse, the conflict between Peter Parker and Harry Osborn that we saw getting built up the the first two films turned into a buddying up thing for the last part of this film with no real conflict stuff before that, instead their Harry has some weird form of amnesia that prevents him from remembering ever having been evil, and let me just ruin something for you now and let you know that in the end Harry dies trying to save Spiderman. While Spiderman 3 is one of the highest grossing film of the year, I feel it failed at actually properly delivering on the goods.

Runners-up for Worst

The Harry Potter films of recent seem to have been going in this direction of delivering less and less story. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a great example of this as the book was the longest book in the series but yet somehow the film is the shortest of all the films so far. Of all the Harry Potter films so far this is one I really find hard to get myself to again as it really just meanders through the sources not really paying attention to what is there, but instead just makes sure that it gets it's self to the end. You really have to sit through this with the book and/or a person well knowledge in all things Harry Potter (to which I would like to thank my sister for helping me though this one) to understand what's going on and why certain things happen in the film.

Something that is not necessarily bad but may have a made affect on most media coming up is the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Strike going on that is seen a number of major writers for TV and Film stopping work on a number of projects. Already television is suffering a bit with a number of the major networks having worked to quickly produce a back logs of episodes for various TV series so they can continue to air the series while the strike is going. The episodes produced however, because they were so rushed have not been to good. Things may even get worse as this may also develop into a industry wide strike with the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of America potentially set to take strike action some time in 2008.

Other runners-up would be Epic Movie, Shrek The Third, Die Hard 4.0, and Jurassic Park 4, though that maybe an early call as no JP4 has been released yet and work on it has been delayed to 2009 so we may still have some luck in seeing a good storyline for it as recent storylines that popped up have not been good (example: A storyline proposed for JP4 involved raptures being trained to become mercenaries. WTF?)

Links for today:

• Ratatouille on Wikipedia
• Spiderman 3 on Wikipedia

Well last week I looked at what was good and bad in gaming related things. This week we look at Technology in general (Gadgets, Hardware, Software, etc.).

Best: iPod Touch and the Multi-Touch Interface

Apple, While still primarily a computer company with their line of Macintosh computers, company has for a while now also made a reputation for itself as portable media player maker. For a while now, Apple has been producing the very popular iPod range of portable media players. But recently the iPod has made what I think is the first steps towards an iPDA. Based on new multi-touch interface technology that has been worked on and developed in university labs since the mid-1980s. Now the device at the moment is lacking a few features/apps to make it a proper PDA replacement but word has it that an update is set to happen sometime down the line to input new apps and features to the device including maybe the ability to take notes and the ability to put in third party apps. If inpatient and want do that now, you might be able to find some online apps that can do what you want, that you can access via the WiFi on the device or you can hack it to operate third party apps people have worked out how to make by reverse engineering the iPod Touch's firmware.

Runners-up for Best

It was kind of hard to think of what could be a runner-up to the iPod Touch (other that the Official iPhone Tool for Apple's other multi-touch device that will be talked about later). The closes I could came to is iPod's competition from Microsoft, the Zune. After having a bad release last year Microsoft made some major updates and released a new version that turned it into great portable media device to those who originally hated the first version. The only problem with this is that it is not available in Australia.

Other runners-up I guess would be Digg, Facebook (sorry MySpace), and I guess Microsoft Surface.

Worst: iPhone

While Apple's multi-touch interface is great, it's first device to have it hasn't exactly been great. Released before the iPod Touch, the iPhone was the best device at release, but then started going down hill  when people started getting one-to-two inch thick phone bills. The iPhone as a hardware device was quite good. As said before it has the same multi-touch interface as the iPod Touch, but with more apps. It also has WiFi abilities as well as being a mobile phone (iPod Touch only has WiFi) allowing users to make and receive phone calls and SMS, but here lies the problem. If you were to buy an iPhone in the US you would have to be tied to AT&T with no Apple approved way to unlock yourself from the network. You can replace the SIM card but the thing will only work with AT&T cards. Part of the reason for this is because in order to accommodate some of the new functionality of the iPhone, Apple needed a service provider will to make some changes to some of there mobile network systems, to which AT&T was the only one and Apple decided to lock the phone to them rather than just disabling those specific features when the phone is on another network. Then their was the interesting way AT&T decided to do billing. A number of the first bills people got for the iPhone were coming in large boxes filled with hundreds of double sided A4 pages listing $0.00 items that weren't even worth listing. Apparently iPhone was doing a lot of communicating back home to AT&T for updates on E-Mails, SMS, and other stuff, and if you didn't have you're details sort out with AT&T as to what sort of bill you wanted, well then you got the big one. This item that appeared at $0.00 on the bill however did then begin to cost something however when people decided to take their iPhones with them out of the country. Once this thing was taken out of the US the bills started having prices appropriate to their size, heading into the thousands of dollars area, not to say the in US AT&T bill was a good price. Add to that the problem of no third party apps, and you've got yourself a bad phone. If these are the problems in the US, imagine what the problems will be with the iPhone when it hits here in Australia sometime next year (if not the year after). I don't know about you, but I feel iPhone fans in Australia when it hits here are going to be screwed.

Runners-up for Worst

While their wasn't much to talk about with best, their seemed to be a lot of worst. Lets start with Windows Vista. Vista for the most part is a good upgrade to the Windows series. It does have some minor kinks relating to performance, and the newer interface changers and features are some what confusing, but it is good. The problem is it is the first major new version of Windows to be released in 6 years, the longest time between major Windows releases. Back in the late 1990's-early 2000's the years between releases Windows releases floated around one to three years between each, this meant that not much had changed between releases and that everyone was reasonably prepared for the next release. Vista however has had a larger gap in which people had become some what complacent and less willing to change things around just because their was a new Windows. The hardware manufactures who were quite willing to product new drivers for ever new version of Windows back in the 1990's became more worried about adoption of the Vista and weather it is enough to worry about supporting it, rather than considering weather their lack of support is affecting Vista's adoption rate, as drivers play an important are as to if people can us a certain OS like Vista. Microsoft itself didn't seem to Vista themselves ever. rather than consider that 2007 is somewhat different to 2001, when they released Windows XP, Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to expand on a release concept they had for Windows XP of having a couple of different variants. For XP Microsoft had four variants with the two main variants being Home and Professional editions, Vista however has six variant. Rather than giving users option, the Vista variants just created confusion. There is a number of other things I could go on about but I think the main problem with Vista is that it is released to a completely different environment to its predecessors, with Microsoft assuming that would be fine.

I could go on about some more tech wrongs and blunders, but I feel it would be best for me to finish this off so the rest of the worst runners-up are AACS high definition video copy protection, Facebook Beacon (that made the MySpace people smile again), and Safari for Windows.

Links for today:

• iPod Touch on Wikipedia
• iPhone on Wikipedia
• Microsoft Windows (Series) on Wikipedia
• Apple.com

Well it's the last month of 2007 (the most wonderful time of the year, some would say) and I've decided to do a kind of year in review thing, looking at a couple of things that have court my eye and/or I want to rant about. So here is what I saw to be the Best and Worst of 2007 in games (video & computer games).

Best: Portal

When this was shown off last year in a short and sweet video from Valve a lot of people got excited, and when it was released people got a lot more than expected. Based on gameplay elements sourced from a small independent game called Narbacular Drop, Portal was more of a puzzle game than a FPS. The game puts the player into an empty test facility run by a computer system that has a bit of a dark side (and some faults in its speech and operating abilities). In this environment the player must run through a series of test involving portals and a weapon capable of creating them. While the game was short, it did have a lot of good gameplay and a odd sense of humor (which probably would have been severely affected by a longer play time).

Runners-up for Best

Unfortunately I haven't been able the experience much in games this year but their is some that have court my eye in being a good advancement in gameplay and/or being very entertaining. STALKER was a game that was good at providing an interest new environment to games but lost points for having a bit of a problem with difficulty and a ending system that is somewhat confusing and would probably see most people achieving only one ending.
Guitar Hero 3 gets some points for being an apparently good extension to that franchise, as well as being an example of what I'm going to call alternate controller based gaming.
Also on the alternate controller based gaming Nintendo's Wii system has to be mentioned from being a new console system that is all about alternate controller based gaming.

Oh, and lets not forget Bioshock, Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, and Team Fortress 2.

Worst: Duke Nukem Forever

I Know this is probably an easy target, but I don't care, I want to rant, especially since this is its 10 year anniversary...since it began development, back in 1997. If their is any games that can or have beaten it in development time, I would like to know of them. So what has happens in that time? 2 or 3 game engine switches, a hand full of screenshots and a lot of BS. That's not to say 3D Realm (Apogee) haven't been doing anything in that time...well George Broussard and Scott Miller haven't. The two head honchos at 3D Realms have managed to do some producer work on a number of games, including a number of spin-off and alternate productions in the Duke Nukem franchise, Max Payne 1 & 2, and Prey. They didn't do any development work on these titles, they just did some yes or no work on what can happen with the ones based on their IPs and/or helped them get published. The closes they've come to actually developing one of these games it that they originally began doing a version of Prey before beginning DNF and then had the project disappear before hand balling the work over to Human Head Studios, which brings me to my favorite quote about DNF. Apparently sometime after Prey (the Human Head version) was released, someone at 3D Realms slipped out a line that was something like "Well Prey was a game people were saying we'll never get done, but we finished it, so therefore we will have DNF finished". No, Mr. 3D Realm, you won't finish it if Prey is anything to go by. At the least what will happen is another company will be brought in to do your work, then you'll sit back and get fat on the money some other game company's game based of your IP and make statements on how great you are because "you" managed to complete Duke Nukem Forever and that it's the greatest game ever, which also, Prey is anything to go by, it won't be that good of a game.

Runners-up for Worst

The recent news of Jeff Gerstmann and his sacking from Gamespot for giving a game from a company that was promoting the game on the site a bad review. Hey Gamespot, do you know what's great about the internet? No, it's not the fact to can change things and not have anyone notice, it's that people think that and then get bit in the arse when someone notices the change and then puts back up the very thing that was taken down or changed (Click Here People).
Wii was also going to be here as, while it is great for it's new controller that goes well on games made for it, the controller, along with it's lack of high quality and high definition video support make it bad. while the Wii-mote and Nunchuk control system has been good on the first couple of games, it has not worked out well with other games, mainly because most prefer and are use to the standard game pad controller. Their is not denying that the Wii is selling well but the games for the console are not doing well. What Nintendo have done in a sense with the Wii is take a some what older model car a pulled out the steering wheel and replaced with a set of Flight of the Navigator like control paddles, which work great when on some roads but on others roads they don't quite turn well or react as fast.

Others for the worst are Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (because of the whole Gamespot thing), Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Crysis (for technical flaws), and Playstation 3.

Links for today:

• Portal on Wikipedia
• Duke Nukem Forever on Wikipedia
• Kane & Lynch: Dead Men original Gamespot review (lets see that again)
• A cool little Scrubs video

For ages now I've talked about doing something towards film or TV production, but have never really done anything real towards it. Well now I've begun making some steps towards putting together a script for a possible first project. Just last night I began work on a draft plot outline for a script which is current 4 pages long and still being worked on as so far it probably only details out the first quarter of the script.

The title at the moment for the potential script is Zombie Stories and the basic idea of it is that it details out the beginning of a zombie outbreak in a small town, but rather than focusing in on one small group of survivors it details the breakout through a set of smaller stories (ala Sin City) with a few common strings tying them together. This has been sort of a idea I've had for a while as I've felt it would be interesting see a sort of film like this get played out from a couple of different angles, rather than just see only the prospective of the chosen few survivors the filmmakers has decided to focus on. It has however been a motivating factor to me finally getting around to actually watching a few zombie films as at the time I started thinking of the idea I hadn't watched much in the way of zombie films except maybe Shaun of the Dead.

I've since seen a bunch of the major must see zombie films such as the George A Romero series of zombie films, and the 28 Days/Weeks Later films. These films have been a good reference for zombie material. So hopefully I should be able to get something good out script-wise and I'll try and get out updates on that when I can

So yeah I'm late again but I've been recovering a bit from 3treme LAN on the weekend, which was quite cool. Unfortunately didn't play as much in games as I intended to but it was still OK. Finally got to play a bit of Team Fortress 2 however, and soon discovered it probably  would have been a good idea to play a bit of it online before hand to get a bit of a better feel for it. Also got to play a bit of the Half-Life 2 mod Zombie Master which was cool. This week I should be going for another check up on the knee which could decide if I need an MRI scan of the knee and if an operation has to be done, things have however been coming better with the knee but it could still require work. Anyway, I'm out of things to say now so, see ya.

Hey everyone, Troy "Limpy" Hutchinson here. Yeah still getting around with on bum knee, requiring a walking stick to get around, but at least the thing isn't the size of a Softball now, and capable of being more mobile, and the sore throat, well it's gone so that's good. So hopefully if all goes will I should be able to enjoy this summer somewhat. The problem is just working out what to do.

Something I do have down is a return to doing LAN Parties, having signed myself up to being at 3xtreme LAN that will be at Monash University. Basically me and 200-250 nerds/geeks are going to be piled into one room, connecting their computers together, and playing games and sharing por...oh...no...umm....files. It has been a while since the last time I've been to a LAN Party, but hopefully everything should be alright, and should be fun.

While 3treme LAN will be fun, something that won't be fun for me is The Simpsons Game, why, because there is no PC version of the game (and here we enter the slightly insane part of today's post). For those who don't know EA has released what is potentially the best Simpsons video game ever, and is available for all possible platforms except PC. Why EA, Why. Why are you shunning those of us who prefer mouse and keyboard over one feeble controller with rumble (or in the case of the PS3 shotty Sixaxis motion thing). Are well, I guess that will be another motivating factor, along with Halo 3, for me to get around to buying a Xbox 360 (which will happen once I sort out whats going on with that).

Here's another motivating factor. Recently I've been getting into a lot of stuff involving zombies. I have recently watched the whole George A Remero series of Zombie films, and have began playing the game Stubbs the Zombie again.But one thing I would mind doing that involves zombies is play the game Dead Rising. What is Dead Rising? Basically it's a player controlled character, hordes of zombies, and a shopping centre where you can use anything you can pick up to take on the undead. There is some stuff about a story too but somehow I feel must not be important because to storyline stuff apparently suffers from some major flaws, such as not having a proper save system and yet still most people who have reviewed it still give it high praise.

Well I'm low on things to ramble on about now (and that was a total ramble), so hopefully this summer should be a good one, and I how everyone enjoys themselves, and I'm off, see ya.

When Superman: The Movie was released back in 1978 the film was a huge hit warranting the production of a number of sequels. These sequels however were fairly comprised by behind the scenes production problems and conflicts. While people may like some of what was produced after Superman 1 the sequels still aren't necessarily the best follow ups at least in the way that they are not what was intended in some cases.

• Superman 2
  Superman 2 was planned out and shot particularly by Richard Donner while he was working as director on Superman 1. But problems with the Superman 1's producers, Alexander & Ilya Salkind, who blamed Donner for Superman 1 going over budget, saw Richard Donner being booted from the Superman 2 project and in his place the Salkinds brought in Richard Lester. Lester had little experience with the Superman comics, or any other comics for that matter, all he knew before then was that comics are those funny thing you find in some newspapers, as a result Lester's work on Superman 2 was some what more upbeat and comedic than Donner's original vision.
  Some of Donner's vision still made it to the screen as a result of problems with some of the actors preferring Donner over Lester. Gene Hackman (Lex Luthor) didn't return for shooting on Superman 2 so most footage of him in the film was footage Donner shot for Superman 2 while shooting Superman 1, any additional material shot Superman 2 by Richard Lester of Lex Luther used a double who was shot a mostly from behind while a voice actor recorded additional lines.
  There is now a Richard Donner cut of Superman 2 available as there is enough footage available to produce a version close to what Donner envisioned for Superman 2, but Lester's Superman 2 is probably still going to be the version embedded in peoples minds, which is a shame causes its the worse.
• Superman 3
  After Superman 2 the Salkinds decided to give Richard Lester the chance to produce a fresh new Superman sequel which had no track laid down by a previous director, and because Gene Hackman wasn't willing to return to the Superman franchise yet. Continuing with is his basic comprehension what comics are and what Superman is, Lester produced a film with a bunch of characters (beside Lana Lang) that have no connection to the Superman mythology/comic series. Lex Luther was replaced with Ross Webster, a tycoon who uses another new character, computer savant Gus Gorman (played by comedian Richard Pryor), to use computers to achieve a number of evil deeds that help make Ross Webster's company more powerful. Meanwhile Superman has gone all emo after being exposed to bad kryptonite from Gus Gorman.
  This film was a major disappointment in the box office, resulting in this being the last film produced by the Salkinds together (Ilka Salkind did produce Supergirl but that was it).
• Superman 4
  While the Salkinds made some bad decisions with the Superman franchise they were nothing like the decisions made by the produces that followed them in Superman 4. Golan-Globus Productions took over from the Salkinds and began work on the fourth film with a story that was produced with input by Christopher Reeve (who played Superman in the first four films). The story was a comment on the nuclear arms race between America and Russia at the time, intended to be more serious than Superman 2 and 3. Gene Hackman also returned to the franchise as Lex Luthor. But once again things went down the tubes at the hands of the films new producers.
  Apparently Golan-Globus and partner group Cannon Films had no idea of what money management was and began finding it hard to produce all the projects they had going. As a result a number of their projects were be made to reduce spendings as money for a number of projects was being taken away for other projects, and Superman 4 was no exception. Superman 4 was a given a budget of $40 million from Warner Bros. of which only $17 million was actually spent on the film, which was mostly, if not all, shot on cheap locations in england with visual effects that have been said to be less realistic and impressive than the effects in the first Superman film. As a result Superman 4 is considered to be the worst of all the Superman films.
  Christopher Reeves I would imagine was probably very disappointed with this film as he was very much invested in this film in its early stages however Golan-Globus miss use of the budget for the film coursed Reeves to be disappointed with it which is sad as this is the last film with him as the Man of Steel. sometime after this film Reeves got into a riding accident at an equestrian competition which left him paralyzed from the neck down. Sometime later Reeves began having problems from various infections and was having to take various antibiotics to control them. In 2004 Christopher Reeve had and adverse reaction to a antibiotic and died of heart failure.
  Something I think would be nice to see one day would be to have someone put some money into have a Star Wars Special Edition job done on this film or something similar to what was done on Superman 2, being the film to a form that is more close to its original vision than its current form, then to have a good percent of money generated by this new version be sent to the Christopher Reeves Foundation.
• Superman Returns
  This makes it to the list for two major reasons, 1 being the pre-production hell it has been through and 2 being the fact that is it meant to be a follow up from the previous Superman films but doesn't properly feel like it to me.
  The pre-production hell for this film started when Superman 4 was being edited. Golan-Globus, in addition to cutting funds from the project decided to also cut a fair bit if footage from the film with the idea of producing a Superman 5 from the material should Superman 4 do well. Superman 4 how due to their cut if fund and maybe even because of their cutting of material from the film bombed in the box office. There was still some intent after Superman 4 bombed to make Superman 5 by Golan-Globus and Cannon Films but their money management (or lack there of) eventually bankrupted them.
  Right to the Superman Franchise reverted back to Ilya Salkind who looked at doing a Superman 5 film where Superman died but then came back to life to face off against comic book villain Brainiac. Ilya Salkind however sold the rights of the Superman franchise back to Warner Bros. who began looking a different sort of sequel. Handing control of the next Superman film to producer Jon Peters work began on a Superman Reborn project. Under this name two scripts were produced involving some form of Superman being killed by comic book character Doomsday only to be reborn again later an then managing to take out his enemies.
  A version of one of these scripts go into the hands of filmmaker and comic book fan Kevin Smith who was being looked at by Warner Bros. to do rewrite work on a couple of films after having impressed a number of industry people with his film Chasing Amy. Smith read the script and hated it and gave detail as to why he hated it to some of the Warner Bros. execs. Showing that he had a good understanding of the Superman franchise and comic books Smith was given the chance to write a script for the film. During the process of writing his script Smith go a number of bizarre request from producer Jon Peters who want things like Superman not to fly, Superman fighting a giant spider, and for Brainiac to have a gay robot sidekick. Kevin Smith complied with a number of these request until Tim Burton signed on to direct, at with point Kevin Smith was kicked from the project.
  Under Tim Burton a completely new script was produced by writer Wesley Strick, but that script didn't satisfy Warner Bros. execs so another writers was brought in who wrote two drafts of his script before being replaced by another writer. Meanwhile concept design and set design work was being done with Jon Peters using kids to review the work and workout if it could be used to produce sell-able merchandise. Then in 1998 Tim Burton dropped from the project resulting in the project becoming a revolving door of directors, writers, and actors all wanting to be part of the project but then dropping out some time after. There was even plans for a Superman vs. Batman film but after years of not being able to get the project started the concept became all but dead.
  I stepped Bryan Singer who had previously turned out a successful film series from the X-Men comic book franchise. Ignoring Superman 3 & 4 and taking Superman 1 & 2 as a "vague history", Superman Returns is a sequel with no real proper preceding film. This creates some confusion as to what's going on but is still a good film, and is definitely a better film than Superman 3 & 4.

So that's my rant for today. Sorry once again about the lateness but you should be glad to know that the leg is coming better and sore throat I mentioned recently in my statue is clearing up. cya.

Today's Links are:

• Wikipedia entry on the Superman film series
• Unair SNL skit on the iPhone