1st June Sunday

And what a day.  Decided to finally try some smoke cooking.  Got the firebox attached to our grill last night.  That was fun with the screw holes not wanting to line up.  Typical late night assembly challenge.  Luckily I had my lovely assistant to...assist.  She was extremely helpful.  Without her, the neighbors might have been calling the police about a very loud and unpleasant noise.  But we finally got it together.

Got up early to get the remaining items: Charcoal, meat thermometer, and vegetable oil spray.  Again I called upon my wonderful assistant to assist again.  I manned the grill, getting it preheated for first time use (we have only used the propane side thus far).  Lovely Assistant (in case you have not yet guessed, this would be my lovely wife) prepared the beef.

I finally got the grill setup for smoking and got the meat on.  Oh what fun it is to monitor a Charcoal grill to keep the temperature up for smoking.  Can't get involved in City of Heroes as I need to make sure I am available to add more Charcoal and chips to keep the heat up.  We are trying Apple wood chips.  I have put a few on dry and some soaked in water.  This is my first time so hopefully it turns out at least eatable.  The in-laws might want to have some pizza money ready just in case.  And I also have a water hose on stand-by.

Well back to watching the temp.

More Crawling

Here is my latest crawling trailer:

Ghost Recon Alpha

I was watching the Monday Film Riot, and the host suggested this for his short of the week.  Now I haven't been one for checking out the shorts suggested, but when he mentioned the name I had to this week.  Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon is a series of military video games.  I haven't played any yet, but after watching this short film I may just have to.

I don't know much about the Ghost Recon story line, but something tells me that this is how a video game based live action movie should be.  Too bad only the good quality video game movies are short films by the game developers and fans.

I do enjoy the big budget production ones too: Tomb Raider, Doom, Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and several others.  Yes, I enjoy watching Jean Claude Van Damme's Street Fighter movie.  But it's the short films like this that make me look back at those big productions and shake my head.

Avengers assemble!

I went and saw The Avengers movie with my wife Friday morning.  It was GREAT!  We both loved this movie.  If you like any of the previous movies leading up to The Avengers, go see this movie.

The Good:

• Plenty of action.
• No "this is slow, wake we when it's over" scenes.
• Great interaction between the heroes, and with the villain. (The Hulk has a couple of great scenes.)
• Can't wait for Blu-ray!

The Bad:

•  The only bad that I can come up with is that the comic fans for The Avengers will find stuff to complain about. (I have my opinions about this but I'm not going to get into that.)

For me, this is by far the best Marvel superhero movie yet (even better than any of the X-Men movies).  Part of what makes this great is the way Marvel leads up to it.  They did it the right way: giving the main heroes their own movies, and bringing them together using Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D.  If you know something about the individual heroes and The Avengers, you could probably skip all the previous movies (Iron Man 1 and 2, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America) and still enjoy and follow along with this movie.  I do hope they make a trilogy of this.

With this movie, I also hope that DC Comics is taking some notes.  This is what they need to do to get a decent Justice League movie.  But with they way all of their recent non-Batman movies have been going, we might have a long wait.

* Please note that the picture used was cropped from one of the wallpaper images downloaded from http://marvel.com/avengers_movie/.  All rights belong to Marvel.

Avengers assemble!

Happy birthday to my wonderful wife!

iPhone and Film Riot

I sat down to catch the latest on Film Riot, and todays episode is on shooting with the iPhone.  Their short turned out great.  They also gave a few tips to help with shooting, which they have used for a lot of their other episodes.

The biggest of which is using a rig to help with steadiness.  The rig they used is the Owle Bubo for iPhone 4.  It seems to be a very nice rig for the hand-held look, but at around $148 on Amazon I will pass on this.  Instead, I am going to try to get the SnapMount Tripod Mount for the iPhone.  This is much cheaper.  It won't help with hand-held steadiness.  I'm looking for a way to mount my iPhone on a tripod for a low price.

There was also a quick blurb on a camera app: FiLMiC Pro.  They recommend this over the regular camera recording app included on the iPhone.  From what they showed, it definitely has improvements over the built-in app.  Looks like I'll be picking up another iTunes card.

On to the episode:

I know that there are lots of posts and videos about shooting with an iPhone, along with just about anything else.  That's the novelty of the internet for you.  What I like is that these guys are covering it.  They show you great stuff and have fun doing it.  They have good info, good tips, good shorts, and plenty of humor.  If you like anything about making your own videos and film, please check out more of their episodes.  (I do recommend parental guidance as some things may not be appropriate for young viewers.)

That's a wrap!