Month: May 2008

I watched the second Conan film last night, little bit of a let down compared to the first. The first seemed to have more in – effects and budget must have been higher. It’s outstanding and well worth a peek for how a Swords and Sandals film should be done.

Hopefully they’ll do a good job with the next Conan film 🙂

Must get Red Sonja on dvd too – It has both Arnie and Sandahl Bergman from Conan the Barbarian.

House comes out with some top lines …

I’m watching House now after growing a new character for a D&D game starting Monday. This one is a sorceror called Molochas, who will hopefully last longer than my first sorceror 🙂 He was fun to play but I started making him go insane (in-character thing), so the fella didn’t have much of a life expectancy after that.

I have two new characters lined up, with one being a fighter to replace Keela the cleric who got eaten by a troll last week … At least it was a heroic end as she held up the troll for long enough for her buddies to get away. Except for the barbarian who also ended up as troll-food.

Badminton was a little bit of a struggle again last night. I’ve got two major things to sort out there :
1 – Psychological conditioning stopping me from pulling the trigger on smashes (more later)
2 – I need to build a new serve action from scratch

I’ve always used the simple learner serve, as it allows me to send the shuttle to the back of the court but also to the front as a surprise with little or no change in the action. Trouble is, it isn’t that useful against better players because the long ones feed their smashes, quickly leading to end of rally. I’m needing to learn the serve type you’ll see if you catch the rare sight of badminton on telly. However, I may be limited there if it puts too much strain on the shoulder. I’ll work something out 🙂

The first one (psychological conditioning) got beat on the night. Unfortunately 😉 I managed to nearly do a jump smash early on, I almost got it through but didn’t commit fully. Missed opportunity on that one but I did get the chance to go for one again later. Result ? OW ! My shoulder seems mechanically sound for 95% of what I want to do with it but when I go for the more violent stuff (like jump smashes!), it tells me it was a bad idea.

I thought it could be bad last night in the aftermath of a shoulder going crunch, with pain coming when I went for overheads. Things seem to have settled down overnight though, so I just have the soreness of muscles that have got a shock due to change from not doing very much. So – very low point last night but doing better today.

The other symptom that comes out from a bad, chronic injury is that the sufferer tends to develop a complex about it. Like me with the shoulder, I go tentative when using it or back off completely from certain activities. Some of the reasons for the backing off are good, like being concerned for the safety of the person I’m bowling to. Some are bad, like not pulling the trigger on smashes because you think you’re going to break something. Another symptom is that when you get a little setback you immediately think the worst. Things like believing that you’re not going to get any cricket at all in this year because you reckon that one bad smash has caused 1-2 months of forced inactivity on the shoulder.

I’ll be taking it easy on my right arm for a few days but I don’t think it’s as bad as the knee jerk complex makes one think it could have been. Looking forward to next week’s game again 🙂

PS I’m actually more worried about my knee than my shoulder at present. That’s another long term thing I struggle with – there’s a big list !

I love the depth of field used in films like Conan. I love how it draws the eye to what is important so that the background is not so distracting. When everything is in sharp focus it can get confusing for the eye so selective depth of field is a tool used by photographers and camermen (as I am sure you know). Apparently they are shooting another Conan film…

Oh! that Conan!!
I’m such a schmuck 😉
this was really interesting
and I had a good laugh at myself to boot – what more could a girl ask for.

I wanted to watch something with decent sound tonight as something easy before I hit the road tomorrow (daytrip), it ended up being Conan the Barbarian. One thing that struck me midway through was the cinematography … Things seem to have improved rather since Conan was made in terms of keeping the focus consistent across the frame of what’s on screen.

In Conan, the sharp focus is very definitely restricted to what the director and camera is most interested in showing. The rest of the scene tends to diminish into somewhat of a blur. More modern films don’t really seem to suffer from this, the image is sharp all the way across the scene. Here’s an example :

(copyright 2002 Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Ltd)

This is the one that set me off – Conan is sharp, Princess in the background is rather fuzzy. Compare that to :

(copyright 2005 Lucasarts Ltd)

This is actually one of the few images up to halfway in Revenge of the Sith where the animators at Lucasarts didn’t finish the job. This is a nearfield object dominated shot, yet the robots in the medium field are a little blurry with the far background sharp.

Maybe it’s a symptom of Green Screening becoming more common ? The image we see on the dvd or blu-ray is not actually what’s being caught by the camera ? CGI doesn’t suffer from the limitations of the conventional optical camera lens, with things like focal lengths and chemical based film. However, the animators do try to build in imperfections like lens flare and bloom to make the image look more real. The cameras will be catching the actors, with the visual effects people placing those actors in a visually perfect backdrop.

(copyright 2005 Lucasarts Ltd)

Looks like the camera limits are still there when they’re taking shots of actors against a background far away, here’s a shot of Angelina Jolie after having far too much with guns in the first Tomb Raider film :

(copyright 2001 Paramount Pictures Corp)

Hey ! I needed a relatively modern film that might have some real backgrounds in it ! Sexy lead actress has nothing to do with it. Oh – back to the point, sharp actress in foreground, blurry walls in the background. The animators try to replicate this in the CGI pictures and it’s rampant throughout Revenge of the Sith. Apart from the in space shots, where you can see close ups of Obi-wan in his fighter with as sharp a picture of a cruiser behind him as dvd can produce. Perhaps one of the reasons people criticised Final Fantasy was that it got things too “perfect”, maybe we need a little blurriness to keep our eyes and brain happy with what we’re seeing.

Here’s another where the Lucasarts people got it a little too good :

(copyright 2005 Lucasarts Ltd)

Yoda’s got the focus in the foreground, yet it’s easy to make out those details in the far field. One last picture, again from Revenge of the Sith, this shows the animators compensating for that nearfield/far field blurriness :

(copyright 2005 Lucasarts Ltd)

I’m supposed to be on the road in 7 hours and have to get some sleep before then, will try to “acquire” (aka screen grab from dvds!) some piccys to show what I mean when I get home tomorrow. Screen grabs done 🙂

PS I reckon the screens at the local Mall are worn out … The picture seems far less fuzzy when I watch films like Transformers and the Bournes than I remember it being on the big screen.

Aye – that’s one of the reasons I got lucky enough to bat after breaking the nose 🙂 I managed to make a game about 3 weeks after it happened which was lucky because it was the last game of the season before the rains set in … I didn’t make many runs but I did get to face bowling again, albeit with a helmet this time.

The badminton’s another one of those getting back on the horse things 🙂 Plus it’s good fun too and apparently was pretty effective at blowing off some cobwebs. Looking forward to session 3 on Wednesday as my knees seem a little more interested in cooperating 🙂

I’m still aware of the shoulder problem when playing and it puts a few limits on me. But I’m getting more confidence that it’s stronger than I thought it might have been 🙂

Ouch is all I can say! The psychological effects of such accidents often live on long after the physical injury has healed. It’s all about getting on the horse again. Good luck!

PS [chuckle] Maybe “life-threatening” was a little strong, I have a very hard head 🙂

Wake Up Call #2 involved me getting hit in the head by a cricket ball … The only protection I was wearing at the time was a pair of glasses !

So instead of 5.25 ounces of hard ball (think baseball) going straight into my eye, my glasses spread out the impact around the eye. Result – one broken nose that could have been a lot worse …

I got away with one that day 🙂 Which served me well a year later when I got hit on the temple, with the impact being absorbed by a helmet that time 🙂

This is fascinating on many levels. How things can happen and come back to haunt one in later life….Seemingly innocent things as well as serious ones.

What I didn’t get was the Wake Up Call #2…If you explained how this was life-threatening, I must have read to quickly….I dearly hope this injury is not life-threatening and that I somehow read this wrong.