Einarsen.Net - the blog

Many films has been involved in moving what is possible in the visual effect arena forward, but never with so huge leaps as George Lucas and his pre-ILM buddies did with Star Wars back in the 70’s. If you look at it today you may say that you aren’t impressed at all, but most of the effects tricks created for Star Wars had never been done before. Why you may ask. Maybe because no one had ever thought that it even was possible to do it. The best is that it wasn’t made because they wanted some cool effects, but they just needed it to tell George story. And that is very important when we talk about visual effects - it should only be used to tell the story in a better way.

Who knows how the visual effect industry would have progressed into films without Star Wars.

Now members of the Visual Effects Society has voted about which film is the most influential and they couldn’t possible have gotten a different answer. Blade Runner came in second.

Source: Visual Effects Society

We have all seen the new HD-ready TV’s and lately the new HDV camcorders coming to market. Prices is also lining up so that normal consumers can buy them without having porridge for dinner the next year. All of this is of course good news, but for people like me that is used to our good old DV camcorder with the possibility to edit all our video on the home pc there has been this little worry about how to edit all this new HDV material.

Now Blackmagic Design has come up with a new PCI Express card supported on both Mac OS X and Windows XP. Where editing software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro is supported. This should help most of us to make the jump to HD in our home studio.

The Insanity card have two HDMI ports (one in and the other one out). And the best of all the suggested reseller price is only USD 249,- Almost as there should be some snag in there some way, but lets hope everything is as good as it looks. As you already may have guessed you need a pretty powerful PC to edit HD, but that comes without saying.

More details at Blackmagic Design

Source: Norwegian Itavisen

Seems like some sword swinging Star Wars fans did give the audience at Hollywood Bowl some extra entertainment when they “attacked” in the middle of the concert. This of course happened when John Williams’s Star Wars music was brought on. I guess this wasn’t planned from the organizers, but probably someone gave the order. Luckily someone didn’t strike back with an “Order 66″

See the video at YouTube

Source: Laist

Jack Bauer is the man that solves all the big problems that occur in the USA with or without the help of others. Most of us know that you don’t mess with Jack and those that do it anyway will regret it soon or later. Like you don’t miss a episode of 24 cause you for sure don’t want to risk Jack to be angry at you. NOT RLY has made a list of some “facts” about Jack which is pretty amusing even though some is to good to be true even for Jack for everyone except Jack. See the Top 100.

Source: NOT RLY

Now where was this gun when I needed it back in the early years of elementary school? Most kids, me included, has been doing pranks and one of them was shooting rubber bands in the back head of your class mates. But who in their right mind would had dared to attack you when they knew that you had your faithful Gatling Gun (rubber band version of course). If they didn’t know, they for sure would have been bombarded with 144 rubber bands from the 12 barrels.

It’s not priced at a level that kids could afford, but a little office shoot-out is more likely to happen. Even though this is a toy for kids at all ages it’s also a work of art that you could have in your living room. Maybe your wife wouldn’t agree about that, but then again she better…

Not sure what will happen if you buy it and try to bring it with you in the plane home. It’s not letal, but it’s still a weapon. If you try that please tell us.

Get your own at Backyard Artillery.

Source: TechEBlog (where you can see them demonstrating the gun)

Is that possible you could ask. Reduced Shakespeare Company co-creator Adam Long thinks so as he will write, direct the almost impossible - a 20 minutes stage comedy of Star Wars. He will be performing together with two other performers on stage. Lucasfilm has approved Longs plans to shrink the saga to 20 minutes.

Long said: “This is my boyhood dream” and “Everyone loves Star Wars but I love it more than anyone”. The last statement I’m pretty sure that could be debated for a long time as there is a huge fan base around the world, but I give him a huge credit for just trying something like this.

No plot or aspect of the epic saga will be omitted and that’s when we come to the almost impossible part of this. The effects will probably be a little simplified so they could easily cut away some the 13 hours there, but there is still a lot of things to cover in those precious 20 minutes.

Source: Irish Examiner

Italy won the trophy, but what everyone talks about are what happened in the second half of extra time. Materazzi provoked Zizuo so much that one of the best player ever in one second of insanity took revenge with a powerful head butt right in the provokers cheast. What he said is still not known, but Zidane will talk to the press soon. Of course he shouldn’t have done it, but I have already forgiven him. Seems like the world has as well. So let’s forget about that and look at one of the other seconds that he had in his last match. France got a penalty early in the first half and everyone would have gone for a safe solution, but Zidane didn’t as he gave us a fantastic penalty when he chipped the ball in the underside of the crossbar and down behind the goal line. There is only one that I can remember that shoot penalties like that and that’s Socrates and he did it twice in the 1986 World Cup, sadly he didn’t score at the second one.

The question that we will never get an answer to is of course would “Les Bleusâ€? have won the final if Zidane hasn’t been provoked so much that he retaliated, but what’s certain is that we will miss him just as much as the French team did in the last minutes of the match.

I have never combined these two and after watching this I’m not sure that I ever will. If you can make a fountain of something without adding stuff like propellant gas I’m pretty sure that you shouldn’t try to eat or drink it and for sure not the amount these guys are using for their experiment. 200 litres of Diet Coke and 500 Mentos should be little more than you digest in front of the TV on a Saturday night.

They also ask important questions like what will happen if you mix this in your stomach. Read more at the researchers website

Source: Jarle på Norsk (in norwegian)

We only saw glimpses of what they can do, but that’s not enough! The big surprise is of course the comeback of the French team which never gave Brazil a chance to qualify for the semi final. I thought that the Brazilian players longed for retaliation after the 1998 final, but it didn’t seem so because they wasn’t willing to pay through the nose for a victory. At least they could have tried. For sure it was good to see Zidane back in his peak before he ends his career after the tournament even though I would have liked to see Ronaldinho at his peak as well. Brazilian media has given him the blame for the the bad performance, but he couldn’t have won this match alone.

A Brazilian team that win the World Cup without playing entertaining football will of course be hero’s anyway, but if they don’t win then they are a fiasco. But if you don’t win, but play wonderful football you can still be remembered. Everyone still remember the Brazilian team from 1982 with Zico, Socrates, Eder, Falcao. Maybe the best offensive football team every. I rather see re-run’s of their matches than watching this years boring edition.

Now we can start to see which teams that have the potential to win the trophy even though many of the teams that already are through to the the round of 16 without playing other big teams yet.

Germany and Ecuador have won both matches, but they haven’t played any good teams yet. The final match in group A will give us a hunch if they have what it takes. England vs Sweden in group B will also give us more answers to how far the English team can go.

Argentina has continued to play brilliant football when they crushed Serbia 6-0 and this time they didn’t stop when they got the lead. As Holland also has won both their matches in the same group Côte d’Ivoire which has played open and entertaining football is already out.

Spain has played two good matches and won them with ease, but we will probably not see how good they are before playing better teams in the round of 16. There they could well run into the French team which haven’t .

Portugal, Brazil, England are ready for the next level without doing much more than needed to win their matches.

In the last round in the preliminary matches we finally get some big teams against each others like Argentina - Holland, Italy - Czech which will decide who will meet who later on in the cup rounds. This is the latest match teams can afford to rest before every match need to be won.

So who are the hottest candidates to go all the way after round 2? At the moment I think Argentina, Germany, Brazil, Spain has the potential. Holland, Portugal, England and Italy should be considered outsiders at the moment.