When I saw Larry during the making of Harvey Daggit and the Devil's Olives, he was completely stressed out, distracted, and exhausted. Now that I find myself in charge of The Girl and the Ghost, I fully understand what he was feeling back then.
It's amazing how many hiccups arise on a film that will only be roughly fifteen minutes long in the end. From making sure all the voice work sessions go smoothly, to issues with editing software, to figuring out music, to just being burnt out by animating. All the little problems take a mental toll on you when there are so many other aspects needing your attention.
I've been in a zombie state lately, which is why I gave myself the weekend off.
This weekend happened to be the weekend of the Perseid meteor shower. Over the years, it's been an amazing thing to watch, so it seemed like a perfect time for a break.
Jeff is heading off to college in a couple days, so we had a final game night before school took over. It seems the new challenge among the guys is to best me at Soul Calibur II. They keep trying. They even resorted to trying to make me laugh so much that I'd lose. At one point, I had Mikey inches from my head making bizarre faces and sounds while Jeff blasted audio of a goose calling tournament from his iPod. I had tears in my eyes from laughing, but I emerged victorious, though it was a crazy and awesome battle.
After the games, I headed outside with Mom to see what could be seen in the sky. We saw a handful of meteors on Saturday night and only one each on Sunday night.
Yesterday, we went to see Stardust. I read the book a couple years ago and loved it, so I was excited (and a little nervous) to see it on the big screen. I've seen the trailer and though I love the book, the preview just didn't sit right. Thankfully, Neil Gaiman was right when he said on his blog that the previews are bad and very misrepresentative of the actual movie.
I had a great time and Mom was even teary-eyed by the end. The previews try to sell it as a romantic film with a little action and while it is romantic and there is action, there's so much more to it than that. The humor is actually funny (which is rare in most movies lately) and sometimes twisted, the fantasy elements are great, and Robert DeNiro gives a... very surprising performance. There's a little bit of everything going on in Stardust and I thought it worked well. For the first time in a while, a movie revolving around magical beings and events actually felt magical. I left the theater happy.
We came home and ended up staring into the skies again for four and a half hours. While it wasn't as spectacular as other years, we still got quite a light show with accompaniment by the tree frogs and crickets. Between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM, we probably saw between fifteen to twenty shooting stars. Some were small, some were not so small, bright and colorful with tails that stretched halfway across the sky. We even saw one strange light that appeared to fade out not a hundred feet away from us.
Still puzzled by that one...
It's been a nice and much needed break. Hopefully this'll get the creative parts of my brain firing again so I can get back to working at full burn again soon.
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