November 2015

Almost an entire month late, I started to write this one right after Thanksgiving (October 12th)! For the majority of October I was relocated to a friend’s apartment. Ariana was kind enough to harbor me on her couch for a little over two weeks. If you’re thinking sleeping on a couch sucks, have a look at the kind of sunrises I got there.

Neat, isn’t it? Well, it was also a great incentive to get up early and do stuff. Like maniacally bike around Stanley Park, or to North Van, or from the airport, or anywhere that seemed stupid enough to grant me a good amount of exercise and getting used to different areas of the city. It was also a great time to read more and more books, including among them “Ready Player One”, which I couldn’t put down until it was over – and was mentioned on a previous post.

During this time, some music videos came out, shot by Matt, two of them using some of my anamorphics, and I’m still impressed with the quality of the footage he was able to get out of a 7D, shooting H.264. Well done, my friend, well done!

Plus, the music video for Hello – which entitles the aforementioned previous post – directed by Matt and Jake also came out. I really like the way this looks and sounds, plus it was great to work with these guys for extra content on their new album. Now that I’ve re-read this sentence, it seemed confusing so: I haven’t worked on the music video below! Hahaha.

But, back to the post title, this was about Thanksgiving. Last year we went to a friend of May’s place and had a decent dinner with them, even though I was already in my unwilling “no-food-down” diet, so I didn’t get to enjoy it so much. I remember it was raining like hell, and we took a bus there, to a part of town we’d never been before. This year, I was at Ariana’s and, well, she wanted to stick to traditions and organize a huge meal and gather friends. It wasn’t like I had a choice to not-be-a-part-of-it, and even if I had, wouldn’t make a difference. Nicko and Nati joined us early in the day and we went shopping for the missing ingredients, then as they started cooking I was constantly out, getting things we forgot about the first time, or looking for stuff in more distant stores. There was a whole “Apple Cider Quest” which ended up unsuccessful since there was no non-alcoholic apple cider to be found anywhere and I ended up getting the ingredients for some variation of it based on apple juice. Sweet! – in all senses.

I tend not to remember rainy days very well, but I’m pretty sure this one will last. The amount of food we made was enough for everyone to take some home and me and Ariana eat for a week, and we still had to get rid of a lot of leftovers because they were going bad. The day was also a kind of test to see how we worked as a team, since we’re all planning on moving together to a bigger (and cheaper) place – a house or large apartment – outside of downtown, but not too far – bikeable distances, please.

I guess when I started to write this post I was going to talk about the collaboration and feeling part of a team, being around friends and all that, but it’s pretty obvious by now and I desperately need other subjects to write about here! I guess I’ve dried this well, at last.

Weird limp post… I should’ve finished it back then!

Ever since the first Paranormal Activity movie came out, there was an element that I really liked about it: the fact that it absorbs the viewer into a story that’s told by the camera – I wrote about this a while ago, calling it Diegetic Cinematography – plus, it was a horror movie. The problem is, doesn’t matter how much I want to like Paranormal Activity, I simply can’t. I tried with the first movie, it bored me to death, with less than five minutes of actual cool stuff going on. It should’ve been a short. I admire its budget/box office ratio, very much like Blair Witch Project.

Its concept of how to tell a horror story was something I liked so much that I forced myself to watch all the other movies in the franchise, as they came out. They just got more and more predictable and boring, leaving aside the true horror of its nature, making everything more and more explicit and resorting almost exclusively to jump scares. Yesterday I watched what’s supposed to be the conclusion of the series, “The Ghost Dimension“. You don’t even need to guess what I thought of it. It was one of the worst disappointments ever – I watched it right after Crimson Peak. Individually, Crimson Peak was incredibly boring, but at least had very cool looking effects, even though lacking the whole ‘foreplay’ you expect from horror movies, where most of the time you don’t actually see the ghost – or whatever supernatural creature the movie features. In Crimson Peak you have long shots and close ups of the ghosts, which is cool for some reasons and anti-climatic for some others. The characters are also incredibly stupid and take forever to unravel the plot. Overall, a weak movie, not worth watching again. Compared to Ghost Dimension, though, Crimson Peak is an amazingly well written and shot horror movie.

It feels like in the previous movies they depleted completely all the possibilities of jump scares imaginable and the only way of trying to add any depth to such a flat story (pun intended) was to make it 3D, with jump scares that fly onto your face combined with footage processed to look like old VHS, on a supernatural camera that can “see this other realm”. Well, the image looks like crap, and I admire that, the problem is whenever the spirits appear, they show an incredible amount of detail that isn’t present anywhere else in the shot. It’s like taking a very low-quality photograph and inserting a super sharp and amazing 3D model into it. It just doesn’t match.

My rule of thumb regarding the Paranormal Activity series still applies: watch the trailer and be done with it. 95% of the good scenes are there, as well as the – lack of – story. Save yourself some time and watch a better movie.