I’ve actually done some media-related work since the last time I wrote one of these posts. Wow!
Doing
First off, I got through the entirety of The Hanna Jo Stories episode 13 in terms of roughly putting in the sound effects and music. They still need mixed completely, and it’s been over a week since I touched it, but I still felt pretty good about the progress.
Also, I’ve been preparing for a short Christmas video that my ministry team with Youth With A Mission is making for a Christmas party that our whole missionary community is having soon. We are going to shoot it this week–I’m looking forward to sharing it if I can.
I’ve also been re-jigging of my interactive murder mystery games (a thing I’ve done a few times) for a friend who wants to “hire” one. I’m trying to get my head around all the details so I know it all makes sense. I found, for example, a random piece of information I gave one character about staying in a cheap motel and buying a couple of drying racks–I’ve absolutely no idea why that is included or where I thought was going!
Finally, my editor on Stuck (a short drama we made earlier this year) is done with what we call the “Shambles” cut.
Really, it’s just a rough assembly edit, but I’ve liked to call it the Shambles cut for some time, simply because usually at this stage, the film looks like shambles, and going into it with that in mind helps to keep watching it from being a miserable and discouraging experience. Hopefully I can take a look at it tomorrow!
So yeah…for once the “doing” part of this post feels like its getting some traction.
Watching
Over in the “watching”, probably the biggest one is that my daughter Johanna and I recently sat and watched Les Miserables–the musical one with Hugh Jackman, directed by Tom Hooper. I’d seen it before–my notes are elsewhere on this blog, and looking at them again I find I mostly still agree. My daughter though, was seeing it for the first time, and she loved it. Just loved it. Like, ten minutes in, she turned to me and said it was the best thing she’d ever seen. She ended up weeping through most of the movie (so did I) and just loved all the emotion of it.
I love the movie too, though I feel aware of its flaws. I’m not sure that my daughter is aware of its flaws. But I’m happy I had such a win with that one!
We’ve also pushed forward on Sherlock, watching all of Season Three. Even my oldest daughter got into it with us. All three of them agreed that Benedict Cumberbatch is crazy handsome when he puts on his long jacket and pulls up the collar around his neck.
It was cool rewatching The Empty Hearse, which explains (sort of) how Sherlock survived his all from the previous season. I was surprised, however, that the episode makes it sound like Sherlock and Mycroft had been onto Moriarity the entire time, and were basically setting him up to defeat him. I don’t feel like that really makes sense with The Reichenbach Fall, but maybe I need to view it yet again and see if I can keep it all straight.
On the other hand, I have no reservations about The Sign of Three, which is the episode where Watson gets married. That is a tour de force of writing (Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and Stephen Thompson all working together), directing (Colm McCarthy), acting (Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman and others) and everything else. Just loved it.
His Last Vow wasn’t bad at all as well. It made me ponder a future post or article about all the times that heroes shoot people in cold blood and yet that seems to be the right decision, as it does there…so well see if that comes to past in the future. But it also made me sad because I’m pretty sure that the rest of Sherlock is never as good as these first three seasons were. We’ll see.
We also pushed ahead on The Mandalorian. We haven’t totally caught up but we saw up to the episode that had Katee Sackhoff as Bo-Katan. This is a character I know nothing about, but my daughters say she’s pretty important. It was cool seeing Katee Sackhoff being less annoying than she was in The Flash. And my kids are over the moon at the possibility of seeing Ahsoka Tano in some future episode…I hope they don’t “mess her up” (although again, I’ll just have to take my girls’ word for it).
Of course, if you are keeping track of your Mandalorian, you know that if we’ve seen Bo-Katan, we’ve also seen Baby Yoda eating eggs! Yes, the biggest controversy on the internet since the day before yesterday, people seem to be mad at Baby Yoda for eating the precious eggs that Din Djaren is transporting. I know this to be legit because this is an understatement for Johanna felt about it. She freaked out, and eventually left the room, refusing to watch any longer. It was only realizing that the eggs are not fertilized that she was able to deal with it emotionally (even if she still doesn’t want to watch it).
Reading
When you get to “reading”, of course the big deal is that my copy of the first trade paperback collection for the Legion of Super-Heroes (the current series) finally arrived. I read it and enjoyed it, and my kids did too as soon as they could.
Full comments here.
I also have begun Green Lantern Earth One volume 2, but that is still to be finished. And I finished rereading Geoff John’s Flash volume 2, and am almost done with volume 3. I read most of those issues when they first came out, but have not since them. It’s good plotting and solid characterization, but there is something so gratuitously gruesome about so much of Geoff Johns’ criminals’ activities (for exampls, he’s got this gross pseudo-Batman villain called Murmur who cuts out his victim’s tongues! Bleah!) that its always a little off-putting. Still, I’m enjoying it, and there are some issues I’ve been missing it seems.
It’s past midnight, and I have to go to bed.
Hey, it’s November 23rd–Doctor Who‘s 57th birthday! Cool!
Blue Towel Productions 