A Girl With a Sword

technology and magic

Ah, my time in the great Midwest is drawing to a close. These past few days I've been working on some stuff for my research assistantship this coming semester, so the time's gone by pretty fast. I've mainly been finding info to add to a bibliography my prof sent me--finding page numbers and first names of authors and stuff. It's like a scavenger hunt with me and Google on a team. We are winning.

I've also been reading lots of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (and there's lots of it to read) and watching Ralph Bakshi films. We watched the interview of him on the Wizards DVD, that man is crazy and hilarious. He was convinced that Wizards was a great family film. I'm not so sure. He really doesn't like Disney, either. He explained that he released Wizards to kind of show Disney how it's done, since they kept putting out such "sop." And we also learned about rotoscoping, which is that super cool technique of animating over real film. Bakshi uses a lot of stock footage in his films. In Wizards it's the Nazi footage, in Lord of the Rings it's some Russian film footage. The first feature film to use rotoscoping all the way through is Waking Life, and the technique is also used in those Charles Schwab commercials that have been on lately, like that one of the woman riding the ski lift.

This week, also, Mom started a blog. I helped. Check it out, it's all pretty on blogspot.