Curling:The Roaring Game

Hey everyone, I’m just writing here to tell everyone that I have finished my first documentary film “The Roaring Game”. It is about blind curling, yes blind curling.

I had fun shooting the thing and the curlers and all of the coaches were great. It was an interesting experience because I never expected them to be that awesome but they were. I met some cool people while filming this thing and learned some new editing techniques which was good for me. Yay! 

I am going to try to put the thing on youtube at some point, but it is too long to put it on in one go because youtube sucks, honestly ten minute limit? My doc’s 13. 

Well that’s all I just wanted to plug the documentary. Peace.

The History of Dragon Power

Hey all, it’s been awhile since my last post. If you look below you will see Dragon Power: Dawn of The Dragon. Now there is a story behind the making of that film and I’m going to tell it.

It all started in the 80′s when my cousin John got a video game called Dragon Power for NES, of course it took twenty years to figure out the game was really a very poorly translated DragonBall game. On with the story. So my cousin got this game with a karate gut on it and thought the title was cool so when he was around 14 or 15 years old he and his friends decided to make a kung-fu adventure film and thus the very first Dragon Power film was made.

They used pieces of haloween costumes and karate gi’s as costumes and props. But in classic kids with a camera fashion they made the story up as they went along. The only characters with names were Tetzu and Pen-Pen who are in the new film.

So when my cousin was in university he thought of making a new Dragon Power and wrote an idea down for a new movie, but it was forgotten for years. Four years ago I was talking with John about making a movie and he mentioned Dragon Power and I was hooked. We talked about this movie for months and what it would be about until he found the story he drafyed in University and We just knew that this was what we would base the new movie off of. So we wrote a script which was much to long and had to be broken up into two movies, in doing this the story changed to work for a short film. The original script is much more detailed and complex.

We decided that this Dragon Power wouldn’t be as much about story as it would production and cool travel scenes. So I wrote a script for part one Dawn of The Dragon and we gathered a cast of people we knew and we filmed the first movie in one day during the labour day weekend of 2004.

After that the film was cut to fifteen minutes then Johns friend Joe Schacher from Kraken Soundworks did all the music and sound effects. And John, Joe, and their friend Chris voiced the characters. And Dragon Power was born.

A year later we made the sequel Shadows of The Dragon  which I wrote a couple of weeks before Halloween 2004. Shadows had a darker feel to it and focused more on story and action than it’s predeccessor making a superior feel. But Dawn will always be the Heart of the franchise.

Dragon Power: Dawn of The Dragon

As I might have already promised before. I said I would post Dragon Power on this blog and well Here it is. Instead of me boring everyone with a rant or my opinion on stuff that nobody cares about I think I will entertain you instead so without further delay here it is Dragon Power Dawn of the Dragon!  

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is another way of saying convenient internet. It is basically a term given to applications that make surfing the web easier whether it be from social networking sites to RSS feeds. Two of the most useful Web 2.0 applications are de.licio.us and RSS. But what are they you ask.

Lets start with del.icio.us or the little d for short. The little d is a website where you start an account and you can use it to bookmark things and look at other peoples bookmarks. This is a useful application for many reasons. 1. it is an excellent research tool because with the use of tags(keywords) you can find almost anything you are looking for and it is more likely to be useful because why bookmark crap? 2. See number one.  3. See numbers one and two.

Second is RSS feeds. Now RSS feeds are useful all you have to do is set up an account for Google Reader and look for the RSS symbol on your favourite sites whether they be  blogs, news, or other. Then when you add them to Google Reader you just have to check them on the reader to see if the site has been updated. This is good because it cuts the time you would spend going to the site and looking through it, hazah.

There are many other web 20 applications like flikr which is photo sharing, second life which is like a virtual world, and facebook which does a bit of everything. heck right htis second you are probably immersed in the world of web 2.0.

Airport Security:The Legendary Journeys

Recently in the news specifically CNN there was a story about an airport security tester who got through security during a secret test with a fake bomb. Now this is not something I would even joke about because it is a serious matter.

Even after 9/11 and all these alleged preventative security measures that are supposed to keep people safe, a guy saying he has a bum knee was still able to get a bomb on a plane. Lucky it was a sanctioned test, but still what if it wasn’t?

See in reality airport security is a joke. They say they check bags but in reality they just check carry ons because there is too much luggage. They have fingerprint scanners but they only scan two fingers. Then there are the metal detectors but you can always say you have a metal plate somewhere in your body like the security tester did.

Now this is a serious problem what are they going to do when an actual terrorist bluffs their way on a plane, add three finger scanners? Now I’m not saying it is all bad I mean it is a little tighter than it used to be but not by that much.

There are so many back doors in airports that a Die Hard 2 situation wouldn’t be a big surprise. Not much is needed to improve security. Maybe more staff to check luggage and more competent security guards who will check things like knee or back braces.

For the story that gave birth to this rant go to this URL:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/28/tsa.bombtest/index.html

Second Post which I didn’t know about because I was filming stuff for a story and people didn’t say what it was but I am doing it now.

So here is the second post about what I think about the video I am posting a link to here. I have posted the link to Laser Cats. It is the funniest thing I have ever seen on SNL ever! I like this particular digital short because it takes me back to the days in elementary school when my friends and I would make movies the old school way, by rewinding the tape when you make a mistake and using household items as props. I especially like Laser Cats because not to long ago I made a little film called Dragon Power while being in my opinion a low B-movie, and considerably better made than Laser Cats. I filmed it kinda the same way.

Dragon Power was filmed using a hand-held camera, old halloween costumes and karate uniforms, wooden ninja weapons, and no danger pay. We shot the movie and edited it, then got rid of all the sound and added the voice-overs, music, and sound effects. It was like an old Drive-In kung-fu classic. Except none of us knew kung-fu and it is not quite classic.

When I post Dragon Power and Dragon Power 2 on youtube I’ll put them up on tis blog for all to enjoy, but for now enjoy Laser Cats!

First Real Post?

    I am currently in a new on=line journalism class, and I really enjoy it. One of the assignments is this blog  more importantly this particular post. I am supposed to write what I would like to get out of the class, so here it goes.

From this class I would like to learn how to post my stories online in a way that is as simple as possible, I am not very computer literate I can use computers well I just don’t know how they work. So it would be cool to get a better understanding of those things. Also I wouldn’t mind learning ow to compress my final cut projects into different files other than QuickTime.

First Post

Hello me and well…you? This is my first blog post in a long time. I used to have a vox blog that documented my journey through web 2.0, but I got bored with it. So for now on I will blog on this site because just like the Web 2.0 Journey 2007, I must post stuff for school.

Til next time when I will blog about something or just keep typing my thoughts as they come along like right now.

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