Get Behind Me, Santa!

To share with you how I'll be spending my Christmas:




I'll probably eat a lot of food, too. We have breakfast with Mike's parents, lunch with my mom and brother, and dinner with Mike's grandparents/extended family.

Seriously, whatever you do, whatever you celebrate, have an awesome day. Be good to yourself.

I See You

Okay, so I saw Avatar yesterday. Apparently my take on it was a lot different than most of yours. My review is spoiler free, aside from the summary from IMDB and I don't think there's anything in there that wasn't in the trailer.

First, here's a short summary via IMDB:


A paraplegic marine dispatched to the planet Pandora on a unique mission becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the world he feels is his home.



Yes, it was beautiful. Yes, it had amazing, unbelievable special effects. It definitely deserves credit for all that. We saw it in 3D, and I've never seen anything that amazingly beautiful on the big screen before. I definitely recommend seeing it in theaters, especially in 3D, while it's there because I think it will lose a lot at home on DVD.

However.

Avitable wrote in his review "Even with the basic plot and one-dimensional characters, the movie is phenomenal." And not just Avitable's review, pretty much every review I've read has said something like this.

I don't think the beautiful picture should make up for the complete lack of original plot. I mean, really, is that what filmmaking has become? We'll just recycle the same, overused plot but pretty up with groundbreaking special effects? Because I can tell you, I knew what was going to happen 30 minutes into it. I could tell how it was going to end, I could tell how the love story was going to go.

If it took James Cameron this long to make this movie, he should have had time to write an original story to go along with all that CG. I've seen this all a million times before, and at least then it didn't take almost 3 hours to tell the story.

Stay Inside Our Rosy Minded Fuzz

So, I'm finally on winter break. This particular semester was a hard one for me, but I think that had more to do with lack of motivation than actual challenge from the work. We had a semester long project that I did the majority of in the week before it was due. This proved to be a very, very dumb thing to do. (I know, who would have thought?) I was so rushed towards the end that I made stupid mistakes, like forgetting to put my lighting fixtures on the board, and spelling the word porcelain wrong (Hint: there's no "e" at the end). But in the end, I recieved a solid B, so I'm more than comfortable with that. I think it also helped that I was the only one who did my boards on InDesign, so they looked a million times more professional than anyone else's.

I always have a sense of uneasiness when the semester ends. For so long (and especially at finals) I've poured all my extra time, effort, and energy into projects and homework, then suddenly I have nothing but free time.

That, and all my tv shows are on hiatus. That also frees up a lot of time.

I wasn't going to make cookies this year, but I've been awake for about two hours and I'm already bored. It's only the first day of break. So I guess it's cookie time!



Here's a few of my projects from this semester:

My semester long project (the floorplans anyway):





Computer Art Studio:

My first project in Illustrator: (to create a mechanical device)



My second project in Illustrator (Architectural Piece)