Good news, bad news
First the good news - the site is back online! I apologise to everyone that the site was down for such a long time. It's a bit of a long, complicated story (as these things usually are) but basically my hosting service was suspended because the credit card info with my hosting company was not up to date and I didn't get the notification that my annual payment hadn't been processed in time. Normally I would have gotten everything fixed right away but between performing a number of shows at work and getting sick with the flu and a nasty chest cold time just sort of flew by and before I knew the site had been down for over a month.
Now the bad news - unfortunately the whole site was deleted from our server. I had most of the site backed up, but the files associated with the new forum was lost along with all of my blog entries from October 20th onwards. I guess that'll teach me to back-up more often!
In other (good) news, Muppet Central recently posted this editorial I wrote a few months ago about October's Unseen Work of Jim Henson event at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.
I managed to attend The Lord of the Rings "Trilogy Tuesday" - the special one day only screening of the entire LotR trilogy - this week at the Paramount in Toronto. I hadn't seen the special editions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers and it was a real treat to see them up on the big screen. If you haven't seen the extended editions yet, check them out. I always thought the original theatrical cuts of the LotR films felt too rushed but the
extended versions are much better paced and fill you in on a lot of the back story if you haven't read Tolkien's novels.
We also got this spiffy film frame collectible. New Line Cinema asked Sideshow/WETA (the collectibles arm of Peter Jackson's own WETA Workshop) to create the film frame as an exclusive for Trilogy Tuesday
participants. Each frame contains one unique frame of film from each of the three movies.
Speaking of Lord of the Rings, a few weeks ago I picked it up a copy of Gollum: A Behind the Scenes Guide to the Making of Gollum the new book by Andy Serkis, who provided Gollum's voice and movement in the trilogy. Gollum was created using motion capture, a rapidly emerging technique in filmmaking that is really just another branch of puppetry.
Although the book's a little dull in places - as Andy himself points out most actor's memoirs tend to be - I still thought it was a interesting read. Andy spends most of the time describing how he used his voice and mannerisms to turn Gollum in to a fully realized character, which was very interesting from a puppeteer's perspective. I also liked that this book is much more personal than a lot of "behind the scenes" books tend to be.
Now the bad news - unfortunately the whole site was deleted from our server. I had most of the site backed up, but the files associated with the new forum was lost along with all of my blog entries from October 20th onwards. I guess that'll teach me to back-up more often!
In other (good) news, Muppet Central recently posted this editorial I wrote a few months ago about October's Unseen Work of Jim Henson event at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.
I managed to attend The Lord of the Rings "Trilogy Tuesday" - the special one day only screening of the entire LotR trilogy - this week at the Paramount in Toronto. I hadn't seen the special editions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers and it was a real treat to see them up on the big screen. If you haven't seen the extended editions yet, check them out. I always thought the original theatrical cuts of the LotR films felt too rushed but the
extended versions are much better paced and fill you in on a lot of the back story if you haven't read Tolkien's novels.We also got this spiffy film frame collectible. New Line Cinema asked Sideshow/WETA (the collectibles arm of Peter Jackson's own WETA Workshop) to create the film frame as an exclusive for Trilogy Tuesday
participants. Each frame contains one unique frame of film from each of the three movies.
Speaking of Lord of the Rings, a few weeks ago I picked it up a copy of Gollum: A Behind the Scenes Guide to the Making of Gollum the new book by Andy Serkis, who provided Gollum's voice and movement in the trilogy. Gollum was created using motion capture, a rapidly emerging technique in filmmaking that is really just another branch of puppetry.Although the book's a little dull in places - as Andy himself points out most actor's memoirs tend to be - I still thought it was a interesting read. Andy spends most of the time describing how he used his voice and mannerisms to turn Gollum in to a fully realized character, which was very interesting from a puppeteer's perspective. I also liked that this book is much more personal than a lot of "behind the scenes" books tend to be.
Posted by Andrew at 7:25 AM | Permalink
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