kingandy | A Grand Night Out

I haven't posted anything of substance for a while.

Last Friday went to see Mirrormask with

gothdog. I enjoyed it immensely, very much a spiritual successor to Labyrinth (in that both are, at the end of the day, a series of effects shots with a story loosely tying them together - there's a beginning and an end but the journey in the middle is a series of set pieces). Where the two films differ is where Labyrinth was a big-budget production pushing the very limits of what it was possible to do with puppetry and camera trickery at the time^[1], Mirrormask was more about what can be done with computer graphics on a shoe-string. Apparently made from two million pounds that Henson found down the back of the sofa, the finished product manages to look exactly like one of McKean's Sandman covers given life. Which I suppose is the point, really.

Lots of people these days are very unimpressed with computer graphics, as though you can just pick up a mouse and tell it to draw a cityscape with orbiting giants or a flock of Bobs, or the creepiest costume change ever. These people do not know how much effort goes into the whole affair. Things here do occasionally look a bit Renderworld^[2], and it's easy to tell when the actors are being matted into an entirely CGI environment (except once or twice - I assumed the steps in the Prime Minister's scene were real but Mr McKean mentioned afterwards that there were only one or two actual steps), but the whole thing is so damn technically impressive that I don't care. Certainly they did an excellent job of matching the lighting on the actors to that in the scenes.

The evening as a whole was most enjoyable, had a long-overdue chinwag^[3] with

gothdog (where did I ever get the impression he lived in Leeds?) and a pleasant ride home.

[1] Looking back at an old Muppet show, it struck me that the show itself was very much about experimenting with the medium. A lot of the more bizarre sketches were done purely on this basis, and the puppetry is damn impressive.
[2] A derisive term, meaning not only can you tell that the scene is CGI but it is creaky CGI. There isn't enough ambient light, or there's too many shafts of light dramatically lighting things, or things are just too pretty to possibly be real (even the rust and scratches are aesthetically positioned). Too much canned crash spray. In fact it would perhaps be more accurate to say the CGI is not creaky enough.
[3] SPACED fans: No.