To expand upon a comment from an earlier post, there are three goals when making a special effect.

1) Convey what the effect represents.
This is the most important goal. If you create a model city, it needs to look enough like a city that the audience knows that it's a city when they see it.

2) Look cool

For the sake of variety, something nothing to do with movies.

Started some crapshoot wine today, recipe is 10 cans of frozen grape juice, 2 cans of frozen apple juice, water to match, and red wine yeast.

The second episode of The No Budget Show is up.

Interesting how "childhood dreams" sounds so wholesome, but "adolescent fantasies" does not. The words are almost synonymous, but have very different connotations.

Someone on the Indy Mogul forum posted asking about foley, and I ended up pretty thorough, so I figured I'd post it here, too.

I don't know why nobody has remade The Bride of Frankenstein yet.

I think I never properly gave Space Invaders credit, but I've played it a bit lately, and I've got to give it props. That's a game that worked very well within the hardware limitations.

For example, the fewer invaders there are on the screen, the faster they move. This means each level has a natural escalation in difficulty. But it also means the computer always moves one invader per frame, which maintains a consistent load on the processor.

So, one project I've been involved with is bearing fruit. It is called the "No Budget Show."

The pilot episode is now available for your viewing pleasure through the internet. I primarily served as a camera operator for this episode.

Go to DanWalechuk.com to see it.

Nine more episodes have been shot, and three more are in the pipeline to be shot, so expect them to be squeezed out in good time.

I'm now very curious as to how something like this comes to exist:

Apparently, the CPDRC, (Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center) a prison in the Philippines, does this sort of thing a lot.

With On the Lot wrapping up, (and I grudgingly admit I watched that damn show almost every week) I think I'll sum up what did and did not work for me on that show.