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Discolor Online

Weblog of the sweetest person you never want to piss off.

 

Monster House

Because of the Seattle International Film Festival, Kate and I got to go to the first North American showing of Monster House. We had to be wanded for electronics and hand over any cameras or camera phones before being admitted. It was pretty hardcore.

Kate gives the movie itself a pretty enthusiastic recommendation. She thinks five year olds might be a little frightened but it's not too scary for ten year olds. There are some genuine scares for the kids (and the babysitter is the Worst Babysitter Ever!), overall it was pretty good fun. For some reason I was particularly detached during most of it, but I write that off to having seen too many damn kids' movies. These days even the ones that get raves I tend to view from a a far too detached perspective. I was literally thinking to myself "Ah, they're going to do the whole 'camera following the blowing leaf' thing..." but I don't hold that against the movie itself. Just my own weird head space.

The director Gil Kenan was on hand to talk about the movie. Kenan, a young 2002 UCLA film school grad, was hand-picked by the film's executive producers Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg to work on this movie (a script which he admits had been kicking around "for years"). He did some stop-motion work for school that apparently attracted some attention. This interview from Ain't It Cool News, shows him to be Geek Like Us (complaining about the Millennium Falcoln playset being "ridiculously expensive, like... beyond the grasp of any mortal kid") and that's just how he approached the audience for the Q&A.

In the Q&A they got into how this was done with video capture technology instead of straight up animation, so the actors (rather than going in and reading their lines in solitude, alone in a booth somewhere) were actually able to be on a stage together and act off of each other. Kathleen Turner "voices" the Monster House itself, and the director talks about recreating the town in miniature and having Turner "rampage" around on her hands and knees before they animated the scenes. I was glad Kate got to be around to hear about the creative process that goes into film making. With her perspective of how we do what we do for our company, and having opportunities to know and talk to people in the computer industry (games and not-games) and things like this Q&A, I hope that she'll never feel intimidated about what kinds of things she might accomplish.

 

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Blogger Cruel Buddha Says:

Somehow, I doubt much will ever intimidate Kate for long.

 
 
Anonymous Joanna Says:

Every time I see the trailer for this, I think how it'd make a great adventure for Razor in the Apple. :)

 

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