It has been a few months since I’ve posted anything. It hasn’t been a lack of interesting things in my life, but rather a chaotic torrent of events, projects, and of course the holidays keeping me busy. Now that I’m finished with my Master’s degree in Communications, I believe I am just about completely finished with Lindenwood University… at least academically.
Graduating feels weird. This is the first semester in my entire life that I’m not going to be joining any classmates in studying whatever. I don’t mind it, though… Since this last semester just felt like a grind. It definitely seemed to be the quickest semester, as all of my projects and loose ends needed to be tied up. It was a great semester though… I spent most of it writing a massive, 44-page thesis paper on Star Wars, modeling and animating a space ship, studying the directing style of Alfred Hitchcock, working as a Grad Assistant for the LU Film Series and getting a new job. It wasn’t all work though. I did meet a lot of awesome new people, discovered some great TV shows, saw the Hobbit in IMAX 3D, and started getting caught up on video games.
But on to more important things… Site updates. I have some of the fruits of my 3D Graphics class posted in the projects section. I don’t have the animation up yet, but I will be posting it as soon as I add the sound effects and music. You can see stills of my modeling process in my “Thrilling Escape” gallery.
I used a design similar to the Millenium Falcon, but made it a lot more streamlined with metal plating rather than the small details sticking out. My decision was partially based on modeling and render time. The ten second animation clips I did already took hours to complete, so the extra detail just wasn’t feasible. And I always thought the Falcon looked like you could just kick it and something would fall off somewhere.
I also had another shoot with Ashley to test out my new Canon Rebel T3i. You can find a couple of the photos in her album, here. I mostly took photos of her playing tennis so I could use them to apply for a freelance gig at the Steel Shop Tennis Club in St. Charles. Since I have wanted to take tennis photos for a while and plan to do more in the future, I put them in a new gallery. You can check them out here.
Now many of the people I know have been kind of expecting me to post commentary on the whole… “Disney buying Lucasfilm” deal. I honestly have no issue with it. Sure, Disney is snatching up intellectual property like it’s playing Monopoly, Entertainment Edition. But so far they’ve done a pretty good job of not interfering so much with the creative directions of those properties. The recent wave of Marvel cartoons aimed toward children was pretty much inevitable when The Avengers built so much hype. Fortunately, that more sensitive and child appropriate material didn’t consume the Marvel comics and movies.
I think that if Disney can handle movies like The Avengers and Pirates of the Caribbean well, they should be able to help Lucasfilm do a good job with the new Star Wars movies. Many people think George Lucas will ultimately still have say over what goes in to the new movies, but honestly I believe that him selling the rights means that Disney may end up disappointing him. That may not be such a bad thing considering Han Solo’s response to Princess Leia confessing her love for him wasn’t something George liked, and it was one of the greatest lines of the movie.
So far the new trilogy has quite a bit of steam. Fans all over the world are dreaming up what new planets or characters we’ll get to see. Disney and Lucasfilm have already released that the story will continue to follow Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia Organa in the events that followed Return of the Jedi. Now, many of us older fans that have dipped our toes into the Expanded Universe know that our heroes from the Original Trilogy get into quite a lot after the war against the Galactic Empire. At first it seemed like Lucasfilm would go with one of those stories as their next venture into the Star Wars universe. With the announcement of the movie being penned by Oscar-winning writer, Michael Arndt, Lucasfilm also announced that it would be an original story. Now while this could mess with story canon, it could also be the best route to take. Trying to recreate one of the stories from a Timothy Zahn or Kevin Anderson novel may stir up some distaste in fans that loved those books. I personally thought it would be absolutely amazing to see the Thrawn trilogy visualized in movies.
The facts that Michael Arndt is writing the first movie of the new trilogy and that he’s been working on the treatment for it for a couple of years already make me feel better about the original story idea. It may not turn out to be an Academy Award-winning movie, but it’ll be more Star Wars. I’m excited about more Star Wars, that’s for sure. Now I just gotta figure out a way to land a job at Lucasfilm…