Gun on the mantle: Chekov
Bomb under the table: Hitchcock
Gun under the table: Greedo
Bomb on the mantle: >THROUGH THE NORTH DOOR

Neat piece. An easy way to improve for future projects that involve digital sets is to consider production design a little more throughly. Everything on screen should have a logic and purpose. Full CG spaceship interiors are really hard, in that to do it right the entire environment needs to be realized from the ground up. For example, If that's the scientist's workstation, there would probably be a chair, or at least a stool around somewhere. Dirty the floors, and scuff it near said movable furniture. The alien tubes probably would not have a random distribution throughout the room, but rather grouped together in a specific section of the lab, perhaps with little consoles on each with readouts similar to the hologram bay/desk.

As Gregory flippantly mentioned, V has the same problem - a massive interior of a spaceship that's really clean and ambient occlusion-y with huge halls that serve only to serve three people walking from one end to the other to give the damn thing scale. Details and considerations like that echo up and down your production.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a tremendous, face-melting, Herculean accomplishment. Since it's not properly released yet, guess I'm more inclined to talk about what it means rather than what it is. Cuz spoilers?

Saw it at the LA Film Festival a couple months ago. Nothing's made me as excited for the future of what indie movies can be than that film.

Talked to Gareth for a bit after a screening - one of the most interesting things he mentioned was  the insane schizophrenic relationship you develop with yourself when you're directing and doing all the effects on something, where you can't really externalize the forces cutting favorite shots and sequences, or demanding 20 hour days for months straight.

Benefits of working at that scale though, is that you're more or less guaranteed success and with minimal involvement. Some people were commenting that they couldn't wait to see him make a movie with a serious budget, but I think that's totally missing the point. Such a beautiful, intimate movie with those kinds of closing scenes would never exist with a 7+ figure budget.

I've heard the track on either the second or third Resident Evil movie is just Milla Jovovich and friends getting drunk and apologizing.

Haven't seen either, but Burden of Dreams is supposed to be a great documentary on the production of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, a film that spent it's entire production teetering on the brink of failure.

Apparently at one point, some locals approached Herzog asking permission to literally kill the star of the film, as they found his actions so repulsive and disrespectful.

Scientifically speaking, you can only get like 50 minutes into Tron before it devolves into the occasional "huh, neat" and "wtf does this have to do with anything"

Dead Man! Johnny Depp running around in the best anti-Western Western ever killing white guys with his new best friend, an exiled Native American with a total boner for 18th century English poetry. And an improvised Neil Young soundtrack.

The Fall! Kind of like if Grandpa from Princess Bride was paralyzed from a fall stunt gone wrong and tried to get Fred Savage to bring him enough drugs to kill himself by spinning a tale about bandits, evil governors, and Charles Darwin.