Challenge accepted.  I have never heard of this movie, but apparently it's playing down the street.  I will  attend the 10:00 showing this very evening.

THIS BETTER BE GOOD, HERR SUBMARINE.

As I (dimly) recall, the Keith Richards bit had some good moments, but went on too long.  Not unlike the movie (zing!). 

A judiciously edited selection might be fine, tho.   Feel free to give it a go if you want.  And - I'm assuming - after the LOTR blowout, we're likely doing some kinda 3rd anniversary looking back/looking forward DiF2.0 inaugural podcast, so maybe throw it in there, who knows.

Same here, rented Real Steel last night and really enjoyed it.   Unlike most movies nowadays, it didn't try to impress with the visual effects, it focused on the story and the characters.  I stopped thinking about the fx early on and just watched the movie, and that's a rare thing for me. 

And now I'm doubly glad it got an FX nomination - it'd sure be nice to see more movies that use fx to tell the story, instead of all these movies where they wrap a half-assed story around the FX.

As for how Atom could do the things he did, well... isn't every fight movie about the underdog whose only advantage is that he can take a beating and keep getting up?  I don't think there is another kind of fight movie.   

Well, everybody got their panties in a twist over this one, but I happen to genuinely think Serkis qualifies as a "lead animator" for Caesar.   He didn't use a mouse and keyboard, but not so long ago using a mouse and keyboard wasn't considered "animating" either.   I'm not saying he should get credit for something he didn't do, I'm saying the fx team should acknowledge what he DID do.    And might have, if not for the misguided Oscar campaign that gave the impression their contribution was negligible. 

On Troopers we had three input-device animators: two were stop-motion animators by experience, and one (whom I hired personally) was a puppeteer.   (We also had about ten keyframe animators who only used a computer.)   All three input device animators used the exact same setup, except two used the device like a stopmo armature and keyframed poses, while the puppeteer used the device in realtime and captured performances live.

One of our computer-only animators was ADAMANT that the stopmo animators were "animating", and the puppeteer wasn't... even though the only difference was how fast they did it.   It was a ridiculous argument, but the hatred of motion capture among "real animators" runs deep and still exists to this day. 

I think it's a silly and arbitrary way to look at it.   Personally I don't care how the data gets into the computer, or how many people had their hands on it along the way.   I only care if you believe the end result as a character on screen.  And if so, then everybody deserves to take a bow.   I still don't think Caesar deserves a Best Actor Oscar, but he deserves an FX Oscar, and in a fair world without these silly turf wars Serkis would be duly credited for his contribution to the effect.   

There certainly didn't seem to be the same animosity if you look at the making-of's for King Kong and Lord of the Rings, where the FX teams were generally profuse in their praise of Serkis and the contribution he made.

Yeah, the DiF glossary is just for stuff WE made up, either some expression we coined in a commentary and then kept using (magic bean, Goldblums), or an expression that is SO *ahem* inside baseball that the average listener probably hasn't ever heard it before (footprint in the snow).

Phrases like deus ex machina or inside baseball, we didn't invent 'em, we're just usin' em.

But I don't think we've invented any DiF-centric phrases in quite a while.   At least I can't think of any... anyone else?

In the past 24 hours I've caught up with The Artist and Drive - both entertaining movies and sorta fascinating in their own ways - but now I'm especially confused by all the praise and awards being showered on The Artist. 

I mean, I was impressed by it, for what it was - I haven't sat in a theater and watched a feature-length silent movie since film school, I assume most people nowadays have never done it in their entire lives -  so it's great that someone can make that kind of movie and find an audience.  But Best Picture?  Really?  I'm just not feelin' it, even though all the indicators say it's gonna win.

I have yet to see War Horse or Hugo, but have seen the rest of the Best Picture nominees, and I still go with The Help, both as my own vote and my bet on the actual winner. 

That being said, if it's not The Help, then I bet The Artist gets it.  We already have precedent with the Shakespeare In Love surprise upset over Saving Private Ryan - another case of Let's Be Nostalgic About the Rich And Colorful History of Show Business snatching the Oscar out from under Let's Think Seriously For Two Hours About An Important Thing.

I see what you did there.   And I approve.

Thea Stairbender
Stop-motion feature about a young girl who remodels houses using only her mind.  Based on one of those Neil Gaiman stories that makes you worry about Neil Gaiman.

I haven't used Audition since Adobe replaced it with Soundbooth (I actually liked Audition better, especially when it comes to adjusting levels.)  So all I can say is from hazy memory about Audition, while looking at the file in Soundbooth.

Your overall audio level is about right - there's a lot of clipping on the waveform, but for a voice track that's not really a big deal.   I assume that's a Levelator artifact... I dunno exactly what Levelator does, but it seems like it does the same thing as the Normalize function that Audition already has.   

Normalize boosts the audio level of a file, or a selected part of a file, as loud as it can go, without letting any point in the file get louder than the peak level.    Usually you can just let Normalize do its thing on the entire file and be done with it -  unless you happen to have some extremely loud sounds here and there, in an otherwise quieter track.    Those are easy to spot in Audition, they'll be giant spikes in the waveform.    In that case, select and reduce the volume of those moments specifically, so they're more at the level of the rest of the track, and then Normalize the overall track afterward.

Anyway, hunt around the Audition menu and find Normalize and see how that works for ya.

I propose we call the award The Big DiF 

And/or living under repressive regimes run by dictators with nothing but consonants in their names.

On that note, I figure Tears of Czglwczk is the one to beat this year.  Just like every year.

Fair enough. Just wanted to make sure that if you're gonna do some custom-codey business, it doesn't have to be fancy preferential voting.