Monday, February 10, 2014
Rode Muni to UCSF Parnassus. Breakfast at Carmelina's: breakfast burrito with black beans, water. UCSF shuttle from Parnassus to Laurel Heights. Linkchecking, kiosk work. Did some browser bookmark cleaning. Content and styling work in Drupal. Posted spring draft schedules for Lucia. Launched Ahituv Lab and Limb Study websites. Late lunch at Royal Gound Coffee: peppered turkey sandwich on soft roll with everything, hot chai. Photowalk, returning via the stairs at Laurel Hill Playground. Content and styling work in Drupal. Susie gave me a ride home. Finished watching The Rooftop (2013) on Netflix instant watch with Patrick. This film has some of the most beautiful opening and closing title animations I've seen. After watching roughly the first third of the film I described it as West Side Story crossed with Shaolin Soccer, but even that is not exactly hitting the mark. It had an extremely small opening in the USA. I found it only while browsing titles in Netflix. The set designs are amazingly well done. The costumes are goofy, colorful, fun. The characters are predictable and so very disappointing. The story is hokey with some schmaltz and quite Chinese. The music and dance numbers are very astute and surprisingly well integrated with the acting part of the film. The acting I thought was just alright. There's a lot of interesting and fast camerawork that mixes live action with cgi and greenscreen in creative ways. The dialogue and singing is in Chinese with subtitles, and occasionally it was hard for me to keep up. I was extremely disappointed that the film focused on only one primary female character who was stereotypically a pretty and ultimately weak victim, but perhaps that's what Chinese culture enjoys. There's one scene with particularly bad dialogue that compares women to buttons, and I did not understand this part of that scene at all. Caution: feminists might develop aneurysms while watching this film. Several times throughout the film, I thought to myself (and sometimes outloud), "Wow, they spent a lot of money on this film, didn't they?" While watching the film on each of the three days the image quality was terrible, so after we finished watching and Patrick slept I experimented a bit with how to improve the quality. In my Netflix playback settings I changed from using HTML5 to Silverlight. I switched from Chrome to Safari. I used the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+Option+Shift+S to reveal a secret settings dialog and manually increased the value to a higher value and finally got it to stream in HD. After that I installed the SILKYPIX software that came with my Lumix G6 camera because I thought it might help me import the movies from the camera. I had imported a few clips but then couldn't remember how I did it. The way I did it today was not the same way I did it in the past. My solution this time was to open QuickTime Player, then open the file called PRIVATE on the camera's SD card. This let me export the movies to iMovie, but when I opened iMovie I couldn't locate them. I returned to QuickTime Player and chose the manual export option which let me specify a location to save the file. By this time I was too tired to do anything with my movie clips. What an awful experience.