So yeah. I got myself a projector recently. It’s a Panasonic PT-AX200E, a model which has been around for about a year, but has earned itself pretty good reviews all around. I had been toying with getting one for some time, and saw the Panasonic, thought it looked good, so off I went! I paired it with an Optoma 80-inch (yes, really) 16:9 portable screen. I don’t have a wall big enough to project it onto, but could easily put up a screen where I wanted to project to.

So the projector sits on a shelf on one side of the room, and when I want to watch something, I can have the screen up in a matter of seconds. I managed to also find a reasonably priced 15-metre HDMI cable on eBay(about £30), which has been suitably concealed around the room. I made sure to get a decently screened one, to avoid any signal loss. That plugs into a 3-input, 2-output HDMI switch, which has all my main kit on, including the Sky HD box, the Media Centre, and my DVD player.

The projector is wonderful. The picture is crisp, and clean (even with a 15-metre cable, and the colours are deep and vibrant. There’s two main modes which adjust the projector for light and dark conditions; in darker conditions the bulb isn’t as bright, so the fan runs quieter. Not that that seems to matter, as it’s pretty quiet anyway. I’d read that it was one of the quietest, which was a major factor. It is also able to auto-detect the brightness of the room, and adjust the output accordingly to compensate. It’s not too bad in bright conditions – watchable, but then again, not many projectors produce a great image in light.

The only thing I could really fault it on is that the image always seems to tear a little at first – only very slightly mind – then it goes away. I wonder if this is just my eyes adjusting though.

I’ve been tending to watch things from Sky Movies HD on it, and it’s just perfect to watch things on. The centre speaker of my surround system is behind and above the screen, so the sound works very well. I’ve watched quite a few things – HD films, and upscaled DVDs, and it’s just superb. My best toy ever!

I was sitting watching, and during the opening scenes, some stuff happens (no spoilers, if you hadn’t seen it). The scene ends with a fade to black. A good method to end an act of a film, and very often used for just such a reason.

As it faded out, the thought popped into my head ’20 years later’. The picture fades back in, and what does the subtitle say:

“20 Years later”

I nearly fell off my chair with that one; it was just so damned obvious! OK, so it was probably more fluke that I was right, but it still made me think about how obvious some of these things are. It’s a nice kind of obvious though. Sometimes we like to see where the story is going, the same way we like to know where the bends are in the road. I’ve seen films where pretty much the whole storyline is telegraphed out to you before the opening credits have finished popping up.

Good film though.

It got me thinking about the old Odeon idents from quite some time ago. This predates them merging with ABC cinemas, and it goes back to before the new multiplex was built here, so it’s probably about 15 years or more now. I recal the idents featuring some quite nicely done animation, which featured the camera slowly swooping down and around an Odeon cinema, before pulling back for an announcer to say something. It was accompanied by some quite bombastic eighties music, but I loved it. A few years ago I emailed Odeon cinemas to ask if it would ever appear elsewhere, or if there was some way to obtain the adverts (purely for sad, nostalgic reasons) but got a typically bland, canned response.

I just had another dig around and found nothing. A shame really. I couldn’t even find anything on Youtube or Google Video. So if you ever find anything, let me know!

Seriously though, it’s one of those cartoons, like Animaniacs or Rocko’s Modern Life which is for more than just kids. There’s certainly plenty of slapstick and sillyness for kids to enjoy, but I can’t help but feel a lot of the jokes would pass kids by, but adults get them and laugh anyway. I love how the show mixes the odd bits of ‘live’ video with the animation too, sometimes in the same scene, other times flicking back and forth. It’s a nice concept, and it works well. The characters are good – there’s a depth to them that many other cartoons miss.
I saw The Spongebob Squarepants Movie the other day too, and was pleased to see it was basically a long normal episode – often when something is made into a film it loses something, but the movie was just as funny.

It really is great. Go watch it now!

Being an older film, there’s subtle differences you tend to notice, comparing it to contemporary films. The one I picked up on mainly was the fact that a lot of older films liked to throw in sound effects in very odd places, and quite often over do them. The one that gets me the most is the notion that dogs seem to bark almost constantly. Just having the dog in frame isn’t enough – it has to bark randomly, usually as the main characters are expressing some emotion, almost as if the dog was speaking with them. It’s a nice idea, but damn annoying. There’s a few shots in Summer Rental where you can see the dog walking toward the camera supposedly barking, but the dog is obviously not.

Similarly, there’s so many films featuring computers that bleep and boop their way through EVERY operation. Most computers I know don’t make that much noise. A good sound editor will sneak these things in, to just bolster the action, or underline something. If you notice it, they’ve obviously done something wrong in my mind.

Still, it’s a good film all the same.

When I got home we dug out our copy of Jeff Waynes WOTW and the original book by HG Welles. I’m hopefully going to read that sometime, mainly to contrast it with the film. From what I understand, the original was really Welles indictment of the way the British were acting in Asia in the 19th century. I suppose this could be Welles’ “Animal Farm”.

As the original was published in 1898, the text is now off-copyright, so its on the Wikisource site here

All of the kids seemed to be there because they wanted to be, but they were all happy that if they didn’t win, it wasn’t a big issue to them. They were happy to be there, and take part. Usually in these situations you find over-bearing parents pushing the kids incredibly hard, but that also didn’t seem to be the case. The parents were supportive, and very encouraging, but none seemed to be pushing the kids to do something they didn’t want to do. The motivation seemed to come from the kids, not their parents.

Overall, it was a nice documentary, and I’m glad I watched it. You certainly felt you were as good as there, under the spotlights, trying to work out how to spell a word you’d never heard of before. Good stuff!