Tag: documentary

LIGHT & MAGIC

Nick Momrik1 Comment

Last week I binged the Disney series Light & Magic. It was phenomenal!

LIGHT & MAGIC is a six-part series that tells the story of Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects company George Lucas founded to make Star Wars. Through personal interviews and never-before-seen footage, director Lawrence Kasdan pulls back the curtain on ILM’s most iconic effects, while delving into the fascinating backstories of the artists and innovators who created them.

via Disney

Since we had watched all of Star Wars in chronological order earlier this year it was good timing for me. I enjoyed learning how they did a lot of the visual effects for the first movies and seeing how creative the teams had to be in order to do things which had never been done. It was very inspiring and came at a time when I was just getting back in to my basement workshop. Watch for some project posts coming soon!

The Playbook

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Netflix’s five episode season 1 of The Playbook is good. Each episode is 30-35 minutes with a coach talking about their “Rules for Life.” All of the coaches were very different, as were their rules. By the end, I realized they shared a common and very important skill, which is understanding and working with people. It’s not an easy skill to excel at and these coaches are doing it at the highest levels of sport, with some of the best to play their games.

Add it to your list and watch.

The Defiant Ones

Nick Momrik1 Comment

Adam Savage raved about The Defiant Ones on his podcast. I was subscribed to HBO for Game of Thrones, so I checked it out this weekend before cancelling.

“The Defiant Ones” examines the partnership between Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre – one the son of a Brooklyn longshoreman, the other straight out of Compton – and their leading roles in a chain of transformative events in contemporary culture.
IMDb

The series is 4 parts and it was so good I couldn’t stop watching, so I watched all 4 hours in one sitting. I grew up listening to a lot of this music in the ’90s, but never knew most of the stories behind it all. I can’t even imagine the stories that will never be told.

Planet Earth II

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Ten years after the original, the BBC produced a sequel to their nature series Planet Earth. While the first series was 11 episodes, this second iteration only has 6, but it’s still phenomenal. We live on an amazing planet. In the United States you can watch Planet Earth II on the Discovery Channel.

Some of the moments that left me in awe:

  • Penguins being able to find their family and distinguish the call of their mate in a group of over 1 million others.
  • Ibex effortlessly moving up and down steep mountain terrain.
  • Big cats like the snow leopard and jaguar.
  • The plague of locusts.
  • Stallions fighting.
  • A fox diving in the snow.
  • Langur monkeys running and jumping across rooftops.
  • Feeding the hyenas.
  • Singapore.

Throughout the series I kept wondering how much work went into catching some of the scenes. Thankfully they produced a bonus “Making Of”episode as well, which shows off some of the camera equipment and the challenges faced by the camera crews.