Well there are over 300 blogger meet ups happening around the world today! all of that commemorating the 11th anniversary of Blogger!
Awesome new templates, performance monitoring, editable HTML templates and so much more!..what more can you ask from them?? You guy ROCK! \m/ Too bad many of my friends are on bloody WordPress...damn you guys, Blogger Rocks..:P
Too bad we couldn't get a Meetup organised over here...oh well may be next year! Anyways... Congratulations to Blogger and the team at Google on a job well done! Happy Birthday from everyone of us at Mathawaada!
Well, I guess we can say that about the first one on the list, but others go a bit beyond just rock n roll...So here are the girls who rock my world these days...
Mariska Veres (R.I.P) – Shocking Blue
Well her amazing and very distinct vocals are just the right mix for the band's amazing tunes. Shocking Blue was a Danish rock n roll band from early 70s who has produced some awesome tracks before they split up in 1974. Even though they shot to fame with one single called “Venus” I still love this song “Send Me a Post card”! Sadly Mariska Veres died of cancer in 2008., she was 59 years old.
Angela Gossow - Arch Enemy
Well, anyone in the metal community would know her and love their music. Being the vocalist for one of the most successful Melodic Death Metal Bands, Angela still continues to be an inspiration and a role model to many in metal.
Britta Görtz – Cripper
Well when I downloaded, their album I was just looking for some good thrash metal and was never concerned about the vocalist. But later when i realised it was in fact a girl who was on vocals i was quite surprised, Cripper not only has some groovy tracks, but also has a pretty awesome female vocalist.
Sabina Classen – Holy Moses
This German hottie is undoubtedly one of the great contributors to thrash metal. Holy Moses is among some of the first few German thrash bands which has had a great influence over the scene in Germany. Sabina Classen, the bands vocalist is undoubtedly one of the very few female vocalists to be on the scene in those days. Holy Moses churns out some awesome thrash metal since 80s and to know that it is female fronted just adds to their awesome reputation.
Went and watched Bambara Walalla at Regal yesterday, and must say the movie was quite awesome. Needless to say that Mahendra Perera(Mel) and Shriyantha Mendis (Jinnhey) took the spotlight for me even though the movie was centered around Athula Liyanage's character "Podi Eka". Although there were certain areas i wished could have been done better in my humble opinion, the movie at large i think is a refreshing break to the line of cheap carbon copied, romance movies that are being produced lately...
When I was small, used to think that film making or even making a teledrama is just a piece of cake as long as you could get hold of a camera and some good actors, where you would just shoot the conversations that happens. But I later came to realized the mammoth effort that goes into creating even the smallest scene.
One of the main aspects in a movie clip would be the camera angles and how the camera is being used in each scene. You could shoot a film in many different angles; this is done due to many reasons.
Some can be to best illustrate the contents of the scene, for example in a scene where two actors are engaged in a conversation the camera will switch between their facial expressions. For this you would either need to shoot with two cameras at once or to shoot the conversations separately.
Also you would slice the movie down into different scenes and have breaks in camera shots just to make it easy for you to get the perfect picture. Then you would work your way through little by little shooting each scene with breaks, this will reduce actors mistakes and ease up choreography and handling of other props.
But as of late I have grown in interest and being fascinated by “long takes”. Long takes are simply where the director uses one single camera to film an entire scene without having breaks in the acting. It lasts longer than the normal editing phase going into extra several minutes. Long shots are extremely hard to do simply due to the effort and the cohesiveness of all the teams that need to go in just to get it right. One single error means that the whole shot have to be taken from the scratch and for a very complex scene this is simply a nightmare.
I first started to show a keen interest on long takes through the movie Children of Men, where director Alfonso Cuarón has created a masterpiece giving you an amazing experience and suspense through his extensive use of this technique.
Of course there are so many directors who are famous for long takes, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and many more but these are three of the best scenes I could find over YouTube and i am sure you are going to enjoy these...
The Goodfellas - Copacabana Entry
I love this one. One of the most popular scenes from Martin Scorsese masterpiece; The Goodfellas, the scene is where Henry and Karen enters the Copacabana. With the use of a steady cam the director takes the viewer in a smooth journey into Henry’s stratum of friends society he deals with.
Children of Men (Uprising scene)
I have no idea how they pulled this off; this highly complex and thrilling take keeps you at the edge of your seat, and I am sure the director was able to strike right at the heart of the viewers with the free hand camera that follows Theo (Clive Owen) though this scene.
Great use of the Long Take to give the viewers a roller coaster ride of emotions. The shot which is done inside the car is amazing and the techniques they have used for this is simply brilliant.
This fight scene from old boy has been dubbed as one of the best movie fight scenes ever, and I couldn’t agree more. The director Park Chan-wook has done an amazing work in making Old Boy and this scene is undoubtedly a testament for it.
