Just came back from another fun day on the streets of London and Norwich! It’s been a fun last two days, here’s a (pretty) short review of them.

First up, yesterday began with me waking up way too early, something you may have noticed based on the timestamp of the last news post. Had a good breakfast, and then I went to the British Museum. I had been there about 10 years earlier, but as they quite often reinvent their exhibitions it was all a new experience. On the way to the epic museum I decided to check around town for a book I’ve been looking for, for English class - the very-well known Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. Unfortunately, since I was up so early, turned out I had to go back later to buy it, although that turned out more difficult than I had anticipated…. Last time I visited the British Museum I guess I didn’t really find anything that interesting -which just made it all the more fun to check it out this time. Firstly, the architecture of the place is seriously amazing on the outside, but also so when you get into the building and see the very epic glass roof which houses the main room. So I went looking at mummies, old watches, statues and old coins and bills for about an hour or two - really interesting stuff, not surprisingly massively more impressive than their Swedish museum counterparts.

After having lunch at the beautiful Covent Garden, the walk continued off to the posh area Mayfair, where some really cool cars and houses were spotted - if anyone has a spare Porsche 911 Carrera 4S I wouldn’t mind having it - it was seriously what the Volvo V70 is to the streets of Malmö. Decided to continue to Buckingham Palace to visit the Queen - well, sort of. Unfortunately, my overjoyous photographing of passing cars decided to kill off my camera battery about one block from the royal home.

I had planned to go buy some films later that evening at the huge HMV store located just a ten minute walk from our hotel, but when I showed up at the store at around 19:00, it turned out it closed really early on Sundays for some reason, even though the amount of people and tourists in the streets hardly had been reduced considerably. No problem though, as I picked up quite a few films today instead, but more on that later!

Today I woke up early to take the nine o’clock train to Norwich, home of FXhome. I arrived at about ten to 11, and was picked up at the station by Simon (also known as “Tarn”). Spent a great few hours hours and had some really good lunch - can’t really go wrong with cheeseburgers at a pub! Also talked a lot about some future plans of FXhome - very interesting and very fun. I wish I’d been able to stay a bit longer to challenge the crew to some Rock Band, but unfortunately I had to leave back to London on my train, which departed at 14:30. Arrived at the hotel at around 17:00, and pretty more directly went out to - hopefully - be able to get a few films. And so I did - in total, I think I bought around 30 films in total, among these Quantum of Solace, Taken and Man on Fire on Blu-Ray as well as the Alfred Hitchcock collection containing 15 films at the really good price of just 20 GBP.

After that, I was off to see the musical We will rock you by Queen and Ben Elton, playing at the Dominion theatre. It was really  a lot of fun, and a fantastic show - yet another must-see if you ever come to London. Which is what I love about this city - there’s always something to see, something to do. Which also means by the time you get home at night, you’re really, really exhausted :P. Going to an airport-related conference tomorrow with my dad - bringing my camera along, maybe I’ll be able to shoot some cool pics, as it’s a tech-related conference.

It’s going to be great to get home to Malmö soon though Talk to you soon, take care!

P.S. I hope you like the new image-heavy news posts!

Another day in London! The sun is shining and I can’t wait to go out again. Not sure where we’ll head today - thinking about visiting the British Museum - and bring my camera there as I should find a lot of cool stuff. Other than that, I haven’t got much planned for today…going out later this evening to HMV to look at some films probably - should be fun; I’ll try not to destroy myself economically.

Oh, and I’m taking the train tomorrow to Norwich to say hi to the FXhome team and visit their new office, which is going to be loads of fun. And I’ll finally be forced to do some homework on the two-hour train ride there and back (for my civics test on Wednesday). And I still can’t get over how incredibly good the weather is here, feels like summer - in the middle of the Swedish winter!

Talk to you guys and gals more tomorrow! Take care!

Here’s my review of the long-awaited film “Watchmen”, directed by Zack Snyder - starring Jackie Earle Haley, Malin Akerman and Billy Crudup, among others. I’ll try to keep it as spoiler-free as possible!

I’ll just start by saying I haven’t read the graphic novel just yet (planning on buying it as soon as possible though). Even so, I had been waiting for this film for quite some time now - the first trailer premiered around the time The Dark Knight was released. It quickly caught my attention and I’ve been - as I always do - building up the hype for it the last couple of weeks. And watched the trailer so many times I’m sure it can’t be really healthy. Based on this, i obviously went in to the theatre with extremely high hopes. Oh, and I saw it in IMAX as well - but more on that later in the review!

The Comedian is dead. The oldest figure of the Watchmen masked vigilantes - as well as the only remain of the former Minutemen - has been murdered, thrown out of a skyscraper. This is where we enter the film’s universe. Rorschach (Earle Haley) suspects something more is behind the motive of The Comedian’s murder, rather than just a simple robbery. It’s reallly difficult to go any further without spoiling the rest of the film (before you start bashing on my no-spoilers policy, this was the first 2 minutes, and can all be seen and understood in trailers ). What I can say is the rest of the film takes you to a whole lot of places, both literally and emotionally. By the end of the film I basically sat still in my seat, almost hyperventilating - sort of the same probably quite unhealthy experience I had having watched last year’s masterpiece The Dark Knight. So, yes - you could say I enjoyed the movie’s story. A lot. Although I was quite frequently shocked at the amount of violence in the film - definitely not for children, or anyone faint-of-heart. I can’t wait to read the graphic novel to get the full idea of the story’s smaller details, and therefor also completing what I think is a pretty remarkable film.

While all of the actors had pretty good performances, the ones I would like to focus on are Jackie Earle Haley as well as Jeffrey Dean Morgan, as they are by far the best of the bunch.Firstly, Jackie Earle Haley is phenomenal as Rorschach. He almost brings the same intensity and level of insanity to his character that the late Heath Ledger did to last year’s Joker - which coincidentally, covered his face in make-up in both comparision and contrast to Rorschach’s ink-blot mask, which he uses throughout the majority of the film. Haley manages to give an object which is not able to display-emotion exactly that, and the few scenes in which he is unmasked are surely some of the better this film has to offer. (Two words: dining scene). Jeffrey Dean Morgan is The Comedian is also amazing, and somehow adds depth to a character who is very easy to hate, and justifiably so.

Visual Effects. They were seriously amazing. To have one of the leads being a CG blue naked man (a fact which I’m sure r will spur some intense debates over at FOX News, masters of integrity and modern thinking) is an interesting move, and one I wasn’t sure of how well it would be pulled off walking into the theatre. Billy Crudup’s performance as Dr. Manhattan is amazing though, and totally works in every single scene. Oh, and from about 2 hours or so in the film starts presenting visuals I’ve never seen the likes to before. Ever. If you see it, make sure you sit close to the screen, and allow yourself to fully immerse in the world that Alan Moore has built - and Zack Snyder perfected on screen.

I loved the film’s music! It’s from the get-go pretty obvious Snyder loves to use unusual bands and songs at unexpected moments of the film. It all works really well in the end! Also Tyler Bates delievers a great score, as always. Sound Design was also fantastic, with the scene featuring the creation of Dr. Manhattan standing as my favorite when the credits rolled after the quite long runtime of 163 minutes. The lengthy runtime was never an issue when watching the film though, and now that Snyder has confirmed his director’s cut version to be a bit over four hours, the eventual Blu-Ray release can’t come soon enough.

Saw the film at BFI IMAX, which was truly amazing. Sitting at the third row, it felt as if you were right in the middle of the film’s events. If you ever go to London, make sure to give the theatre a visit, as it truly turns just another movie-watching experience (albeit an excellent one) to an incredible experience.

Overall, I loved this film. While I feel it might have been easier to follow in some scenes if I had read the graphic novel beforehand, it doesn’t hurt the film notably. 5 stars, and a sure contender for this year’s Best Film.

There we go! Just uploadded the latest version of “Campsite” to my teacher at school - it’s moving closer and closer to being completed, but at the moment it seems as if I’ll have to take just a slight break from it as I have quite a lot to do in school the upcoming two weeks.

But, going to the UK on Friday evening, and I can’t wait. London’s always a fun town to be in. Going to bring my camera along too, so hopefully I’ll have some cool pictures for you (hopefully shot with my awesome wide-angle lens). The reason for my trip? My dad is going over to some sort of conference on Tuesday so we decided to make it into an extended weekend, which means I’ll be gone a full four days (back on Tuesday evening).

Trying to learn how to play keyboard from all my books I’ve lent from the local library. While interesting, I find it quite difficult to understand exactly how you’re supposed to play just based on notes - particularly songs I haven’t heard before. Which is why, most of the time, I have a tendency of just dropping by YouTube to catch some piano tutorials. Learned to play the Imperial March today - a pretty simplified version, but still: pretty cool, right?

Talked to a friend about “Watchmen” yesterday, a movie I seriously cannot wait to finally see. Planning to bring back the reviews section of the website for that film, and hopefully I’ll be able to keep my promise about posting a review on every film I see in theatres. Although it might be interesting to post reviews of lesser-known films as well, i.e. not just modern ones - as there already are plenty of those. But well, my friend really loved the film. I’m really tempted to go see it right now, but the promise of seeing it in IMAX less than a week from now keep me from it.

Oh, and hopefully I’ll be able to finish the first poster for Campsite this week!

Me, Johannes and Fredrik have been hard at work the last week or so on our new photography blog, Frejoni, which we just launched a few minutes ago! This is obviously still my main website of course - but we thought it’d be fun to have a website where we could all upload our very best pictures all together - this would increase the amount of visitors. I will still upload most of my pictures here though as we have a one image/day policy over at Frejoni, which means I’ll only be allowed to upload an image every third day or so.

Campsite is moving forward - spent the whole last weekend working on a driving scene shot against greenscreen. It was a tough scene due to a number of issues which came to light - for example, a few green decals we had in the car which didn’t agree to well with my chroma keying… although it feels great to finally have finished the scene, there’s still quite a lot left to do. I just have to find that spare week or so, and I’ll be able to finish most of the film’s visuals.

I lent a whole bunch of keyboard lesson-related books from the quite awesome local library yesterday so I’m going back to try and learn some nifty songs (still need to have a whole song ready for music class in 8 weeks…I can feel time rapidly closing in on me already).

Oh, and by this time next week I’ll be on the UK! But more on that - and some other things - tomorrow! (And this time I’ll actually write something ) Take care!

Hey everyone, hope you all had a good last week. I had a good time at Fotomässan 2009 with Johannes and Fredrik the weekend before. Took a lot of photos, which I’m planning to get uploaded hopefully later tomorrow evening. Also bought a wide angle lens from Sigma for my Canon 400D (10-20mm, f/4-5.6) due to firstly me being on the lookout for one, but mostly because of the fact that a lot of resellers have great deals and price cuts during these types of exhibitions. Fredrik bought a Wacom tablet for his computer which I’m yet to try out - but it looked really cool once you eventually got the hang of it. Johannes was on the lookout for a Macro lens, but as he was dissapointed with the lenses on display, he decided to skip on buying any of them.

Campsite is on schedule! Planning to have most of the visually related stuff done this upcoming Sunday - just got a few scenes left to colour grade, then moving on to visual effects (which shouldn’t be too much work, considering it’s not really an effects-driven film).

Been playing some Condemned 2: Bloodshot and Mirror’s Edge the last two weeks, which I rented at the local library. Both are great but they’re not anything I would spend a considerable amount of money on.

This is about all I have time to write this evening - just wanted to let you know I’m still here and survived Gothenburg pics hopefully coming tomorrow, along with a longer news post. But until then, take care everyone!

Oh, and still working on using famous movie quotes as news titles, as you might have noticed. Let me know if you figure out what film they’re from