Messages

Great work!

Great, as always! I'm using a few of your tracks in my current project, however quite a bit of work remains and it will probably be a while before I can release the game,
but your music is inspiring and really helps build atmosphere! 

All the tracks are quite beautiful to listen to, I especially like the Princes's day out one, great fantasy feeling to it!

Nice, looping music make for a good background ambiance in games.
You've sure had a very productive year!

There's one thing that grinds my gears, and I thought it might be worth pointing out today.
This year is about to end, and many celebrate with fireworks. One problem however, is that
some people start way before midnight, and continue with the fireworks for hours afterwards too.
All the noise and racket is annoying for me, but an absolutely terrifying experience for all dogs
in the area, so I hope anyone reading this send a thought to the poor animals and wait until midnight
with the fireworks, and then don't keep at it for too long.

I'm not sure how you can come up with all this music,
but great work all the same!

Great work, always fun to see what new tracks you come up with!

Not sure why, but this GIF just cracks me up every time I see it!

How nice!

Littering is terrible, I've never understood people who just throw away their garbage out in the open.
Cigarette smokers are the worst offenders, at least discarded candy wrappers never started a forest fire,
but chewing gum is pretty gross too. I just hate people who leave stains of gum on the street or smeared
under school benches. I mean, if there really aren't any nearby trashcans, just swallow the stupid gum.
Accidentally getting gum on my shoes makes me wish the 700$ fine they have in Singapore could be applied worldwide!

Yes, thanks for the tip you both!
Adblock do block most of the worst offenders,
which just proves how useless those ads are.

Who thought such a thing was a good idea is an absolute mystery to me.

Speaking of brightly colored garbage, I don't know what grind my gears most,
free to play games with a ton of micro-transactions and terrible gameplay,
or the kind of people who actually spend real-life money on such things.

I saw micro-transactions on Candy Crush for up to 10 US dollars! Don't they know how much real, actual and edible candy you can get for that sum?

Popup ads grind my gears, along with auto-play video commercials and animated GIF-banners.

I mean, who on earth has ever in the history of planet earth clicked on those things for any reason other
than frantically trying to close them down before those ungodly noises and flashing lights give them a seizure?

And did someone actually think that "I know exactly what will sell our generic product, people love flashing images and stolen sound effects ground into a hideous mess!"?

Because noisy and/or animated ads doesn't make me want to see what they are selling.
Noisy and/or animated ads make me want to see how fast I can hit Alt+F4 without breaking my keyboard.

Superman with a Santa beard and shooting two clones of Hitler with the most impractical gun he could find.

Great to see!

Or hear I should say...

Well, I agree with you there, CaesarCub.
You can see similar things on Kickstarter, with someone giving a super vague idea and then expect people to pour them money.

This discussion reminds me about something the author Kalle Lind wrote about Walt Disney...
"Walt Disney was great at making animated movies. Except that he didn't make the animations. And he took the stories from old fairytales. Basically, he put his signature on the movies, but he had someone else design the signature for him.
So I don't know what Walt Disney actually did, but he was good at it."

In my opinion, choosing good artists and writers and being a good leader of a team as well as acting as a vision-bearer can also be very valuable skills.
However, there is a difference between working hard to manage a group project and just look for others to do all the hard work for you.

Another thing that grinds my gears: People who insist licorice counts as candy.

It grinds my gears that some people complain that the presence of female fighters or black people in medieval fantasy is "historically inaccurate" but will readily accept things like:

Horns on viking helmets

Everyone, including poor peasants, having good teeth

Warriors wearing their swords strapped to their backs instead of their belts

pumpkins, potatoes and tomatoes (native to the american continent)

Zombies, orcs and other creatures that have never been part of European folklore

The focus on sisterhood and rejection of Prince Charming are also firsts in a Disney movie, I believe.

Okay, possibly being a tad unfair with earlier comments - as mentioned I did enjoy the movie, just didn't think about it too hard maybe!

The feisty heroine bit had certainly been done before in Mulan, but I guess she in a way had a "Prince Charming".  I haven't seen all of them.  Nothing beats The Jungle Book for me!

Lilo and Stitch did the sister dynamic before, and Brave was also about the relation between two female family members, albeit a mother and daughter.
Even the rejection of Prince Charming and critique of Love at first sight was done before in Enchanted (Just compare this clip to Elsa/Hans meeting!).

The only thing that Frozen did first for a Disney movie was making the identity of the villain a surprise, and even then it feels like an afterthought tacked on at the last minute.
In my opinion, Frozen is like Cars, but for girls.

My main beef with current Disney movies is simply that I wish they would go back to 2D animation, or at least animation with more of a 2D look. Ever since Tarzan and its Deep Canvas system, and then later with the Meander system used in "Paperman", they've had tools to do really nice painterly stuff that allows them to put hand-painted/drawn things into a 3D scene (though I didn't think "Feast" worked very well: basically just looked like cel-shaded 3D), but all feature movies have this cheap videogamey 3D look. I had hoped Moana would be 2D, since the Polynesian setting lends itself beautifully to more loosely painted backgrounds. Ah well.

Yes, it's a real shame you don't see many 2D movies being produced anymore, I remember growing up watching Disney and Don Bluth movies over and over again, I felt they looked like picture-books given life and they inspired me to draw things myself.
Most of the 3D movies just feel like they all look the same as well, there isn't really any big differences in style, only in budget and technology.

However, there is a good animated film of H.C Andersens tale The Snow Queen, made in Soviet Russia in 1957. It's 2D animated and stays pretty accurate to the original story as well.
Here is a link for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV1M1y595_U

The death of cinematic cartoon shorts came about largely because a Supreme Court antitrust ruling forced the separation of cinema chains from movie studios. In the old days, studios like Warner, MGM, Paramount, etc. owned the movie theaters and controlled the programming (so a particular cinema would show only films from a particular studio). The ruling meant they had to sell them off, and that there had to be an open market in deciding what each cinema would show. The court also started to enforce an earlier decision that it was illegal to "block-book" short films along with feature-length films (i.e. sell them as a package). This made them much harder to sell, since people didn't usually buy movie tickets for short films but for main features, so they were an obvious target for cinema chain cost-cutting (the movie business went into a major decline around this time). Within a few years they were all but gone.

Most interesting, thanks for the read!

I thought Frozen was good, not necessarily outstanding.  It was phenomenally popular because it hit all the right social consciousness buttons at the right time.

That is also something which baffles me, since I can't really think of anything that Frozen did that other Disney/Pixar movies haven't done before. Compared with previous Disney movies, such as this scene from Pocahontas or The hunchback from Notre Dame,
I think Frozen is very tame and doesn't take any big risks. Even Wreck it Ralph and Zootopia handled issues like fear of others and alienation much, much better than Frozen.