little bits of everything

We watched Back to the Future as a family at the weekend. It's one of my top ten films, so I was curious to see what the boys thought. They enjoyed it, and I enjoyed too another time, even though I know the plot well. Three things struck me: The mention of Libyan terrorists was strangely topical. George McFly - Marty's Dad - is a bit like the current Doctor Who. I don't know if Matt Smith has consciously acted like him. Doc Brown travelled 30 years into the future at the end of the film, that's 2015 - so not so far away.

Two vaguely related thoughts: In real life everything is dark until you add light. Photographers, whether still or motion picture, worry about light a lot because it makes such a difference to the picture(s) they are taking. With CGI making a pixel light or dark is just a number. Making light look like the real world is hard. It's easy to create a 3D image. It's hard to make the software light it well. Getting surface texture right is part of it, because part of the way you perceive texture is because the way light falls on parts of the surface that are only small distances apart. Toy Story worked well because the characters were mostly plastic toys which have a very predictable texture. Since the first film there have been a few films based on computer games, but they haven't been brilliant because of the uncanny valley effect. Despite the abundance of CGI cartoons are still popular, probably because they aren't realistic. However when I watch Storkhawks I can see...