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Inside joke for fans of "The Office" - In the words of Ryan the Temp:

"Even for the Internet ... it's pretty shocking"

"The Office" Extras - For Americans Only?

I am a big fan of the US version of the TV show "The Office". (disclaimer: I never watched the original UK version - I believe it when people tell me it is great. I have no opinion on which version is "better" - I just watch the US version.). So I was quite excited to hear that NBC was posting "Producer's Cuts" versions of some of the episodes, which included a bunch of content that simply didn't make it into the original broadcast episode for whatever reason. Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed to see the following message when I actually went to view the video on NBC's "The Office" website:

Apparently, the video is only available to US residents and NBC uses your IP address or something to guess where you are accessing the site from. Now I am sure that there are plenty of reasons why NBC believes that restricting access is necessary - but this kind of thing just drives me crazy and flies in the face of Net Neutrality. So, I can watch the show on broadcast TV, but some extra content is unavailable just because of where I happen to live?! The sad part of the story is that this kind of approach doesn't even work - there are plenty of alternative means to find the content online.

Halo Movie

At the risk of becoming a one-trick pony before finishing up my first official month of blogging - here's another Halo related post.

Recently, there has been a few minor news items concerning the making of a movie based on the Halo games. Apparently, some good preliminary work was being done, but then there were some disagreements amongst the studios and producers, etc. so the project was put "on hold".

Since it is probably inevitable that a movie will get made at some time, I am wondering if, with the recent releases of some great Halo trailers, Halo isn't a great fit for an entirely CGI movie? It's been 5 years since the last big-budget CGI movie: Final Fantasy. And while that movie is largely considered a flop due to it's poor showing at the box office, I believe that the problems were related to 2 primary things that a Halo movie could avoid:

1. Weak and confusing plot.
2. Too many "human" characters.

The first point is pretty self-explanatory (I hope), but the second point may deserve some further explanation. You see, I remember when the Final Fantasy movie came out there was a lot of talk about how realistic the characters would look (I seem to recall something about the animators modeling all of the female, main character's hair strands individually, in order to make it move more naturally). While the results were amazing, I still think that were not good enough to not distract the viewer during the movie. Additionally, it seemed like the quality of the character modeling varied with the level of importance of the characters - i.e. the main character looked more "real" and natural than some of the less important human characters.

With the Halo movie however, this would be far less of an issue. Part of the Halo mystique is the fact that the main character (the Master Chief) doesn't ever remove his helmet - and therefore we never see him. I am no CGI artist but I am pretty sure that the amount of effort required to create a character who is basically covered from head to toe in some fancy armoured jumpsuit is a lot less than the work to model human facial expressions and individual hair movements.

Also, since the Halo world is occupied by a large variety of alien species, you know that there is going to need to be a large amount of CGI work done for the movie anyway, so doesn't it make things a lot easier - especially for visual continuity - for the entire movie to be rendered inside a computer-generated environment?

On the good side, at least the news for Halo isn't related at all to Uwe Boll being the director ;)