Lightning Thief Movie

In May of last year I posted about the Percy Jackson books. Last week the movie of the first book the "Lightning Thief" came out. I took our two kids and the two kids we carpool with. Our 9-year-old has read the first book in the series, and the older boy we carpool with has read all 5 and did so voraciously.

I think all of the kids liked the movie, but the older boy and I spent most of it comparing it to the book. There were a ton of changes. The kids are supposed to be 4-5 years older than in the book (16 vs 12, and the lead actress was actually 23.) The plot was changed pretty heavily, and they pulled the Hydra out of book 2 and put it in this movie. They skipped the St Louis Arch and a ton of other stuff. The biggest change was that the underlying villain was completely missing. In the books, the person behind all of the plot was the Titan Kronos, father of the gods. In the movie, the plotter was a demigod son of Hermes. If they plan on making another movie, they are gonna have to get Kronos into the plot somehow. Considering the books center on Kronos's return to power, it would be hard to make the movies without dealing with him sooner or later.

I listened to an interview with the author. He sold the movie rights before his book even got published and had almost nothing to do with the movie. He hadn't seen it yet at the time of the interview--he's been working on his new "Kane Chronicles" book and the first of the new "Camp Half Blood" books (Percy Jackson sequels, of a sort,) so he hasn't had time to see it. His two sons had seen it though and seemed to like it.

I thought the movie was okay and I'm glad it's holding its own at the box office this week. I hope it does very well.

A new talent emerges

So, we know Steven has at least one real talent: the ability to concentrate and persevere to get a big Lego project done. This week we discovered a new outlet...

This summer he went to UCLA tech camp for two weeks (actually called ID Tech camps by Internal Drive) The first week was a make-your-own-video-game class, which was beyond him in two ways: he's not very computer savvy, and he had pretty much never played or shown much interest in video games before the class. (This was before we got a Wii and he became addicted to the game de Blob (more on that later.)) His evaluation from that week was pretty generic:

Steven you have an amazing imagination! You had fantastic ideas for your game and I wish we had more time to complete them all. I love how you created all your own characters and customized your obstacles. I hope you come back so you can continue using your creative talents. Way to go this week. Have a fun summer and I hope to see you back at iD next year!

The second week was about making comic books and things like that with a computer. Steven got the idea, instead, to make a claymation, stop-motion movie instead. Tuesday night at about 6:30, he and his mom started making figures and a set made out of a box. He wanted to make a movie based on the Wii game de Blob. On Wednesday (with half the week over) he took one of our old digital cameras to camp and started putting together the movie. He took probably around 300 pictures the first day, and probably about the same number the second day. Everything got put together and the councilors added music and made it into a DVD. He did a really amazing job. This is the write up from the second week:

Steven, thank you for allowing me a window into the genius that dwells within you. Admittedly when you first described what you wanted to do, I was initially skeptical. Then again, so were the Fox executives when George Lucas pitched Star Wars. We all know how that turned out. From the exquisitely modeled de Blob characters to the painstaking art of taking hundreds of pictures, your stop-motion animation is an absolute masterpiece. I am extremely proud of you for sticking to your vision and truly creating your own adventure. You showed great diligence, always working on your project without prompting, even during our activities! As Palpatine said to Skywalker in Episode 1 of Star Wars, "we expect great things from you!" To next summer - and beyond!

A really great evaluation!

His councilor recommended he take a digital photography class and a movie editing class. He also said he had never seen a 7-year-old work the way Steven did.

I'd love to show you the movie, but the disk is in a format that I need to covert to something usable. I'll do what I can to post when I figure out how to work with an IVO file.

Here's the video:



I just did a quick count and their seems to be roughly 35 frames for every 10 seconds. That makes 570 images in total!!! All done in 2 days at camp.