Pazhassi Raja is an effort worth a lot of appreciation. The biggest and classical hits in Malayalam Industry collects less that 10-15 crores in box-office, so by investing twice the amount in production, the producers are certainly praying for this movie to be received in other languages as well.

The Screenplay, as in any good movie Pazhassi Raja has a good script to hold the 3.5 hour long movie together without much lags. The dialogues in the movie are very dramatized. Even though the storyline is from a real life incident, dramatization of certain scenes slide the movie and gives the feel of a fantasy story.

Cinematography has moments of brilliance. There are some shots all along the movie that are of world class, shots which we have never seen ever before. The color correction done in this has contributed a lot to make the look and feel of the sets more authentic. Most of the VFX shots did really blend in to the scenes and was hardly noticeable. The movie fails in visualizing war scenes and swordfight scenes with grace. It is more of a technical failure, they could have pulled to wires with a bit of perfection to make the physics look real. The most appreciated contribution to the movie is its art direction. Art direction has contributed as much the screenplay to hold this movie together. Background score did excel in the actions sequences and scenes shot in the forest.

The actors have done a really commendable performance. There was not a single scene with anyone performing under. The surprise package comes from Padmapriya who did the role of ‘Neeli’, its her best performance till date and she has managed to set new standards doing actions sequences by woman in Indian cinema. If anything was amazing in the movie, it will be her performance. The songs was good and its visualization tried to do justice to an extend. The makers did manage to bag in the Oscar winning sound engineer Resul Pookutty at the last moment. Unfortunately he couldn’t do what he does best, Live Sync. As Pookutty rightly said this movie should have spend on live sound sync as well, considering the investment in other areas, anyway he did his best and raised the standards of traditional sound mixing a bit in this movie.

Padmapriya, Pazhassi Raja

The efforts and the strain that goes behind a movie that took two long years of filming including locations in forests with multiple star actors and over hundreds of extras bringing an epic to life is something only a real master director can do. Hariharan deserves a lot of credit for visualizing this movie. He has done probably the best and biggest movie in Malayalam in the decade. A bit more effort and investing some more time in pre-visualization could have made this movie a classic. Even thought the director claims this movie as a docu-fiction it is far away from that.

This movie is royal, but not a classic, its massive, not perfect and I personally don’t think this movie as something that will stay on for ever in the viewers heart. Its visually pleasing and comes as an entertainment package.

Pazhassi Raja  gets an  3.5/5

Trivia
*The film released on October 16 with 560 prints out of which 125 were in the original Malayalam version, 100 in Tamil, 100 in Telugu, 110 in Hindi, and another 125 in Hindi with English subtitles for overseas release.
*The movie garnered Rs. 1.53 crores initial on the opening day itself from theatres in Kerala alone, which is a record
*The total budget of the movie is about INR 27 crores (+ 5 Crores extra for scenes Re-shot for SYNC SOUND makes it 32 Crores.)
*The entire movie was filmed in Panavision
*A part of the score was produced at the Hungarian National Philharmonic (Hungarian State Symphony Orchestra), Budapest.
*Wiki Article on Pazhassi Raja – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazhassi_Raja

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Adobe Photoshop! No other software should have changed the industries like Photoshop did. And there is not a single industry that not directly or indirectly linked with a Photoshop result! It’s one of the costlier and most used professional application in the world. Even with a whooping price tag of 799$ Photoshop don’t have a single competitor anywhere near them!

I’ve started using Photoshop (Ps) from release 5.5. I was a student of digital media then. Later I passed the ‘Adobe certified Expert’ exam. Now 7 years later, I consider myself as someone who has a proficiency level somewhere near advanced level on Ps, it has turned into a full blown application that have its hands on almost every field, from movies to medicine and sports to space.

The birth of this blog post is pretty wired. There is a name that has mesmerized me for years, ‘Seetharaman Narayanan’! An Indian name that is on splash screen of Photoshop! Even from the days I was studying Ps we friends used to talk about this name! Every single time we fires up Photoshop, all we do is keep staring on that name till the application window appears! Who is this guy! Even now! With the CS2 edition…that name is what all I notice on the flamboyant Ps splash screen.
Recently one of those usual Photoshop launches and it was taking a bit more time to launch which is very unlikely, a thought went through my mind! I need to get some details about this name. Back home later that day I started googling for ‘Seetharam Narayanan’. The results were unbelievable! I wasn’t alone in the “world”! There are thousands of other PS users who get mesmerized by that name and some of them, mostly Ps addicts has started a fans club for his name. The birth of such a fanclub was really fun! Photocafe is one of the oldest and most visited Photoshop forums in the web! In mid 2000 someone started a thread about the way he gets his eyes stuck on that name when he launches Ps. The first reply was someone calling ‘spam alert’, but for the next few weeks 100’s of users replied “me too”, over 6 pages! It was a phenomenon! It’s that name the majority of the people keep looking at! Later some of them (addicts) joined and started the club!

While going through the thread which is already 7 years old, and also posting my “me too”, I found many comments that’s related to different Ps releases. And that made me want to know the history of Photoshop! I couldn’t find any good articles, interviews or any resource that gave me a detailed description of Ps’s development which was reliable. I decided to give up the effort! As a last try I tried searching in old online magazines! Yes! Got one! An exclusive interview with the fathers of Photoshop! The story of Ps since 1987! The interview was done by one renowned Ps user, who is a beta tester for Ps and a one who gives some ‘feature input’ for Ps developers, Jeff Schewe.

Click HERE to read the entire article on ‘history of Photoshop’. I’d highly recommend this to all Ps enthusiasts and professionals as this changed my outlook towards Photoshop.

Quote from a Seetharaman fan-

” It has been said that Seetharaman Narayanan has evolved to the point where he is more Lens Flare than man. He can bevel and emboss through the power of sheer thought. I heard one time he was walking down the street and some gang tried to mug him and he Unsharp Masked his hand and karate chopped one of the thugs in half, and then one of the other thugs attacked him and he Pinched that guy’s head so hard it exploded and then after he Plastic Wrapped the rest of the thugs he disappeared in a burst of Difference Clouds“

Seetha is responsible for rewriting the core photoshop code from Mac to Windows and making it par with the mac version. He also wrote code for different filters and now works on developing Lightroom and Bridge.

An Interview with Seetha!

When did you become aware of the fascination with your name among Photoshop users?
Jeff Schewe sent me an e-mail sometime in the fall of 2005 about the existence of Seetha’s fanclub thread from ConceptArt.org.

What do you think about it?
I thought it was funny and was amazed at the amount of free time people had at their disposal. I always thought that I was fortunate in getting hired by Adobe at the right time since any Tom, Dick or Harry would have done the same thing I did and perhaps better than what I did. They may not have become famous unless they had some weird last name that is almost un-pronouncable. How long have you been at Adobe? I have been with Adobe for 15 years to date. I joined Adobe as a peon on Photoshop 2.5 on September 23, 1991. Peter Merrill (who now works on Acrobat and is still with Adobe) was the lead engineer on the task of making Photoshop run on Windows 3.1 and I was his deputy in the early days. Peter is one of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with in my 20 year career (he may just be the smartest of all!). I still remember the interview I had with Peter before I got hired at Adobe. Peter had this toy application (that later became Photoshop) with ugly Icons and Cursors he showed me and mentioned to me that he had that code ported over from the Mac and he could even open an image (Flower.psd which by the way, shipped as a sample file with Photoshop 2.5) on Windows. I had previously worked at CrystalGraphics and we had just ported over Crystal’s TOPAS over to the Mac platform just weeks prior to my interview with Adobe and I was totally under whelmed by Peter’s demo of Photoshop on Windows. In spite of my lack of enthusiasm, Peter hired me anyway and the rest is history.

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1. Jannie Warner -Meet the Geeks

Arabikkatha is a movie from one of the premiere directors of Kerala, Lal Jose. As most of his movies, this one also reflects the daily life of Malu community. Ive always belived that movies are an artistic reflection of the human nature. Lal Jose is a director of such movies, making movies about lives in an artistically realistic way.

Arabikkatha by its nature, is a communist movie and being a communist movie it points aganist the moral deterioration the left parties go through today. The hero of this movie is its theme, the thoughts and the powerfull script itself. In one of my earlier posts Ive said that i want every person in the world to see the movie ‘Guru’, on the same way, this movie is a must watch for all Malayalees.

The lead actress in the movie, a chineese national, Zhang Shumin

This is the second sucessfull movie of Lal Jose in an year time. Lal is becomming a brand like Priyadarshan who has the best color sense in world cinema. But Inlike Priyan, who was totally depended on Mohanlal’s acting skills, Lal Josedepends on the script of his movies and the variety of themes, so he has to be placed even higher.

Zhang Shumin:)

I also think that this movie is much related to the current political games in Kerala, the movie sounds a favorable tone to the current chief minister of Kerala, a leftist. It also made into news that the CM itself watched the movie on a theatre in the capital.

Kudos to Lal Jose for this wonder full piece of art!

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Im a big fan of Big B, for his superb experimental characters lately, Black, Nishabd…unmatched performace. Ive a feeling that cheeni kum is the best from BIG B till date.

Jst b4 the climax, for 5 minutes or so..i felt the movie dragged a bit…but acceptable..from hunderds of crap thats relasing every month from the billion dollor bollywood industry..this one is a GEM…enjoy it with ur close ones..

Cheeni Kum, a slow, romactic comedy that touches ur heart and make u smile till it ends

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Apart from a touching and inspiring story this one is a good entertainer as well. One bad thing about this movie is how bad the VFX has done in this, although it dosent play a big role in this story, a convincing VFX could have being better.

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1. The Pursuit of Happyness – Movie Review

Will Smith can act, can do roles other than from sc-fi movies. The pursuit of happiness is a great movie which portrays the story of a father who is trying hard to raise his boy on his low income and the hardships he has to face in running his family. The backbone of this story is the screenplay itself which is slightly humourous and touching at the same time which made it an Oscar nominee. Will’s acting also holds the movie together. The story moves forward by Will’s charector narrating the incidents from his life and he does that with a touch of homour.

Pursuit of happines is a story based on a real events, a biography of an American african businesmen, Chris Gardner. A must watch for all Wills Smith fans and people who enjoys good movies other than big vfx flicks.

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‘Meet the Geeks’ :D is a series where i talk about a few people i follow and look into
in a ‘professional way’!

Janine Warner’s expertise in media, technology, and cross-cultural business have taken her on consulting assignments across the world and speaking engagements from New York to New Delhi. She’s the worlds most wanted lecturer on web and technology meets. I ve seen 4 of her DVDs on webdevelopment and man! belive me..this is one f a kind!

An award-winning journalist, her articles and columns have appeared in a variety of publications around the world, including The Miami Herald, Shape Magazine, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Point Reyes Light newspaper.

Janine is a guest reporter for the consumer technology show Into Tomorrow (a syndicated program that reaches more than 1 million weekly listeners), and she has been a featured guest on a variety of television news and technology programs.

Since 1996, she has authored more than a dozen books about the Internet, including Creating Family Web Sites For Dummies, the best-selling Dreamweaver For Dummies (now in its sixth edition), and Digital Family Album Basics, the first in a new series she created with Watson-Guptill.

Her success as an author attracted the attention of Total Training, Inc., a pioneer in innovative video-based training, where she was first contracted in 2005 to host a video called Total Training for Dreamweaver 8. Her first video won two industry awards and she is now working on a series of Web design videos that includes Advanced Dreamweaver 8 and Total Training for Microsoft Expression Web. Her latest series is featured at Microsoft.com. It has been released couple of days back and im sure it will have record breaking sales this week!

As a part-time faculty member, Warner has taught online journalism to graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and at the University of Miami. She has also developed online journalism programs for the Western Knight Center, a joint project of USC and UC Berkeley funded by the Knight Foundation.

Warner has extensive Internet experience working on large and small Web sites. From 1994 to 1998, she ran Visiontec Communications, a Web design business in Northern California, where she worked for a diverse group of clients including Levi Strauss & Co., AirTouch International, Beth’s Desserts, and many other small and medium-size businesses.

In 1998, she joined The Miami Herald as their Online Managing Editor. A year later, she was promoted to Director of New Media and managed more than 50 designers, programmers, journalists, and marketing staff who produced the Web sites for The Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and Miami.com. She left that position to serve as Director of Latin American Operations for CNET Networks, an international technology media company.

She was a founding member of the Miami Internet Alliance and the South Florida chapter of WITI, and she served as a judge for the Arroba de Oro Latin American Internet awards from 2001 to 2005. As part of that project, she helped to create an Internet literacy program for students in Central America called Operación Red (Operation Network).

Since 2001, Warner has run her own business as a writer, speaker, and consultant. She earned a degree in journalism and Spanish from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and spent the first several years of her career in Northern California as a reporter and editor.

She lives with her husband in Los Angeles.

Visit her @

http://www.jcwarner.com
http://www.digitalfamily.com
http://www.totaltraining.com
http://www.microsoft.com

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