More pictures

Last night we went to a potluck at Michael and Jim's apartment. The two brothers live down by Bite-a-Pita, so we stopped in for some pita, hummus, falafel, and taboule as our chosen dishes. But the purpose of the get-together was to screen some of Jim's work. Jim does computer generated images (CGI) for film and television, so we watched 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Star Trek: New Voyages in order to see his contributions.

30,000 Leagues is a terribly-acted, terribly-written, and terribly-staged update of the Jules Verne classic, starring C-list actor Lorenzo Lamas. Jim found a copy in a local DVD shop, much to his surprise. The CGI, however, was great.

Star Trek: New Voyages, on the other hand, is the effort of a Trekkie who decided to put his money into filling out the last two seasons of the original Star Trek, and another Trekkie who reconstructed the bridge of the Enterprise in his grandfather's barn. It was supposed to be a five-year mission, after all, so they're trying to finish the work that NBC canceled in 1968.

"Star Trek: New Voyages" sounds like it would be awful, and indeed some of the acting fits that description. The guy they found to play Scottie is really bad, in that he looks more like John Ratzenberger of Cheers fame than James Doohan, and endlessly switches between accents while delivering poorly-written dialog. The other cast, though, is actually pretty good, and there's enough fans of the original series working in CGI that the production values are really high. They even managed to convince George Takei (the original Sulu) and Walter Koenig (the original Chekov) into guest-starring in a few episodes.

The best part of the evening, though, was being invited to a gathering of friends in Beijing. It was really nice to get to know them better, and really nice that they had us over. The fact that I found some kindred spirits didn't hurt too bad either.

The evening did say a few things about China, however. It seems like there's quite a few expats in Beijing working for the gaming and entertainment industry. Jim obviously does CGI. Another member of the group showed up late to the party because he was working into the evening on a video game. An absent member of the group designed some of the electronics for the wildly successful Nintendo Wiii. There's even a related market in Beijing for English-language voice-over work, since there's not many people in Beijing that are willing and able to act out American voices for the latest shoot-em-up games. I actually responded to a few classifieds in "That's Beijing" in the hopes that I'll get to do some of this work, just for fun. We'll see how it goes.

Oh, our classmate Judy sent us some more photos from our post-bar party.