Check out my consulting business website, Best Rank Search Engine Marketing. We’ve given it a new look, let me know what you think.

Spider Man 3 was an excellent movie, it really surprised me (and I thought number 2 was good). Movies usually don’t surprise me very often. Plot twists and great use of visual and sound effects kept me wondering why I even bother to make my own movies, this stuff puts me and so many others to shame. Then again the movie is rumored to have a $300 million dollar budget.

The flick runs about 2 hours and 20 minutes, but don’t let the long run time fool you - it’s a great film! Especially when you see it in IMAX. There were even parts where the action/special effects made people clap mid-way through, something I almost never see. The actors did a great job, everyone gave very believable performances and Topher Grace (from that 70’s show) was no exception. The writers & director are some kind of genius breed, keeping the series fresh through the end of the 3rd film. I hope they don’t make a 4th film for a long time, I just don’t see how they could top this one. Although, I have been wrong before.

Interestingly enough, the success of the spider man films lies not in Spider Man himself but in the Villains he fights against. Think about that, why do people love Star Wars so much? You know Darth Vader is, like, the cooooolest bad guy ever, and you didn’t actually wear Luke Skywalker masks for Halloween did you? No, you wore Vader helmets. We are attracted to things that we consider “bad ass”, just the way it is.

OK enough ranting, I thought the Sand Man was especially cool:

The director is quoted here:

“I had people bring in 12 different kinds of sand — this is where people think the movie industry is insane — so I could look at it.” A team of more than 200 programmers at Sony Imageworks then spent the equivalent of 10 man-years writing code that rendered the billions of individually manipulated sand particles.

Visual-effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk elaborated:

“We shot footage of sand every way we would need it — thrown up, thrown against blue screen, over black screen. John Frazier, the special-effects supervisor, shot it out of an aero can at a stuntman. Anything we could imagine sand doing in the film, we shot.”

You can read more on the making of the “Sand Man” from Spider Man 3 here.

OK, so Dell took down their Ubuntu photo, but we all know they’re going to offer linux as a solution… right?!

Check out this photo (lets hope Dell puts it back up) on Dell’s website, showing Ubuntu as a future choice for a pre-installed OS on their computer hardware product(s), pretty cool. Down with the Microsoft monopoly?

Check out my short video on the “Ryan VS Dorkman 2″ scoring session at Capitol records. I visited Capital Records in Hollywood, CA back in February just as the RVD2 team was scoring the music in their new video. This short movie includes the first part of the scoring session that I shot and a short interview with the camera man. You will also notice my name in the credits “Michael L Shannon” - I donated small amount of money to Ryan and Michael’s cause, all the power to them. Thanks for letting me be a part of your video! Also, this clip was recorded and put together back in February but I’m just now getting around to posting this in my blog. Better late than never, enjoy!

Today I’ve created the Esq Sites Blog. What is it? It’s a news and information resource to compliment my attorney web hosting business, esqsites123.com. It should be a great way for my current and potential customers to access lots of organized information. Right now there isn’t a whole lot on there, but in the coming weeks expect to see more

Welcome to the new MLS Studios blog! I’ve decided to install wordpress to help manage and distribute my content a bit easier. I will be customizing the “look” of this blog/news section over the comming weeks so stay tuned and enjoy!

Hello everyone, I have created a new page on my website devoted to internet search marketing (SEO?SEM). Why? Because it fascinates me and I’ve been implicetly practicing SEO for years without really publishing any of my knowledge. Have at it and visit my seo page.

I was able to attend the movie premiere of “Ryan Vs Dorkman 2” at the Wilshire theatre in Hollywood CA this weekend while getting a chance to meet Ryan Wieber and Michael “Dorkman” Scott, the creators/actors in their new film. I had also previously donated a bit of money to their cause, well worth the wait ever since the original Ryan Vs Dorkman some years ago. In my opinion, this new film has by far the best ameature special effects ever seen! Great job to Ryan, Michael Scott and the rest of the film crew!

This just makes me laugh, check it out:

My new music page has been created, check it out!