The day after our trip to the Pacific Science Center and harbor cruise, we headed to the Experience Music Project or EMP. The building itself is interesting; Forbes magazine considers it one of the 10 ugliest buildings. We didn’t get a picture of the outside, but Wikipedia has one.
They have a lot of music memorabilia, but they seem to focus a lot on classic rock and acts that got their start in Seattle, which is something we weren’t really that excited about. You can also play around with instruments and get a DVD of yourself onstage playing a rock concert.
What was interesting was their exhibits about horror films and science fiction. They had a ton of movie and television show props, like this one.
There were also some screens showing famous directors talking about their favorite horror movies; I thought those were fun. There were some things on the wall about different movie monsters, where they come from, their weaknesses, and how to survive each one. I thought the timeline of movies was pretty cool. It included little symbols under the titles showing who the baddie in the movie was, for example zombies, evil child, country folk, vampire, alien, etc. Will and I talked about which ones we’d seen and which ones we should add to the Netflix queue.
Speaking of aliens.
They had an exhibit on Avatar. The blue cat people, not the fantastic Nick cartoon. Oh man, if it had been an exhibit about Avatar: The Last Airbender, I might have peed myself a little out of excitement. I love that show. Anyway… Blue Cat People Pocahontas was an okay movie and the exhibit was okay too. Will took one picture. A picture of the battle mech the humans used.
They did have kind of some neat stuff about motion capture film technology. They had side by side footage of the motion capture shots and the final product. And they had this thing where you stand in front of a camera and it translates your movements to one of the blue people on a screen. There was one little thing on the wall about the Uncanny Valley and how they designed the aliens so that they would appeal to audiences.
The thing that we were most interested was the Icons of Science Fiction exhibit. They were mostly just props from various sci-fi properties. Like this random something from Stargate, a show that Will likes and that I know very little about.
And Yoda’s cane and pendant. I don’t remember the pendant from the movie myself.
They also had some stuff from Doctor Who, Star Trek, the Matrix, and Battlestar Galactica. Classic science fiction books were also featured with little blurbs about what the books were about. I thought there was supposed to be an entire exhibit about BSG, which would have been awesome, but I think the information I had about that was out of date. Sad face. And I don’t remember seeing any props from Farscape or Firefly.
We were tired and hungry so we headed home and ate at the Thai place on the corner right next to our house. We both had chicken pad Thai and it was tasty. Then we probably just internetted until bedtime; I don’t remember.
That mech suit looks pretty neat.