Lately I've been watching Community and Awake. You folks heard of Awake?

Awake is certainly an interesting one. It's a show that lasted only a season before it was cancelled but it had an interesting premise. The basic premise is that a detective gets into a car crash with his wife and son. His son dies in the crash and life continues on. Except that when he goes to sleep, he's awake in a reality where it was his wife that died instead.

To him, both realities feel real to him. He sees psychiatrists in both realities that are trying to convince him that the other is just a dream. He works different cases in the realities but each reality appears to be giving him clues for the other case.

The acting is rather good, a good sense of intrigue and cinematography to help differentiate the two realities. It received positive reviews from critics but people just weren't watching it. There's no dvd/blu-ray of it so you can only check it online I guess.

I brought it up in a topic a little while ago, how about Silent Hill (2006)?

Could be an interesting movie to tackle, great practical effects, always potential for fixes and general discussions. It's either one of the better if not the best of the "videogame" movies or one of the worst depending on who you ask.

Ah I see! And that's fine, with your reference picture I can see that I'm definitely wrong about the amount of hair and the placement of the ear. His ears are higher up on his head than the average person which threw me off a little, haha.

I suppose you can still take potential techniques and what not. I've found for myself that drawing boils down to practice and borrowing techniques (to which tracing can certainly be counted, at least in the beginning) to eventually make your own style

Blotting down colours is a good way of getting started, its just refining it afterwards. It's looking good!

Ooo, Intuos tablets are lovely things! I'm saving up for one to eventually replace my Wacom Bamboo Fun/ Its pretty old but its done me well! I'm not the best at cleaning up my lineart and my pen doesn't help in regards to that so I've developed quite a quick but sketchy art style that I'm happy with.

As for colouring them, I use the art program GIMP. One layer for the initial sketch (occasionally scanned in, mostly drawn from scratch using the paintbrush tool), one for the cleaned up line art (I use the paintbrush tool with a custom setting, it's sorta triangular and mimics pen strokes quite well), one layer for the shading (pure black paintbrush tool with the layer set to about 30/40% opacity) then another layer for flat colours using the standard paintbrush tool again. When it comes to colour schemes, I just tend to go by eye with what seems to fit.

Depending on how complicated the drawing, I make a layer for each colour that I use or each character, etc. Alongside other effects depending if the picture demands it such as gradients, drop shadows and what not. Hope that helps!

http://youtu.be/8GF0LM0_LHU

I made a showreel from my models that I made for university! What do we think, do I have a chance in the games industry?

This week I've been watching quite a few movies!

Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2
"The Bride wakens from a four-year coma. The child she carried in her womb is gone. Now she must wreak vengeance on the team of assassins who betrayed her - a team she was once part of."
Watched them back to back with a few friends and I still love it. I always point to the burial scene as a prime example of just how powerful sound design can be whenever someone tells me that sound in movies or games aren't important. I think its a great duology (is that the right word?) and it annoys me that we don't have more female action hero leads (hurrah for Katniss!) as these two films are a great example to use for that debate.

The Crow
"A man brutally murdered comes back to life as an undead avenger of his and his fiancée's murder."
Quite the cult classic as I'm sure everyone here is aware of. Not much to say but I really liked it! A tragedy to what happened to Brandon Lee and the instance of digitally stitching together Brandon in his final scene is well done for the time (though if you look carefully, you can see the edges of the footage and whatnot) Brandon as Eric owns the role and I couldn't see anyone else playing him.

Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run)
"A young woman in Germany has twenty minutes to find and bring 100,000 Deutschmarks to her boyfriend before he robs a supermarket."

Another cult film! I watched it in the original German language. I've seen it a few times and I still find it an enjoyable film. It feels like one of those films where giving it a bigger budget would have made the film worse. It plays to its strengths because of its lack of money.

I always like time travel stories and this has an interesting video game "reload the level" style of time travel that I've not really seen elsewhere except for maybe The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.

Good Bye Lenin!
"In 1990, to protect his fragile mother from a fatal shock after a long coma, a young man must keep her from learning that her beloved nation of East Germany as she knew it has disappeared."

Not sure if this is a cult film or not but this film has a lot of heart in it. Again, I saw it in the original German language. Obviously takes inspiration from a huge historical point in Germany's history with the rejoining of the east and west. It follows a family who was on the eastern side having to rapidly adapt to western life then having to pretend that none of it had happened. How can you find communist jarred pickled gherkins if all the shops around you no longer supply them because of all the western chain stores moving in? Etc.

In some regards, its similar to other films where a character tells a lie to protect someone and that lie gets bigger and bigger until its starts to get impossible to keep the lie going. Fortunately there is no 2nd act misunderstanding that plagues movies but it does culminate in a very memorable and visually striking scene for the film.

Very much a slice of life with bits and pieces of comedy, it has a very melancholy feel to it. It doesn't have a happy ending nor a sad ending. It's very introspective and I like that the film makes you think.

All in all, I'd recommend all the films I watched this week!

Fifteen-year-old Sarah accidentally wishes her baby half-brother, Toby, away to the Goblin King Jareth who will keep Toby if Sarah does not complete his Labyrinth in thirteen hours.

This week, I decided to dip into some childhood nostalgia and watch Labyrinth!  Even to this day, I still have trouble spelling the title.

I love this Henson production, warts and all. It feels like a timeless movie to me and may I say, the puppetry on this film is beautiful to look at (of course this is to be expected from Henson!) Hoggle gets a great big mention for the complexity of his design. Multiple puppeteers controlling the face and voice in tandem with the actor's performance, combined with some great lines and an interesting personality makes you think of him as a character rather than a puppet.

The visuals have a wonderful dream-like concept  art vibe to it. I think special mention goes to the Escher room in the final act and the "As The World Goes Down" ballroom scene, I remember these scenes the most when recalling the film. I liked Bowie in this film, I thought he played a great villain. His look has become very iconic in pop culture and this film is what got me into Contact Juggling. The ball manipulation segments of the film to give the impressive that Jareth is magical was performed by Micheal Morschen, creator of modern contact juggling, hidden behind Bowie and acting as his arms. He essentially had to perform blind which seems even more impressive to me!

As I mentioned it does have a few flaws, mainly a few timing issues. I'd personally cut the "Fireys" scene out as it adds little to the plot, in my opinion has the worst song of the film and oof, the green screen effects have not aged well. The green screen was due to the complex nature of the puppets themselves as they can detach from one another, they simply wouldn't be able to hide the puppeteers. As much as I like their designs, I feel like they aren't needed at all.

I'd also trim the goblin city attack down in time. Whilst fun and energetic, it feels like a situation where they built a set and were determined to show off all of it to get their moneys worth. Due to spending the whole movie with the goblins, we know how incompetent they are and because of this, they won't be life threatening to Sarah. There feels like there is no stakes or tension in this run around the city. I'd maybe change it so that you still have the chase and such but all throughout the city, there are clocks showing how much is left in the time limit aka not much at all. That begins to throw seeds of doubt into the viewer if Sarah will make it in time as she is being chased around the city.

I also find it fun to find out that the owl in the opening credits was the first CG animal in films!

You remind me of the babe!

It was a rough ride to sit through. I could only do it because I was watching it with friends and we were both discussing our shock at it. If you guys did do an episode on Foodfight! then holy crap, I'd be incredibly impressed.

It was particularly hard for me as I'm on a games design course so I've dabbled in 3D animation. Even with my passing knowledge of animation principles, I knew I could do better!

In this last week, I've been watching a few films! Some great, some absolutely awful.

The great? Children Of Men. Found it to be a really engaging sci-fi movie that was neatly written and the direction on it was incredible. Some of those oners, even if they were stitched together were amazing to watch.

The absolute awful? Well... As an animation buff, I have the dubious honor of watching Food Fight. Started development in 2001, pegged as a "Toy Story Killer", cost $45 million to produce (though its rumoured to be closer to  $65 million!) and released last year and made roughly $70k in the US Box Office. It is honestly a terrifying train-wreck that you can't help but watch.

So what beauty does it contain?  To name a few...

• Characters who's eyes/irises don't move, just endlessly forward.

• Broken mo cap animations

• Texture quality that you could find on a PS1

• Some dialogue lines that are LITERALLY phoned in

• An all-star cast including Charlie Sheen, Christopher Lloyd, Hilary Duff and Wayne Brady