BARBATUQUES ROCK!

Baiana from Barbatuques. First heard this on the trailer for the video-game Shadowrun. Barbatuques are a Brazilian percussion group. I think I like ... I like a lot.

ATTENTION!!!!! (MADAM TUTLI PUTLI)

This 17 minute long film from Clyde Henry, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, looks truly stunning. Nice to hear also that they're currently working on an adaptation of one of my favorite funny books, Ed the Happy Clown.

Madam Tutli Putli Trailer

Animating Madame Tutli Putli (I love how he laughs when asked 'what was your life like'. Life?)

Producer Marcy Page

Making of Madame Tutli Putli

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

Go take a look-see at the exceptionally talented JAKe Steel's new Star Wars site celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars. I have a couple of postcards which JAke kindly sent me (I beat him at holographic stop-motion chess) and very lovely they are too.

I used to have an compulsive habit of leaving a message in the call log book at reception at Picasso Pictures (when I used to have a desk* there) which read "Luke, Darth rang. Says he's your dad." Star Wars left an indelible mark on many a child that grew up in the seventies.

(*a light-desk no less)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HERGÉ!

Tintin creator, Georges Remi (Hergé), was born 100 years ago today, and apparently Dreamworks is planning to bring Tintin to the silver screen in CG motion capture. Which I have to say is something of a relief; I shudder at the thought of a live action version. According to CBR News, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are set to direct just two of three films slated to be made. Exciting stuff.

IMAGES FROM "OVER THE HILL"

These are images from the short film I co-produced (along with Margaret Milner Schmück) and mentored on; "Over the Hill" by Peter Baynton (funded by EM Media's DV shorts scheme). Absolutely beautiful work from Peter, who is already cooking up an idea for another film as we speak. The film's set to hit the festival circuit, then from there ... who knows, hopefully some tv. Pete's certainly a name to keep an eye on. The film was animated in Flash and run through After Effects. Music and sound was provided by Ollie Davis and "We Write Music", who I've worked with before on Dagmar's Friend (among others).

IF CHINS COULD KILL...

Old spice never smelled so good and Duran Duran never sounded so good.

WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY - BIONIC WOMAN

Michelle Ryan (best known in the UK for her role in Eastenders as Zoe Slater, whether people watched the show or not given the media coverage of soaps we have in this country) is set to star in The Bionic Woman.

I was a huge fan of The (relatively inexpensive now) Six Million Dollar Man when I was a wee lad. The idea of someone being re-built into basically a superhero with all bionic parts was just way too cool. That and of course the show starred my hero back then, Lee Majors who would later go on to star in another favorite show from my childhood, The Fall Guy, as Colt Seavers. I used to have a Steve Austin doll, complete with red tracksuit, white pumps, bionic eye and bionic arm with removable skin. I also remember these strange bionic stickers you could get that you stuck on your skin to make it look like you had bionic working parts under your skin (by some enormous leap of the imagination no doubt). Whether they were a cash in or not (most likely), I cannot recall, but I remember that once they had been worn through I decided to draw bionic parts on my arms and legs with felt tip pens. What a mess!

So I'm wondering if that's Oscar Goldman that's the 'landlord' in that clip. Love the bionic eye focus (they appear to have taken a lot of bionic enhancements from Steve Austin and given them to Jaime Sommers, no doubt she still has the bionic ear).

Here's another clip from the show where Jaimie wakes up in the hospital / facility, and isn't too happy. Brilliant stuff. I love how she finds out what her bionic arm can do.

Katee Sackoff (from Battlestar Galactica) can also be seen in these clips and the show is produced by David Eick who is one part of the team that brought back Battlestar Galactica. So here's hoping that they have an equal success as they did with the marvelously reinvented Battlestar Galactica. Here's also a word from the show's producer, David Eick (who is also producing the tv show "Them"... a show about a sleeper cell of aliens living on Earth... I hope people don't confuse David Eick for David Ike!).


UPDATE: Thanks to PaulHD for reminding me. The stickers I spoke of earlier in this post, they were from Prog 2 of 2000AD! Thanks Paul. I can really clearly remember these now. I even wore the bionic watch! Thankfully, 2000AD have a catalog of all the free gifts they've done so here's what I was on about.

HOT WIRED

One of my illustrations for Illustration Friday, entitled "Wired" is going to be used for the cover of Prism, a bimonthly newsletter for the British Fantasy Society. The editor, Jay Eales, contacted me a little while ago asking if he could use it after seeing it on this blog, which is nice.

OVER THE HILL

Yesterday I went to the screening of a film I've co-produced and mentored on called "Over the Hill" by Peter Baynton (as previously mentioned). I hope to put some stills up soon. It was on at screen 2 at the Broadway in Nottingham for a private screening where we got to see all the other films made under the DV shorts scheme. Great stuff. Pete's film was very well received to much well deserved applause and laughter (in all the right places). Have to say, he really worked incredibly hard, and I'm really glad to say that he's planning another film.

COOKING WITH GAS...

THE RETURN...

This is a promotional short for NASA's planned return to the moon just as I am planning on returning to blogging! I'm back from the wilderness!! Had a few days up in the lake district visiting my sister, following a couple of mad days of work last week on an animatic for a commercial. My wife, my son and I traveled up for my niece's birthday party in our relatively brand new car enjoying the air con and CD player. I love our new car.

DO OR DO NOT ...

... there is no try. This is RvD2: Ryan vs. Dorkman 2. What I'd love to see is RvD: The Prequel. Great work.

DOCTOR WHO COMIC MAKER

This is cool. The official Doctor Who website has a Doctor Who Comic Maker for young audiences, with Mister Russell T Davies himself giving a comic maker tutorial. You need to register to have a go, but it all looks relatively straightforward enough. Great to see comics being used to inspire younger generations to write their own Doctor Who stories. Tip top stuff.

TIME FOR A LITTLE MUSIC ...

A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GALAXY NOT SO FAR AWAY ... THERE WAS VALÉRIAN

Princess Leia: Fancy Meeting you here.
Laureline: Oh, we've been hanging around here for a long time!"

A long time ago, sometime in the mid-eighties when music sounded terrible and men rolled their jacket sleeves up to their elbows, in a town many miles away (Woolwich to be precise), I picked up a comic book called Ambassador of the Stars, drawn by Jean-Claude Mézières and written by Pierre Christin. The book followed one of many adventures of two spatio-temoral agents, Valérian and Laureline. I pretty quickly discovered within a matter of pages that this was quite a remarkable book. I adored the story and the artwork. There were a further three books but I'm not certain I managed to get all of them on the pocket money I had. World Without Stars was one of them. The other I'm pretty sure I picked up was Welcome to Alflolol (I distinctly remember reading Welcome to Alflolol under my desk during a science class at school ... I call that studying).

There have been a couple of attempts to translate all the books. There were four published in the mid-eighties which is when I first discovered them, and then recently iBooks published Valerian: The New Future Trilogy (collecting "On the Frontiers, The Living Weapons, The Circles of Power). Unfortunately iBooks folded after declaring bankruptcy so it would seem no more translations are forthcoming. Impatient, I have since taken to collecting the books in French. They are to this day excellent. It's also exciting to see how from the first few books like Les Mauvais Rêves, published in 1967, how much Mézières style develops over the course of a small handful of books. The characters develop, the backgrounds however, with all their detailed and lived qualities, remain remarkably consistent.

"VALERIAN'S originality lies not only in the profound humanism that permeates Christin's text and the 'anti-heroic' quality of the main character, although these elements are not negligible. Nor does it rely on LAURELINE, VALERIAN'S companion, who is without a doubt one of the most non-confor­mist female characters in the history of comic books. To my mind, what is basically a question of originality — and originality there certainly is — owes a lot to Mezieres' creations : machines, scenery and creatures. Obviously when we read AMBASSADOR OF THE SHADOWS today in 1981, we no longer have that sense of disorientation we felt when we first discovered it. The decks of Central Point are haunted by machines, vessels and even stranger beings which now seem quite familiar to us."
- Daniel Riche
(article paru dans Ambassador of the shadows, 1982)
Foreword for the unsucessfull english edition of 4 translated Valerian album

As a Star Wars fan, the books aesthetically ticked all the right boxes. Here was a world as well realized, if not better realized, than Star Wars, and yet, as I was to learn, Valerian pre-dated Star Wars (Valerian started back in 1967).

For any fan of Star Wars looking for another lived-in universe, or even jaded Star Wars fans looking for a new place to call home, Valérian is the genuine original article. Seek it out.

MONKEY MAGIC (1961 'HAVOC IN HEAVEN' ANIMATION)

“Let hundreds of flowers blossom and hundreds of schools of thought contend"

Havoc in Heaven was made between 1961-1964 by the Wan Bros. The film, based on the early chapters of Journey to the West, is a delightfully choreographed and beautifully laid out film, rich and vibrant in both color and action. Can you get an English translation of this classic on Region 2 DVD? Can you heck. But you can watch a fan subtitled version over at You Tube. Viva la televisión revolución.

POLAR

This weeks Illustration Friday topic is "Polar".

INDIANA JONES AND THE ...

... City of Gods.

That's apparently the title for the next installment where we see Indy aged 64 and with, rumor has it, Shia LaBeouf playing his son (the image of LaBeouf to the left is actually from Transformers, but certainly looks fittingly Indy, ... prior to seeing this picture I had trouble imagining him in the role, but now, no problem now I can just picture him clutching an artifact and falling flat on his backside as Indy would do).

Well the only City of Gods I can think of is Babylon (Babylon is the Greek variant of the Akkadian "Babilu" meaning Gateway/City of the Gods) which is semi topical as it's in Iraq. Archaeologically speaking, the remaining layout of Ancient Babylon is that of Nebuchadnezzer's reign and these remnants now lay on the east and west banks of the Euphrates roughly 50 miles south of Baghdad. Saddam Hussein started rebuilding the site, much to the dismay of Archaeologists, and planned to build a palace (in the style of a Sumerian ziggurat) over the ruins. The UN even had plans to turn it into a cultural center complete with a shopping center of all things. So, much of what remains of Babylon would certainly have had Doctor Jones shouting "it belongs in a museum".

Rumors of Shia LaBeouf playing Indy's son have been on and off, with LaBeouf denying the rumors and so on and so forth. Even Indy Producer Frank Marshall said "We're sticking with Indy on his own. He still gets around pretty good." But Indy's son could be the MacGuffin Lucas came up with that nobody agreed with at the time and that has taken so many drafts to convince all parties concerned would finally work. It is after all touted by Lucas as a Character piece, and writter David Koepp has said it tackles Indy's age. Also... Sean Connery is only rumoured to be in it, Ray Winstone is definately in it as is Cate Blanchett as the leading lady, Sallah has been ruled out and Karen Allen may be back for the part of Marion Ravenwood (and possibly therefore the part of Indy Jr's mother?)

Speculatively speaking, perhaps Indy and Marion had a son, but with Indy barely able to attend his day job because of global adventures, and with he and Marion estranged, Indy had a son he knew nothing about, a son who'd grown up unwittingly in his fathers shadow (given as Marion is his mother... the boy grew up with a keen interest in archeology but this would be an interest associated with his grandfather, Abner Ravenwood who got a mention in Raiders). Then basically you'd have Indy possibly retired (now it's definetely the years as well as the mileage) being drawn back into the game looking for his son who's gone missing.

That would be my bet. This could be interesting. But then again ...

SUPINFOCOM

Supinfocom is the leading university for computer animation in France. The work that comes out of that place is pretty amazing. As I've been finding out whilst making Grimmwood, there's animation and then there's fight choreography. Go check it out.

FORTUNE

This weeks Illustration Friday topic is "Fortune".

The word Fortune conjures up just one strong image in my head and that's those slot machines that tell your fortune or make you Big and head designer for a toy company. I wanted my Fortune teller to have deep hypnotic eyes, which again instantly conjured up another strong image in my head, Rasputin (or more specifically Christopher Lee's Rasputin in the 1966 Hammer Movie). I also figured I'd use the casing for the Fortune Teller slot machine as a way of framing the image.