OG's BLOG

Here‘s a glimpse of how the Moon model looks. I’m concentrating on the starfield here, the lighting, color, and the chunkiness of the form.

My strip Croaker’s Gorge is now up in an official WordPress/ComicPress website. It’s interactive now so you can leave your insults directly linked to each strip…

Iron Man was much, much better than I thought it would be. I’d go as far as to say it was the best superhero film I’ve seen. Robert Downey Jr., as reported everywhere, was charming and as appealing as you could want.

Most importantly, they did so many things right. You can go off the rails in a film like this so easily and wind up in Clichétown. But pretty much every time this film got close to that territory, director Jon Favreau zagged where others have zigged, and it was worth it. Oh, here come the Bad Guys, and the Girl is alone – here we go with the hostage situation! (beat) Oh. They didn’t do it. Every time it was a breath of less stale air. And of course it didn’t hurt that at the heart of this action film, it was a human story, and Favreau set up the lead character as a metaphor that worked perfectly.

I’m sure the success of this film won’t be lost on the Hollywood Suits. I just hope they get the right message – Iron Man isn’t just successful because it featured a superhero or a lot of INCREDIBLE action. It’s successful because it worked, and it worked because the filmmakers worked hard, kept the story human and avoided most of the clichés that plague the genre.

Moon Town has its first bit of Blog Coverage over at a groovy site called SFSignal. In the comments section (third comment down), I spilled a bit of information on the plot of Episode One of Moon Town, as well as the overarching plot of Season One. I also spilled Melvin Tripline’s new name…

I spent the evening texturing Jason’s ball tank model. HERE it is now as part of a matched set on the brand new mining platform base.

My buddy Jason Lysinger is helping me out on Moon Town. Jason is a gifted industrial modeler and architectural renderer, and you can really see it in his work. HERE‘s an early look at a piece from the Refinery he has graciously begun building.

For anyone who still doesn’t get the difference I tried to draw between overly realistic (“photographic”) textures vs. something a little more stylized, I present the following experiments in detailporn:

RealHomer by Pixeloo
RealSimpsons at Destination Creation (but watch out for this site’s mystery-meat navigation…)

If, after looking at these, you still don’t get what I’m talking about, I can safely conclude it’s just me. But I’ll just say this: pores may not necessarily make portraits look attractive.

My family and I saw Speed Racer the other day. I have been hearing a lot of bad things about the movie in the Critical Press, but I have to wonder what people were expecting. It was very much like a children’s racing movie, and from the advertisements, that’s what I pretty much thought it would be. I mean, sure, it’s basically a 90 minute commercial for the newly re-booted TV show of the same name, which is in turn basically a commercial for Speed Racer toys, available at the usual outlets. And I’m sure there will be fast food tie ins. There almost always are these days. And I couldn’t help thinking that I was seeing layouts for a future Speed Racer video game in scene after scene. Hey, I’d play it, if only once. Some pretty exciting layouts.

But why such hatred on this film? I wonder what has the critics all hot and bothered over a kid’s film? The plot wasn’t hard to follow. I never had a doubt Speed would Race in the Big Race and Get the Girl (although… is he dating his sister? uh… nevermind. Roll with it.) I never had a doubt the little kid and the monkey would pop up in the trunk of whatever car was convenient for their comic relief goals. And as for that – this is one case where the comic relief actually was comic, and somewhat of a relief. The bits of the little kid and the monkey were the one place in the film where the pace calmed down for a bit, and it was nice. And, yeah, funny. Maybe it’s just me, but most of the time I feel that monkey=funny. *shrug* Your mileage may vary.

Now, this is the Warchowski Brothers behind this film, the same folks that brought you the Matrix Trilogy. I loved the first Matrix film but felt the other two were just too hectic and overconcerned with their own mythology to be very interesting to me. And you see telltale signs of their hand here – many scenes are just Stuff Coming At the Camera to the point that you can hardly tell what is happening. But I suppose the Warchowski Brothers were smart enough to know that you were smart enough to understand the basics – Boy Races. Boy Loses. Then Boy Races Again, Against Hopeless Odds. Is there really any chance that we can’t follow that?

I do wish Andy and Larry would calm down the visual wall of noise a bit. But on the other hand, the film is very exciting, and full of manga and anime visual touchstones complete with motion lines. I don’t think the film ever made the mistake of taking itself for more than it actually was. In fact, I believe as a story, it worked better than Cars. There were real live humans driving these cars, not just talking faces on wheels. I always thought the introduction of drivers in Cars would have improved it drastically, and you can get a real feel for what that might have been like, watching this film. It actually hit some of the same themes as Cars – throwing the race, figuring out what’s important in life, etc. And it did it pretty well, if you really want to know what I think.