more do overs in the key of flat colours and cheeky filters:

(closer look. because for some reason blogger's being lame and not allowing for full image view size. boooo on you blogger. boo on you.)

man. that psycho poster was pretty weak sauce in the first place but i'm not too sure if this is any better. a bit too much all over the place perhaps? (and not an ounce of good composition to be found!)

oh well. TOO LATE NOW SON.

pretty much ripped wholesale by this scene:


ggggooooodddd. this film is so good.


aaaaaaaaaand speaking of redos, someone decided to translate radiohead's ok computer into 8-bit. the results are totally jammy. give it a twirl!

a little work in progress. the (still unfinished) brighton rock comic project was getting dangerously close to turning me into a full blown manic depressant... so i opted to do the sensible thing AND TOTALLY BLOW IT OFF. NYAH!

in the mean time i thought i'd try and totally blitz one of the smaller projects so i've, you know, actually got something finished. so yeah, hitchcock posters. so far this has been a blast, AND an excellent excuse to watch some totally ace films. got to design four of these using three colours. once i've got the lot of them drawn out, i'm going to start twiddling with the pallet and lettering but so far we've got:

north by north west


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lifa3aEBEfM


and the birds


god, this SCENE. shit's so tense. this film also makes me totally take back all the smack i may have said about hitchcock tending to screw the ending after watching psycho and nxnw. what a totally creepy last shot.

aaaand now all the unrelated crap;

sketchbook junk:


a totally rad episode of the nerdist podcast with penn jillette. hot dog. this guy is just a fountain of great stories.

LATERZZZZZZZ

o4


from the book project. this page is a little bigger because the bit at the top was actually done as a flat. gimmicky, i know, but that hill just did not stop. literally, the mo-fo looked like it was levelling out and then the terrain remembered it hated you and wanted to crush out your life and there was still half a mountain to go. so traumatic was this experience that we had to make up a little ditty riffing on a popular tune of the time. it went a little something like,

*what's that coming over the hill? is it a- oh wait, it's just another hill.*

GOOD TIMES!

and with that all said and done, here be some funky stuff from the internet. it's a wee animated film that's just a little bit unsettling.

ancient history from the new york editorial project. oh my god, the paper in my sketch book doesn't know how to take watercolours.

one thing they really pushed in this project was thumbnailing. god, it's crazy just how far away you can sometimes find yourself from your original idea.

speaking of tangents, it's stuff that kicks ass on the internet time!


the phillips tv people recently released a bunch of short films they commissioned to show of their shiny backlight feature or whatever. i think the directors were given free reign over what they came up with, as long as the short featured the line 'it's a unicorn'. haven't checked out the others yet, but this is pretty badass. so much so that warner brothers and fox are in a bidding war to turn it into a full length feature. huzzarh!

more book marking. check these out folks, they're pretty damn niffty!

http://www.dutchuncle.co.uk/illustrators/du/tavis-coburn/portfolios/bafta-2010 -travis colburn's posters for the 2010 baftas. there's one for each of the five movies up for best film. mmm-MMM! love those old school aesthetics.

http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/02/22/cool-stuff-brandon-schaefers-movie-posters/ - god, i WISH the folks who churn movie poster out would take a leaf out of this guy's book.

http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/02/16/cool-stuff-the-lost-art-of-inglourious-basterds/ - un used art work for inglorious basterds.

i think pretty much all this stuff was pilfered from the /film website.

final design of the as of yet un-named vigilante for nick's film project. hopefully this won't look as goofy as fuck when it comes to putting it together.

more as it happens!

wheeeeee! it's time once again for a doodle infested ramble about a movie. today, get to your choppahs with 1987s predator

This was a pleasant surprise. I watched this fresh off total recall which left me expecting campy fun in the jungle complete with big guns and more one liners than you can shake a big beefy Austrian at. Instead, what we’ve got here is a pretty tense action flick.

Speaking of beefy Austrians, ho boy. Nobody told me I was invited to the gun show. There are biceps in this movie like you would not believe. Actually, the whole thing’s grunting and dripping with pure machismo. OOT shoot outs with guns that should be reserved for taking down air craft, tobacco chomping sexual tyrannosauruses and explosions to eclipse the sun- This movie’s got it all.

But wait, there’s more! There’s a little brain to go with all that brawn. The audience is thrown in with a particularly burly group of mercenaries. much like that other lauded ‘cannon fodder for creatures from outer space’ flick, alien, it’s not long before chests cavities start exploding but akin to that film, the writers actually make us care about these hardened vets with a few scattering of lines busting with character. There’s also the sense of mounting paranoia, not only from the thing stalking our heroes through the jungle, but also from a possible enemy within.

But more about the invisible entity stalking Arnold and friends through the jungle. I don’t know about you, but in today’s CGI sodden movies, I’d forgotten just how awesome practical effects could be. The predator suit is top notch (well, except for the mitts. The predator would be fucked if his quarry was some double knotted shoe laces) and Kevin peter hall, despite being a giant of a man, gives the creature a certain air of grace.



Still, this film is a tone of fun. Best enjoyed with some mates and beers.

Interesting fact: we owe a joke kicking round Hollywood for this one. Following the release of rocky IV, folk were saying that balboa had run out of earthly opponents to butt gloves with and he’d be taking on aliens next. The Thomas brother’s heard this and thought it would make a pretty good premise for a screenplay. Thus, predator was born.

#THE MORE YOU KNOW#

so one thing i've been wanting to more of is doodle responses to stuff i've seen/watched/heard/read. could be a fun way to stretch the old visual vocabulary since i've pretty much been thinking in panels for the last god knows how long.

managed to catch 'moon' while it was on general release. before going in, a friend warned me he'd read a review that said the film blew it's wad in terms of the big reveal pretty early on. he wasn't wrong there but turns out it doesn't really matter since the film finds a bunch of other ways to keep the tension taunt through out.

sam rockwell, sam rockwell and sam rockwell give brilliant turns (powerful too. there are a number of devastating reveals in this that this guy just hammers home) as multiple versions of a miner who's at the end of his three year contract on the moon. the on board a.i played by kevin spacey injects some variation in the limited cast and is a neat take on the archetype.

this flick really is a looker. the film switches between the moon's surface and station. the latter's got this wonderful, used vibe. rather than some slick, soulless, sterile setting, it really looks like it's been lived in and there are a tone of neat details that add extra layers. oh, and the soundtrack. clint mansell is a fricking genius when it comes to putting a score together.

all in all, if your looking for a slower paced, thoughtful sci fi movie, you really can't go wrong with this.

managed to catch 'let the right one in' while it was on release and HOLY MOLY did that film blow me away. seriously, it was the perfect rebound from twilight (which, as much as it pains me to admit, i didn't outright hate... although that may only be down to the unintentionaly high rofl factor what with all the doddgy special effects, ott teenage anguish, SUPER INTENSE FACE ACTING and VAMPIRE BASEBALL. oh, and radiohead in the credits was pretty sweet).

if you've never heard of this little gem, it's the touching story of the budding relationship between a wee boy and girl... except she just happens to be a blood thristy vampire. there's some absolutly top notch acting from the two young leads and the stark setting of 80s stolkhome lends itself perfectly to the grim, dark story. do your self a favour and catch this on dvd when it comes out.

also, are vampires this year's zombies? i hear that the oldboy director's got a film about a vampiric preist coming out sometime soon...

hoo boy. this post is more waffly than house of pancakes