Tuesday 31 December 2013

2013: A Year's Worth of Tests


Happy New Year everyone!

I've been saving these clips up over the course of the last year, although many of these are from October onwards.

This is the start of my new drive to create more brickfilms. In the coming month alone I should have at least two short videos for you, with The Ice Vampire coming hopefully by the end of January.

Sorry about the framing - I thought I'd been editing in widescreen, but alas nay.

And yes, I already have a couple of the new Chima sets - those Legend Beasts are surprisingly good sets, especially with the new ball-and-socket joint pieces, which are going to be really useful for stop-motion.

Sunday 29 December 2013

Who ever said dwarves aren't strong?



Dwarves are strong, right? Surely one boulder wouldn't be a problem? You thought wrong, my friend.

I animated this in July and, after remaking my studio, forgot I'd ever done it. Here it is in it's full, mishmashed glory! Half the editing was done in Premiere Elements, and half in Premiere Pro, and half the effects were done in VisionLab, the other half done in After Effects. Thought I'd edit it and upload since I didn't end up doing THAC this year (that's the Twenty-four Hour Animation Contest, over on BricksInMotion.com).

I know - light flicker. It's not something I can solve very easily right now, so we'll all have to learn to get along with it. If I fuss about it too much, I won't get any videos made, and we don't want that now do we?

At the time, I was just about to move my studio setup from one side of my room to the other, because of space issues (which I still suffer from), and this was the last thing I ever animated in that old setup. Believe it or not, this was right in front of a window; thin blinds and a layer of black [insert name of mysterious fabric here] were all that stood between my animations and sunlight. Probably the worst idea for a studio location ever.

You'll notice the minifigs are all flesh-tone - I hadn't used any of those faces for anything other than the sets they came from (e.g. the wizard's face is from a Pirates of the Carribean set) so I wanted to see how they looked used for my own made-up characters. They work well, although the nostalgic voice in the back of my head says yellow will always be the colour of LEGO. Sorry, Jack Sparrow.

Nerd note: the face for the dwarf is the LEGO General Zod face, hence the heat vision. It's a really nerdy joke. Sometimes I just start drowning in my own geekery.

On January 1st (or thereabouts) I'll be uploading a 2013 Test Compilation, and then in 2014 I'll be uploading videos more regularly (I promise, this time!). I've already started working on a whole bunch of things (some scripted, some partially animated) and I'm still trying to re-edit Istari Halloween so that it's vaguely viewable. This video here, this dwarfy thing, is just to wet your appetite in the meantime.

Monday 16 December 2013

The Desolation of Smaug

So it had its faults, and there were lots of unnecessary add-ons courtesy of "Middle-Earth According To Peter Jackson", and it suffered from a severe case of middle-movie-syndrome, but The Desolation of Smaug was a hell of ride.


It was an improvement on the last one, for sure, sorting out most of its pacing issues and ditching unnecessary cutesy moments (Sebastian the hedgehog is nowhere in sight, deep breath out). Though the add-ons made a few of the characters - both those from the book and those invented for the film (cough cough, Tauriel) fall-flat, it was still as engaging and investing as I thought it would be.

Oh, and there's Smaug. Now THAT'S a dragon. Sorry, Hungarian Horntail, but Smaug really sets the bar in terms of reptilian, fire-breathing epicosity.
Benedict Cumberbatch's voice-over is also incredible, though I wouldn't expect anything voiced by him not to sound incredible. His first scene, with Bilbo, was incredibly tense and well-framed.

Wow. Much Smaug. So desolate.

All in all, this was a pleasure to watch. Still not as good as The Lord of the Rings, but getting there.

A word of warning, though, which is that New Line are clearly trying to subtly set up a Silmarillion movie. Make of that what you will, but I'm not convinced that doing so would be a good idea...

Sunday 3 November 2013

Chima: Stink






In Chima, two wolves find out the hard way that if a skunk does its thing anywhere near your clothes, no amount of soap and water is getting that stink out.

The first in what may be a series of really short Chima videos. It depends.

I did this on and off over the course of, well, today (in between college revision and beating the Elite Four - my starter was Chespin, btw), and guess what? No light flicker! I’ve finally got it all sorted out. So you can now expect more animations. Well, hopefully some half-decent ones at least.

As for Istari Halloween…you may have noticed it’s now November 3rd. Due to problems and more problems, I only have some of it shot, and I’ve had to take the sets apart for another, super-secret project. But never fear! I’m looking at the footage to see if I can rewrite it a little bit and upload what I have into a coherent story. Obviously, it’ll be a lot later than Halloween, but bear with me folks. What else d’you expect from a procrastinating teenager?

Like my Facebook page! https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jam-Pot-Studios/139333439497142

And check out Big Pencil Animations! I’ve been doing some voices for his Ninjago videos. They’re really awesome, so click this link! http://www.youtube.com/user/BigPencilAnimations

Wednesday 16 October 2013

Ozymandias is up!



In a post-apocalyptic future, two young boys are inspired to dig for treasure in the desert. They find a lot more than they bargained for...

There's a bit of annoying light flicker and camera shake, and the aspect ratio is completely wrong, but overall I'm glad with how this turned out.

This is my practical coursework for my A2 Film Studies course. The brief was that we had to make a 3 to 5 minute short film, but it could be any genre. I actually started off doing a short about air pollution, but that didn't work, and neither did my next film diea that was going to be about  shadows and stuff, but I'm glad I ended up making this. I think my teachers were all pleased that I did a stop-motion, since it's vastly different to what other students were doing.

The music (Thunder Dreams, Swimmey Texture, Space Explorers and Impact Allegretto) is all by the amazing Kevin Macleod, and you can see his website here: http://incompetech.com/
Subscribe for more videos! Next one should be out around Halloween...

Wednesday 9 October 2013

Istari Halloween: coming soon!




I want to get into the habit of making more animations, so I'm starting with another Middle-earth video this Halloween! It should be up just before October 31st, though I guess there's no harm if it has to wait untilt he day itself. You never know, you might get two Halloween videos...

Friday 27 September 2013

First Age of Ultron teaser!

The SDCC teaser for The Avengers: Age of Ultron is finally online, and it looks...well, see for yourself.


I understand some people might be disappointed by the lack of actual footage in this, but give Disney a break. The movie doesn't come out for two years, and it's still knee-deep in pre-production. Honeslty, I think it's so much the better for not having random flashes of pointless footage or being an endless series of sweeping lens flares - we see Ultron people. Disney's just given us a good glimpse at Ultron. Granted, he looks exactly the same as he does in the comics, but it's nice to see the cinema interpretation of the world-killing android, especially two years ahead of the film's release.

Then, of course, we get to the question of Hank Pym. I've always seen him as an integral part of the Avengers line-up, and just as integral to Ultron's story. However, Whedon seems to have cut him out and made Tony Stark Ultron's creator instead. As painful as it is that they would change such a big piece of comic canon for the screen, I think this works very well; we've seen how crazy Stark is about his tech (remember that 'house party' in Iron Man 3?), so it's only the natural evolution of his story that he would one day create something that went wrong. Dangerously wrong. As in 'destroy the world' wrong. It would take too much time in the new movie to set up Hank Pym and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver (who I am really excited to be seeing onscreen).

Finally, we get to the titles themselves. And the screams. Lots of screaming. Talk about setting the tone - Disney doesn't want us to forget that in many of the comic runs he appears in, Ultron kills anything from thousands to millions to, in his most recent run (also called Age of Ultron, though totally not worth a read) billions of puny humans. He's a furious killing machine that's more than a match not just for the Avengers, but for the whole world.

So now I'm really excited for The Avengers: Age of Ultron, and that's why. Not that I wasn't excited before, but now we have this teaser as proof of how awesome the movie is going to be. Joss knows what he's doing, and he's doing it right.

Friday 20 September 2013

Why I hate spoilers

Some people thrive on spoilers. They love finding out what's going to happen in a book or movie before it's release, and then enjoy telling people those details just as much.

I'm not one of those people. I hate spoilers. A lot.

A lot of my friends don't understand, so I'll explain. I'm going to use Buffy the Vampire Slayer as an example.

I started watching it recently (a friend's been lending me the DVDs), and everyone told me that series 3 and 5 were the best. So I got through series 1 and 2 and really, really enjoyed them. I was told that they weren't the best of the 7 seasons, but they were still awesome.

Then up came a spoiler. Well, more than one. At college, people started to tell me everything about series 5, 6 and 7, assuming I wouldn't care because the show's been out for nearly a decade. Unfortunately, I do care. I got to series 5, which everyone says is the best, and I realised that I wasn't enjoying it as much as the first two, even though it was supposed to be better. I'm pretty sure the reason for this was because my friends had spoiled every single detail of every plot twist and development that was going to happen.

In conclusion to that little anecdote, spoilers ruin tension. They ruin any kind of suspense. If you know what's going to happen, why watch or read it?

People have been spoiling stuff for years - from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to Charlotte's Web (I kid you not, when I was little, there was this kid at my school who took particular delight in annoying me. One day, he saw I was reading Charlotte's Web...) and I'm fed up of. Not just of the spoilers themselves, but of the nonchalent way in which people spoil things. They assume that nobody minds having something they're reading ruined.

I do.

Monday 12 August 2013

World's Finest Villains: Parasite

I'm going to start my list of choices for World's Finest's antagonists with a character I loathe. Not in a love-to-loathe-them kind of way, like with Palpatine or any villain played by Kevin Spacey, but one that I can't stand the sight of.

Meet the Parasite.


Just look at him - he looks ridiculous! In Superman: Secret Origin, it's revealed that he got his powers from eating a radioactive donut. His dialogue is never great, and his power is fairly unoriginal (he steals the life-force/powers of others, leaving withered corpses behind).

Why then, if I dislike him so much, would I pit him against Superman and Batman? Well, I wouldn't have him as the movie's only villain. He'd work much better either as a subordinate for a bigger villain, or as an unrelated-but-still-minor villain for the false victory/false defeat in the middle.

This guy has connections. He works at S.T.A.R. Labs (the same place Dr. Emil Hamilton worked at), which is where he eats the radioactive donut, so there's an obvious connection there,. This would be a great way of getting Superman and Batman to/involved with S.T.A.R. Labs in order to introduce another villain (but I'll get onto them in another post - the links with S.T.A.R. Labs needs more space). What I'm trying to say is that he'd present a minor challenge for the heroes, but not one that would actually require all of their effort and skill; just something to fill a hole in the middle of the movie, and to set up the next antagonist, exactly as he did in Superman: Secret Origin.

What they would have to do to make Parasite is change his look completely, just as Synder's team redesigned Krypton; sure, you can add lots of subtle nods to the original version, but the look and feel has to suit the modern world, first and foremost. 

Xhibit enjoys hosting Pimp My Superhero way too much.

In Season 8 of Smallville, which I didn't watch out of respect for the first six seasons, Rudy Jones makes an appearance as a stereotypical dissaffected-youth-gets-powers-goes-all-supervillain, and causes havoc after temporarily pilfering Supes' powers. But he's just a kid. Here's a pic:


This is how Synder shouldn't reboot Parasite. There's absolutely nothing menacing about him, and to be honest he has nothing to do with the comic book character. This is the Supernatural approach: making an inhuman creature look perfectly normal. It works in the TV series Supernatural, but it doesn't normally work in anything else, which is where Smallville fell down on most counts in its later series', particularly with its rendition of Darkseid.

I'm getting sidetracked here - back to the Parasite! What Synder should really do is recreate the Parasite as a monster - make it so Rudy mutates properly into something inhuman, and not simply become a guy in a leather jacket or a fatty with pink skin.

In my next post in this series, I'll be discussing an interesting option for the central antagonist, one that I believe could make for an interesting plot: Black Mask.

Thursday 8 August 2013

The Wolverine (review)

One of the best things about X-Men Origins: Wolverine is that, while the film wasn't exactly a failure, the writers/creators of later movies in the franchise have all but said "Yeah, forget the continuity. The Wolverine movie isn't important. We were kind of in a dark place after X-Men 3..."

...which is why it's no surprise at all that The Wolverine is not a sequel. It is entirely its own movie, and only makes a couple of minor references to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Instead, it focuses on X-Men 3 as the springboard, and we rejoin Logan's company 10 years after the big battle in San Francisco. He's been living in the woods, has promised not to kill...once again, we see a wounded Wolverine, haunted by having to kill lover Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), blah blah blah, it's not really anything new, but then again, there ain't nothin' new under the sun. So if you're expecting a labyrinthine plot, go watch Patriot Games or something.



If you can put up with being able to see the end coming a mile off (not to mention anticipating every single plot twist the film throws at you), then you'll enjoy The Wolverine, because the main focus is the action. It's on seeing Wolverine hack some bad guys into spare ribs, and it does that phenomenally well.  there's a good 15 minutes or so of sustained action, first at a funeral and then in/on top of a bullet train, and it's fantastic. The choreography is breathtaking, as are the visual effects.

The other draws are the setting and the scale. Coming straight after The Avengers, Man of Steel and Iron Man 3, you might think that it would be hard to take such a ground-level superhero movie seriously, but it isn't. Logan isn't saving the world, but that's quite refreshing. As amazing the battles of New York and Metropolis are, it's nice to follow a story that's not as big or as loud; something that knows it doesn't have to cause $2 trillion worth of damage to hold its audience's attention. I believe that there's a place for both in superhero cinema, and I'd like to see more on The Wolverine's level.

This villain annoyed me. She was boring and hugely cliche.

As for setting, all bar 2, maybe 3 scenes are set in Japan, which is unexplored territory for superheroes. in the X-Men universe it is quite important, as many important elements of Logan's past come from the comic run that this movie is loosely based on. In the movie itself, the location flits back and forth between traditional Japanese culture and architecture and modern Tokyo, and both are quite alien for Logan and (I would say) the audience. This really helps to give the movie a more frantic atmosphere; not only is Logan facing a new and previously unknown enemy, but he's been thrown into a foreign environment; both repeatedly threaten to swallow him up, but he manages to get through it and focus, not matter how hard it is initially. As Mariko (the love interest) says, "You wouldn't understand. You aren't Japanese."

So all in all, an enjoyable ride, but nothing new. It's the perfect Wolverine movie and nothing more, but then again it doesn't need to be anything else. Nobody working on this project was intending the film to be a masterpiece, because that would be a ridiculous aspiration.

But here's my question: how can Logan survive so much damage and yet show no signs of mental trauma? I mean, in the first five minutes he gets most of his skin burned off, and all he does is breathe deeply while it heals, and then he never mentions it again. I guess it's just a testament to his sanity that he can go through so much pain and not go mad, although I'm pretty sure that there's a point where the mind just gives up, no matter how strong your bones are.

Here's the UK trailer. Feel free to watch it, I won't stop you.


I'm not going to talk about the post-credits scene a) because I don't want to spoil it (though I don't think it's that much of a spoiler anymore), and b) because I'm going to do a whole blog post on the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past, which hits the screen next year.

And I leave you with this awesome image:


Friday 2 August 2013

World's Finest

I go to Iceland for 16 days, and what do I find when I get back?


Even though this is exactly what I hoped/predicted Warner Brothers would do, it's hugely exciting news. Despite several attempts to create this movie, Batman and Superman have never before been seen on the big screen together. With all the speculation about a potential Justice League movie, and the success of Man of Steel, it was only a matter of time before Warner fed us something. As I understand it, all we got was a logo, a release date of 2015 and the tentative title of Superman VS Batman (which, truth be told, isn't hugely inspiring - just look at Freddie VS Jason and Alien VS Predator).

I'd originally planned to do a post explaining why a World's Finest (that's the name of the original comic-run in which Superman and Batman joined forces) movie was Warner's best option, but they've already taken my unspoken advice, so that blog post would unnecessary. What I will do is briefly say why I think this is a great idea, but also what I think Warner should try to avoid.

Why is World's Finest awesome?
Firstly, it's not as convoluted as Justice League. Warner's original plan was to do the reverse of Marvel's line-up, and have one movie that would introduce all the characters and spark off a series of individual movies. That would have been terrible - establishing such strong and complex characters and getting them all together and testing them to their limits against a Big Bad requires more than 2 hours. Start off small, don't bite off more than you can chew.

It goes without saying that Batman and Superman are two of the three most well-known superheroes in the world (the third being Spider-man), so it's natural for Warner to use that property to establish their DC Cinematic Universe. Plus, the success of Man of Steel and the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight Trilogy has everyone wanting more of both. Now is the perfect time for them to team-up on the silver screen.

So start small, and then move onto bigger things. Get the two most important heroes right, and then you can bring in the other stars in future movies. In my opinion, the DCCU should go a little something like this:
  1. Man of Steel
  2. World's Finest
  3. Flash
  4. Wonder Woman or Aquaman (possibly - this stage isn't 100% necessary, but would be nice)
  5. Justice League
By the time you get to Justice League, you only have to introduce a couple of new superheroes, who are normally Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, and sometimes Cyborg and/or Hawkgirl. Then, once the big film's out of the way, you can work on giving those other heroes their own movies.

What should Warner Brothers avoid?
Having the whole plot of the movie be Batman fighting Superman. That would be outright terrible. There's no way that a) they could find an interesting enough plot for it, and b) that it would be able to come anywhere near to matching the action in Man of Steel. After all, what's a human got on a Kryptonian? Even though Batman has a strong chance of winning (which he does many times in the comics), it wouldn't make a great movie.

That's not to say they shouldn't come into conflict at all. Just look at The Avengers: Joss Whedon effortlessly pitted Marvel's three biggest heroes - Iron Man, Captain America and Thor - against each other in what was portrayed as a really petty quarrel, and then Thor and Hulk fought each other later on. However, they worked out their differences for the finale and beat Loki and his army of aliens, and saved the day. That's really what World's Finest should do: have the two heroes at odds, but allow them to work their issues out before taking on the real enemy, whoever that may be.

To round off, here's a picture from the LEGO Justice League movie:


In one of my next posts, I'll talk about who I think would make the best villains in the movie. I hope this hasn't been too much of a geek rant - I just wanted to get my opinion out there. I'm really excited for this movie, but also worried that they might not get it right. Superman and Batman deserve to be done, er, justice.  :)

Thursday 1 August 2013

I Am Number Four: book or film?

Having finally watched the movie adaptation of I Am Number Four, I thought it was about time I read the book, and so I did, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Safe to say I'll be reading the rest of the series.

As we're all aware, sometimes when a book gets a film adaptation, the story is torn to pieces. Just look at Phillip Pullman's beautiful His Dark Materials series. New Line released The Golden Compass in 2007, which is apparently one of their most expensive movies to date. Visually, it was a masterpiece (I mean, it's really worth watching the movie just for the incredible VFX, particularly the ice bears), but it softened a lot of the atheist themes of the book (though not enough to prevent harsh criticism about it being violently anti-Catholic) and rearranged many of the events in the book for absolutely no reason. This, and the fact that the whole thing was badly paced, caused the movie to flop; a brilliant book flopped, even after New Line emptied their wallets throwing money at the production.

Similarly, the first Percy Jackson movie was almost indistinguishable from the book. While I understand that the Percy Jackson books are oddly structured (that's not a criticism, as I'm a big fan of the series and enjoy its picaresque style) and would not easily leap to the screen, I think that Fox handled the material really badly, probably worse than New Line did with Northern Lights. They shuffled everything around to fit the Hollywood formula, skipping over loads of important plot elements, characters, and the series' underlying villain completely. However, it was still reasonably enjoyable.

So, I Am Number Four: The Book. First book in the Lorien Legacies series. Written by James Frey and Jobie Hughes under the pen name Pittacus Lore. Young adult sci-fi romp.


And then, I Am Number Four: The Movie. First and now probably only movie in a planned but shelved series. Directed by D.J. Caruso and, though you wouldn't guess from watching it, produced by Michael Bay, all for Touchstone Pictures. Teen sci-fi action movie (sort of).


What's it all about? Well, there's this guy, called John Smith. He's fourteen (but played by 23-year-old Alex Pettyfer), and he's one of only eighteen remaining aliens from the planet Lorien, which was invaded several years before the story starts by the villains, the Mogadorians, an evil race who use life force to sustain their technology. The nine Lorien children sent to Earth are protected by a special charm that means that they can only be killed in sequence. However, that doesn't help John; the first three are dead, and he is Number Four.

That's the basics of the premise. There are lots of details about Lorien's core and about Lorien's alien magic, and lots of backstory about life on Lorien and John's memories, and all these flashbacks of the war and explanations about why some Lorien-people have powers and some, like John's protector Henri, don't, but none of that's important. Or at least, Touchstone Pictures didn't think so. Everything I've just mentioned is left out of the movie, and that's not even a quarter of the total omissions.

So what's in the movie, then? Well, the bare bones of the story: John moves to a new town in Ohio, knowing that he's next. He makes a friend in Sam Goode, an alien conspiracy theorist, and a girlfriend in Sarah Hart (still a better love story than Twilight), and then there's this jerk called Mark James...it's all very simple, really, and aside from a few props here and there and the alien bad guys themselves, there's nothing very sci-fi about it at all. John could just as easily be a young undercover spy (perhaps in the vein of Alex Rider?), on the run from some enemy agents. The sci-fi almost feels unnecessary...until the end.

There's the school battle, and in the movie it's awesome. It's a little different to the book, but it's still cool. And Number Six is introduced.


This is where the comparison gets interesting, because Six is actually a better character in the movie than in the book. I'm serious - though Six has just as many lines in both, Teresa Palmer shows us some emotion in the movie, whereas in the book Six doesn't really do much except fight. Her entrance is an unexpected twist, but a bit flat. It feels like a tag-on. In the movie, Six is introduced about an hour earlier through some little bits that are hinted at in the book but never explicitly described, and they work a treat. They make her a serious badass.


The villains are much better as well, even if the film does make them seem slightly silly. While the gangster-styled Mogadorians of the book are imposing, the gill-nosed, supermarket-frequenting Mogadorians of the movie are both funny in their semi-assimilation of human technology and culture, and also hugely menacing; the way they dispose of their loose ends is beautifully sadistic, especially in tandem with their humorous side. My only comparison is the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs (which was undoubtedly a huge influence on this). Again, watch the movie for yourself to see what I'm talking about. I don't want to write spoilers, and I don't think I can do the scene justice anyway.


However, the lack of any Lorien whatsoever does make me a bit sad. Though the book isn't amazingly written (not bad, just not anything overly special), the concepts described about Lorien and why some of its inhabitants have powers is kind of beautiful. I won't put it here; it's not a major spoiler or anything, but you should read it for yourself. It's more powerful that way. There are also lots of flashbacks to John's family on Lorien and the life he had there, and they flesh him and a few other characters out massively, as well as providing some depth to a later plot development (involving a gecko and John's grandfather). I know the movie had a limited budget, but it would've been nice if they'd have made a bit of an effort. The book has such heart and depth, whereas the movie focuses on the teen love-story aspect a little more than is necessary and makes the science just out-and-out sci-fi. No magic involved.

All in all, I'd say watch the movie and then read the book. I enjoyed the movie, but if you come from it having read the book and expecting the same warmth, you'll be disappointed.

P.S. the book has lots of swearing in it, which is just one of the things that makes it 'young adult' rather than 'teen'. The movie didn't, and was firmly 'young teen'. Complete change in maturity level. Know your audience. Just sayin'.


Sunday 23 June 2013

An Unexpected Encounter




During a stroll through the forests of Greenwood, a young Saruman has a rather unexpected (and unwanted) encounter with a mysterious being...

The footage is from a few months ago, and I edited it yesterday afternoon when I was already brain-fried from college work, which is partly why it's so bad. The angles are terrible, the quality of some of the shots is terrible, and there's a hideous amount of light flicker. The sound is more than a little bit bad too, since for once I didn't pay it much attention. Still, at least I've finally managed to get something out!

There are lots of internet/meme references in this, and the script was actually quite fun to write. Y'all probably know I'm a Slender-man-fan, and he'll be somewhere in most of my videos from now on. The twenty dollars thing is self-explanatory if you know your Slendy. If not...basically, there's a joke that the reason he haunts people is that he wants twenty dollars.

I'm trying to get a some more videos out, both original ideas (some based in Greek mythology) and some DC, Harry Potter, Marvel and more Hobbit/Lord of the Rings. I really want to imrpove my skills, so be prepared for lots of short videos rather than fewer long ones. And obviously also for the fact that I'm suddenly making videos again.