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?
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...
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...
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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