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Jan 29, 2012, 2:32 pm
The stop motion experiments continue - I'm enjoying the chance to try out angles, shot types, compositions, depth of field shenanigans and so on, all on a miniature scale. I'm also really impressed with the performance of my 550D on it's close-up settings. However Stop Motion Lesson #2 is: ten minu... Comment - Like
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Jan 21, 2012, 6:23 pm
I've started work on my second ever stop motion project. The first, an adaptation of the Day Of The Triffids, was made at the age of about 10 with some good friends, a VHS camcorder the size of a bungalow or small house, and seven or eight houseplants. I have no idea what happened to the VHS casset... Comment - Like
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Jan 12, 2012, 1:02 pm
"Last Zombie Standing" will be screened tonight 12th January at Kino London's open mic event at Vibe Live, starting from 7.30. This is a last minute change to the running order. It's good to be back at Kino again, and this event also forms part of the London Short Film Festival. Comment - Like
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Jan 10, 2012, 6:37 pm
My limericks, online, now race
Far apart across time, Net and space
To keep them together
I've done something clever
You can now read them all in one place! Comment - Like
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Jan 4, 2012, 8:14 pm
Roland Emmerich's last film was Anonymous,
'Bout the man with whom theatre is synonymous
You can learn such a lot
From the well researched plot:
Who knew Shakespeare blew up the White House? Comment - Like
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Jan 2, 2012, 8:00 pm
That callous young man Paul Atreides
Always had a (blue) eye for the ladies.
Through the dunes he would ride
With a girl on each side
On his bang pimped up sandworm Mercedes. Comment - Like
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Dec 30, 2011, 8:03 pm
Cyberlords is a sci-fi RPG playable on mobile devices. Jesse, an inhabitant of the Asgard Arcology megacity, wakes up in a clinic owned by the sinister McCoy corporation. Is Doctor Who in charge of this dystopic future? Or perhaps it’s the crisps. For a moment I thought Jesse might even have lost ... Comment - Like
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Dec 27, 2011, 7:10 pm
You can tell so much about a man from his intertextual references. The 2011 Doctor Who Christmas Special is peppered with the blasted things, many of which are more or less throwaway – the opening, which lumps together Star Wars and The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, is both brilliant and ut... Comment - Like
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Dec 24, 2011, 2:23 pm
Short film made for a Kino London challenge, with a title chosen by the audience, filmed in Dalston in November, screened for a Kino audience on 1st December. Music by Parlour Cafe used with kind permission of the artists. I previously blogged about the making of this film here. Comment - Like
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Dec 20, 2011, 8:20 pm
Some time back I reviewed the Asylum TV movie 2010: Moby Dick and I promised solemnly to scrutinize any other movie adaptations of seafaring fantasy novels to the same degree.
Lemuel Gulliver, the hero of Jonathan Swift’s classic novel, encounters the small bodied and smaller minded Lilliputians ... Comment - Like
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Dec 20, 2011, 8:00 pm
Only a few weeks ago, Blender users woke up to discover Christmas had come early - four massive new features taken from experimental branches and added to the main build (beta 2.61) Just as Santa promised: the Tomato camera tracker, the Cycles render engine, a toolset for motion capture, and the O... Comment - Like
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Oct 31, 2011, 3:26 pm
Last Zombie Standing was screened at Ye Olde Rose & Crown on Friday for Walthamstow Short Film Club's Halloween Night. The film was given a warm welcome and we were in good company: seventeen other great films were on the programme including, my favourite, this lesson in how to make an action movie... Comment - Like
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Oct 28, 2011, 8:00 pm
Vincenzo Natali's film Splice is a modern-day take on the Frankenstein theme. Two scientists, Elsa and Clive (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) decide to make a baby - the genetic way - but their Artificial Life chimaeras are not freaky enough so they add in some human DNA. The result is Dren, two par... Comment - Like
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Oct 24, 2011, 8:00 pm
I felt the final novel in the Vatta's War series regained much of the momentum missing from the previous one, and it built to a satisfying climax on both strategic and personal levels. This is partly because we see much more of Ky and much less of Stella and Rafe. Kylara finally finds herself in com... Comment - Like
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Oct 22, 2011, 4:06 pm
I am pleased to announce that Last Zombie Standing will be screened at Walthamstow Short Film Club's Hallowe'en event on 28th October, at Ye Old Rose And Crown, Walthamstow. For details see the Facebook event page. Comment - Like
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Oct 21, 2011, 5:17 pm
Laurell K. Hamilton's fairy noir heroine Meredith Gentry is an exile from the fairy kingdom, working as a PI under a false identity and a magical disguise. In A Kiss Of Shadows, Gentry investigates a mysterious, fairy-obsessed sadist on behalf of his wife and mistress. What she uncovers, however, le... Comment - Like
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Oct 17, 2011, 5:09 pm
Some thoughts about Doctor Who: the second half of the season opened with two episodes written by past masters: Steven Moffat's "Let's Kill Hitler" and Mark Gatiss' "Night Terrors." The tones of the episodes are poles apart: comic sci-fi and psychological horror, but there are some interesting commo... Comment - Like
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Oct 15, 2011, 9:14 am
Exciting news: " 2007" will be screened at the Kino London short film night on 3rd November 2011, at the Vibe Live venue in Brick Lane. Entry £4. Details at the Kino London website or Facebook event page. Comment - Like
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Oct 1, 2011, 4:57 pm
Post production on the music video for "2007" is now complete. I'll post news about any screenings or online viewing, and I also plan to write a little more about the experience of making this video - twice - and everything I've learned along the way. Now I think I'm going to sleep...
Tenderstar ha... Comment - Like
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Sep 25, 2011, 7:32 pm
Dark Entries, Ian Rankin: Of all Ian Rankin's graphic novels that I've read, this is certainly one of the best.
The Sheriff of Yrnameer, Michael Rubens: Of all the space-operas that I've read where the plot revolves around a cargo of freeze-dried orphans, this is certainly one of the best.
Finch, ... Comment - Like
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Sep 20, 2011, 6:42 pm
Kylara is now set on bringing together some kind of space force to combat the pirates. Cousin Stella continues to rebuild the Vatta trade empire from her new shop-front on Moscoe. Aunt Gracie, spymaster and fruitcakerer, takes on the planetary government that sold out Vatta to the pirates. In other ... Comment - Like
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Sep 16, 2011, 5:40 pm
Has the found footage genre had its day? Apollo 18 might be a good point to stand the genre down. True, at time of writing it has a meta-review score of 28% over at Rotten Tomatoes. True, it tells an unoriginal and highly predictable story within a lazy, generic Military-Government Conspiracy (TM)... Comment - Like
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Sep 10, 2011, 8:52 pm
Up late working in Blender on the 2007 video. The challenge is to stop the project getting unmanageably complex - as you can see from my current timeline I'm succeeding beautifully. If caffeine was also a free, open-source download then the world would be perfect. Comment - Like
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Sep 4, 2011, 9:12 am
I started this animation in Cinema 4D back in 2009, and posted some work-in-progress stills here and here. At the time I was working on using complex textures, and also I was a long way from anything human - I still am! but wanted to do some soft-body animation. It's been left on the shelf for the l... Comment - Like
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Sep 2, 2011, 6:14 pm
"What kind of criminal drives a Prius?"
"A socially responsible one?"
The Next Three Days stars Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks. Lara is convicted of murdering her boss on what appears to be extremely strong evidence. John, her husband, is convinced of her innocence and as appeal after appeal ... Comment - Like
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Aug 19, 2011, 7:50 pm
The Swiss film Cargo is set in a future where the Earth's ecosystem has collapsed and humans live in orbiting refugee camps. Anna-Katharina Schwabroh stars as Laura, a ship's doctor who takes a berth on the Kassandra which is preparing a run to a robotic supply station. It's a long voyage and the cr... Comment - Like
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Aug 6, 2011, 1:10 pm
"The Borrowers" by Mary Norton, the origin of the film Arrietty, is a much-loved children's novel from the UK. I have no idea how it fell into the hands of director Hiromasa Yonebayashi: without generalizing too much it seems Japanese animators have good literary taste.
The Borrowers are Little Peop... Comment - Like
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Jul 23, 2011, 8:10 pm
The Space Shuttle Atlantis landed safely, ending 30 years of the Space Transportation System. In addition to the research and engineering achievements the programme has opened up international collaboration in space.With seven novels, eight films and rather a lot of Lego tie-ins the Harry Potter sag... Comment - Like
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Jul 10, 2011, 8:00 pm
Hunter Prey opens to a scenario not unlike Pitch Black: a spaceship crashes on an inhospitable world, the survivors include a prisoner, the last of its kind, captured by the army who destroyed its homeworld. The guards quickly realise that the prisoner has escaped and must recapture it.
Comparison w... Comment - Like
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Jul 10, 2011, 5:05 pm
A re-shoot took place for the "2007" performance roll a week or two ago and I've started post-production. There are several artistic and technical changes, including upgrading the project to HD, with live footage taken on an HD-DSLR. Here's the shot I'm working on at the moment, with a frame from th... Comment - Like
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Jul 5, 2011, 8:00 pm
The third Vatta's War novel finds Kylara Vatta travelling to a series of amusingly provincial worlds as she seeks to put together a privateer force to strike back at the pirates. Each planet has its own eccentricities such as Moscoe, where there are millions of by-laws and regulations to enforce bas... Comment - Like
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Jul 2, 2011, 4:03 am
Me Cheeta is the autobiography of chimpanzee Cheeta, presented here as the co-star of the original Tarzan films alongside lifeguard-turned-actor Jonny Weismuller. It's ghost-written by James Lever, making it precisely as authentic as 90% of other Hollywood autobiographies and arguably better researc... Comment - Like
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Jun 29, 2011, 8:00 pm
Nathanael West's short, bleak novella Day Of The Locust is narrated by a hard-up artist working as a scene painter in Hollywood, doomed to a life of unrequited love and unrecognized talent. The object of his affections is the typical actress-in-waiting, turning tables and sometimes tricks to get by ... Comment - Like
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Jun 23, 2011, 4:57 am
I previously wrote about Sunflower Seeds and artist Ai Weiwei's disappearance here. Yesterday and today BBC News has been reporting his release. Comment - Like
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Jun 21, 2011, 6:00 pm
I think it's fair to say that many of the reviews on this blog are not technically "reviews" but more "responses" - I'm not trying to provide a Which? Dystopian Novel service but to write honestly about my own reaction to what I've seen or read, and where it takes me. So I fail on two counts - I've ... Comment - Like
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Jun 15, 2011, 5:20 pm
There is one reason I am willing to forgive Micky Dolenz for his creation of Metal Mickey and it is this.
Luna, first broadcast in 1983 is one of the strangest sci-fi series ever to be fired from a CRT gun towards a phosphate glass screen.
Where to start? The date is 2040. In the Efficicentre, poss... Comment - Like
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Jun 11, 2011, 8:00 pm
If you had an infinite number of Monkees, and an infinite number of typewriters, then, given paper, ink ribbons, lots of WD-40 and sufficient time, would they eventually come up with some truly classic sci-fi television?
I was recently reminded by a fellow blogger of the many talents of Mickey Dolen... Comment - Like
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Jun 10, 2011, 6:40 pm
The Doctor's finest hour? Or his greatest fall?
The Doctor, backed by a rag-tag crew of companions and allies, takes on a powerful military-religious establishment to rescue Amy and baby Melody. Naturally the entire set-up is a trap ready to spring shut, and the evil Madame Kovarian is a serious thr... Comment - Like
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Jun 8, 2011, 8:00 pm
Moving Target is the second novel in Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War sequence. The delightfully psychopathic Kylara is stranded light years away from her family and homeworld with a loyal crew but a crippled spaceship, while the Vatta trading family and their allies, InterStellar Communications, are de... Comment - Like
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Jun 6, 2011, 9:40 am
First a heads-up: Digging through the murky depths of YouTube a day or so ago I made a really exciting discovery which I have every intention of sharing presently. And no, it's not the Snake easter egg. Watch this space for further announcements.
We now return you to your scheduled broadcast. Attack... Comment - Like
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May 21, 2011, 8:57 am
The greatest mystery of all time: why do good ol' Spaghetti Westerns suck so much, while tributes to the very same Westerns are awesome? I'm thinking of Blazing Saddles for instance, a spoof from the pre-Scary Movie era when spoofs were still allowed to be well-written movies in their own right. Mel... Comment - Like
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May 19, 2011, 8:00 pm
Trying to explain the appeal of 8-bit phenomenon Elite to non-players, I sometimes describe it as a little like Only Fools And Horses, set in a future where the single-handed wheelin' dealin' interstellar trader is king.
Trading In Danger, a really enjoyable novel and first in the Vatta's War series... Comment - Like
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May 15, 2011, 5:10 pm
His papa was a rolling stone
His mama was a rubber tree
He rolled into town
Laid some skidmarks down
And embarked on a killing spree
Affectionately known as Robert
An unbalanced worn down tyre
Named in the credits Robert
He don't need a getaway car
He came looking for trouble
He found it in a scraph... Comment - Like
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May 14, 2011, 9:10 am
Some films entice you in with awesome sequel promises, then disappoint with boring originality. Catfish is not the sequel to Sharktopus. The same goes for Donkey Punch and Sucker Punch, or Tron:Legacy and Tron. Miley Cyrus fans may experience similar disappointment at the opening of Joe Wright's fil... Comment - Like
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May 7, 2011, 6:00 am
"So we're in a box that's bigger on the inside than the outside and travels in time and space."
"Basically, yes."
"So how long have Scotland Yard had this?"
Doctor Who returns: and a central character did indeed die as promised. I don't quite believe they have the guts to completely follow through ... Comment - Like
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May 3, 2011, 8:00 pm
Who can you trust? Are the people around you who they say they are, or are you surrounded by actors playing their part? I present two films that prove you don't need Matrix or Source Code high-tech wizardry to take a hammer to your perception of reality.
The Game - a David Fincher classic from 199... Comment - Like
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