Computer Animation Arts

I might be in Rome, but this geek won't be denied...

This is pretty wonderful...  Black Holes from NOODLES on Vimeo .

Ship of Fools from Josh Shaffner on Vimeo .

Okay, so not very Christmassy at all... but this fanboy can't help seem to help himself - even after the disappointment of Prometheus...

um, wow...

Hello CAA folk. As some of you may know, I've recently been working with L.A pop culture gallery Hero Complex Gallery on a big set of landscape prints. And today, I can finally reveal them after being feature on Gizmodo's io9. Titled  Visions of a Past, Present and Future,  this set of giclee prints celebrates some of the best science fiction films in cinematic history. From Star Wars to La Jetee, each print is sized at 12" x 36" and limited to 75 per print. A big thank you to io9 , who featured and revealed the work on their site. If you'd like to buy one of these lovely, super wide landscape prints, then head over to HCG and BUY HERE! The full list of prints is as follows: 2001 : A Space Odyssey, Akira, Alien, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, La Jetee, Metropolis, Moon, Star Wars Ep IV, V and VI, The Fly. Here are just a selection of images. ** I know you are all horribly poor students, but if you'd like to purchase one o...

Trailer #2 - and the question being asked is simple: 'Where is Luke?'

Find twenty minutes of your time to watch this fascinating documentary on the various ways in which Jedi villain, Jabba The Hutt, was brought to life for the screen.  Perhaps you've picked up on it already, but there's a backlash against the use of CGI for everything in movies, especially for creatures and characters.  There's a debate getting started here: materiality vs virtuality - it's the stuff of dissertations...  

There is something endlessly fascinating about H.G. Wells' tripod martians from his genre-defining invasion narrative, The War Of The Worlds - I guess because they're so thoroughly alien .  Illustrators have been drawn to Wells' invaders time and time again, and I'm sharing here  Henrique Alvim-Corrêa's 1906 iteration of these marauding metallic space-invaders...  They manage to be both whimsical and creepy, with their wide-brimmed scarecrow-like faces and dangly, gangly legs...

A bit of a pre-amble before First Years sample the sultry delights of Barbarella.   Having looked at the VFX breakdown for Prometheus -  and wondered why they didn't just film in places where there are mountains in the background - I thought it time to bring some some actual good sci-fi film action into the mix. This is Soviet Filmmaker Pavel Klushantsev's Planeta Bur aka Planet of the Storms , made in 1962. Klushantsev was an early pioneer of special effects who went on to greatly influence both Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas. Planeta Bur was his only feature film and was released under various guises in the West, most famously by B-Movie maestro Roger Corman as Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet . OK- it's pretty hokey in places, but I'm a sucker for this type of film! They just don't make em' like they used to. Who needs CG when you can make it out polystyrene.     

Something for all those people who believe that corporations and ad agencies are the real threat to human existence... This looks a bit like John Carpenter's They Live   (1988) on some serious VFX steroids.   Branded looks like another sci-fi swipe at the shiny surfaces of hyperreality and critique of consumerism-as-modern-utopia.  I'm intrigued - and those tentacle things are satisfyingly squirmy!  In common with Invasion of the Body-Snatchers , it would appear the threat is already among us!

H.G. Wells' science-fiction alien invasion classic The War Of The Worlds  (1898) has been continuously in print for over 100 years. Many of you will be familiar with Wells' basic premise because of the 2005 Spielberg adaptation , with its often chilling 9/11 imagery and channelling of that terrorist attack's trauma.  The 1953 film version , which deservedly won an Oscar for its special effects, dispensed with Wells' iconic image of the martians' tripod fighting machines, substituting green-tipped, cobra-head manta-rays instead and throwing in an atomic bomb.  For me, however, Wells' vision of our wholesale destruction at the hands (or should that be tentacles?) of alien invaders was first impressed upon me by Jeff Wayne's 1978 concept album, featuring the vocal talents of Richard Burton .  If you've never listened to it - you should.  It can still raise a few goosebumps even now. Wells describes the martian invaders' fighting machines thus: ...