Transformers Revenge of the Fallen

I am going to go against the grain of pretty much every review I have read with this...

TROF fucking owns. It's not Reign in Blood, but it could definitely be Seasons of the Abyss. My experience with the film went something like this.

At 2 PM the lights went down. Roll Harry Potter trailer...doesn't look bad, but *yawn* magic/wizards is not my deal. Then blam, straight into TROF. The film is basically structured like a video game. Short objectives and plot elements are dropped in between scene after scene of robots annihilating factories, houses, cities, aircraft carriers, you name it. There's a lot more of the robots and the humans are way more tolerable because..well there's more of the robots.

I've read many times this movie has no story. I think it has a solid, if a bit simplistic, story that moves at a breakneck pace. There's a few continuity errors, but nothing that seriously breaks/detracts from the experience of 50 foot robots raging full spectrum warfare.

Probably the best testament to the pacing was that when the lights came up, the only indication that 2.5 hours was that I had to take a leak. Bad. I wasn't alone either. The line for the toilets was well into the concession area ^o^

So yes, it's not written as well as it could be, but seriously...are there any well written scifi movie epics other than Alien/Aliens/Alien3?

Invincible Gate Mind of the Infernal Fire Hell

Is at the printers. This record took about a year to write, 4 days to record and mix and over 6 months to get the artwork complete. It will be out late July/August 09 on vinyl, followed by a CD release 2-3 months later.

Since I get a fair amount of inquiry about working on projects I wanted to go through the general creative and production process for creative/design projects I work on.

First, get the music done, to the point where I am fairly comfortable there won't be any major changes to the lyrics or music. Often this is the day after tracks have been committed to a master. After 10+ years of this stuff, a very specific pattern has emerged on everything I've been involved with. Changes are made right up until material is committed to tape. This has led to everything from lyric sheets with completely inaccurate lyrics to designs that had to be rebuilt from the ground up because there was suddenly a need to fit twice as much information in the same space.

Next, begins the discovery process. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year in the most extreme cases (especially when large projects are on the table and multiple concepts are developed and taken to a point that can be evaluated beyond some sketches or ascii). This latest HD project had a very short incubation time. I saw the works of the photographer Chen Zhun and was inspired.

Then comes the budget. My ideas often far out strip the budgets attached to projects. With about $250 left to spend on the art, I made the personal decision to start liquidating collectibles if I even wanted to approach the vision I had in my mind. At the end of the day, we still didn't have enough $ or time to create my "true vision" of the project, so I scaled and worked with materials available to get as close as possible. It turned out pretty good I think ^_^;

At the end of the day, we spent over $1500 on the production of this specific piece including photography by Mr Scott Kinkade, wardrobe by Michelle Bowlin of Assassins Boutique, modeling by Hannah Craft of Rabbit Hole Bakeshop and finally the cosmetic works of Jenny Kline aka facemakerj. Each one of these people played an integral part in making the art come together and look the way it does. Note: that figure above doesn't include the original Scratch Trigger Era comic that comes with the record! Featuring the writing of Mark Gilson + Jon Chang with the artistic talents of Mr Stan Sakai we are finally releasing a prologue story to STE! And yes, it's that Stan Sakai! When it comes to making the stuff shine, I don't half ass anything ^_^

However, none of that $1500 includes the time I spent in post working the art to its finished state. I spent about 2 man weeks to produce 3 different layouts before I picked my winner. I've found that this horrific burn rate of man power and time is what it takes to bring something in at a quality level I consider professional.

Projects with a decent budget get decent creative. Projects with proper budgets, come out looking amazing. Projects with low budgets, I/we simply pass on. If it's not worth doing well, it's not worth doing.

Have a better one!

Odds and ends

There's a bunch of things to gab about today.

To start with, what's on my mind this morning is the new James Cameron film Avatar. Theoretically still 6 months away, I'm starting to get the fever. Despite there being a host of other movies between now and then I am interested in, Avatar is the only one I think will both look great and have a great story (Star Trek surprised the hell out of me but more on that later).

Several pieces of concept art recently surfaced on the net. I found them via AICN but I'll send you to the source here:

http://marketsaw.blogspot.com/2009/05/want-to-see-what-whole-power-suit-might.html

I pretty much exploded the second I saw The Art of Avatar: James Cameron's Epic Adventurewas available for pre-order.

I haven't seen a trailer, a teaser or really much more than the previously linked pieces and yet, I am hopped up like I just pounded 4 Monster Khaos in a row. It's strange to believe after so many disappointments that I can still get hyped up about products/films/games, but there you go. 35 and I still have faith despite my general despair for the future.

Me and Michelle have spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a new school for my step kid, Mercedes aka Chebes aka Cheese Band. The more I learn about education, the less I am impressed with public schools. It's not really their fault mind you, but there's just not enough money to go around and what is one to do? Go the route of the EU and have much higher taxes to provide far better schools or simply privatize schooling entirely...The method that seems to be the most locked on is called "montessori". Google it if you're interested. I'm sure it's not a silver bullet for everyone but I like a lot of what they are about.

I'm reading Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Centuryright now. It's pretty engaging, especially after just finishing "Twisted Metal" by Tony Ballentine (which was fun but not something I ever need to read again. I'll probably pick up the sequels though ^o^). Wired For War is a pretty interesting look at robotics/drones in culture and warfare today and has some very interesting speculation about the future of the industry.

I've been working on client projects and the BPRE graphic novel(and by extension the Facebook game) screenplay this whole week. BPRE as a non-FPS title was really hard for me to swallow at first, but it's becoming clear that this route will allow us to really show off some of the research and story telling we wanted to do, but couldn't afford to create in a 3D experience.

Everyday requires me to embrace change as an artist and as a leader of creative organization. To our credit we've been pretty resilient at this. I am generally resistant to change, but I come around more often than not.

Have a better one :)

The past week I've been working on a vertical slice of our Facebook game. My job is to write the narrative that drives the player from area to area, to identify or invent all the tools(ie weapons, fieldware, armor, clothes) that the player will utilize during their adventure and create a "shot list" for the game, ie shots we want/need to capture to convey what is going on to the user. It's an interesting excercise in that it quickly tells you what you can/cannot do, ie if a sequence is too ambitious to represent, cut it and come up with something else!

We're going to be doing 2 photoshoots this summer. One in the US with some of the people at BDSCI (don't bother looking it up, they don't have a website) and then another overseas, most likely in Dubai to collect location shots. After the game is up and running we've discussed releasing a coffee table book with all the photos from the first "chapter" in high res for people to enjoy outside of the game. As you can imagine, our stuff is going to look a bit different than some of the other games that are out there.

We also settled on an artist to begin work on the BPRE graphic novel. We had a call this week and the artist will begin work on a style sheet shortly. We're still not 100% if the book will be color or B+W. I like both and I think either could work. I'm desperately trying to get the screenplay wrapped but it isn't easy with all the client work we've been running. I have a ton of notes laying out some scenes that had needed more...tissue.It's pretty insane how far the story has come since we switched our locations from Mars to Earth.

Been reading up all the books I can by David Ignatius. Started with Agents of Innocenceand then read Body of Lies: A Novel (Movie Tie-In). Agents is definitely the better read...maybe because when reading Body of Lies I had a pretty good idea of what was in the coming pages. Just ordered his new one, The Increment: A Novel, just shipped. I'm hoping it's killer ^_^;

I used to read nothing but scifi. Now, I feel like good sf is few and far. One trend I've become increasingly aware of is a sf author will get a great start. Fast paced adrenalin rush or super complex intrigue story...250-350 pages...Boom and we're out. By book 3 they are pushing 600 pages and much of it is not the gripping/ass kickery I originally signed on for. I suppose one cannot do the same thing forever but...I ordered Twisted Metal by Tony Ballentine a few weeks ago after Neal Asher raved about it in his blog, theSkinner. It's scheduled to ship any day now...sigh.

Crazy Super Alloy Giant Robot War is live

http://apps.facebook.com/giantrobotwar/

Our first Facebook "game" :-D

Games, Games, Games

One of the things we've been exploring for the past few months has been Facebook games. Altay turned the rest of us onto these games late last year and to my surprise, there have been a few that have got their hooks into me.

On Friday, we got the alpha of our first Facebook game online. A simple "gift" type game which we will do a formal announcement on in another few weeks. It's simple but addictive. Once we get that title released, so to speak, we'll be moving onto a Black Powder | Red Earth facebook experience. We've done quite a bit of design and work on it already and honestly, it's pretty exciting to be taking the first step into the BPRE universe. More to come ^_^;

Friday was also board game day. Every so often we break out new kinds of games that we don't regularly explore, because a.) it's good to try new things and b.) board/card games have had centuries to hone their multiplayer experiences whereas video games have only been around for few decades. Research value aside, they can also be tremendous amounts of fun.

This week we played:

• The Settlers of Catan
• Acquire Game

Settlers of Catan was a game we bought for Michelle's sister's, boy friend for xmas 07. He had raved about how awesome it was and at the time, it was fairly difficult to come by in his area, so we bought it on Amazon :P

Catan took about 1.5 hours to set up and play and it was awesome. We were all riveted the entire time. One of the coolest things about the game was that there was something for everyone to do every turn, meaning there's no sitting around and waiting for the dice to come back to you. There's an opportunity to take action every round.

This is something we strive for in our products. Our early iterations had a more Counter-Strike/SOCOM system with 1 life per round, but we found people, especially new players, were spending a lot of time being dead and just watching their team mates run around without them. We scrapped this at month 3 and went to a re-spawn based system which in the end turned out to be a much better match for our kind of game.

Acquire is one of Altay's finds. It had some interesting elements to it, but honestly, I felt it was long and dragged. I was bored, restless and by hour 2 I was getting up to check email between turns. I ended up winning some how, but honestly it wasn't my thing. It reminded me a bit of another German designer board game called El Grande.

I should mention, El Grande is a lot of fun and way more engaging than Acquire IMO. It's also the game responsible for me getting into the "designer German games". If you have at least two other people to play with, these games are highly recommended.

We didn't get the chance to spin up a game of Supremacy, which is an old favorite of mine, but wayyy out of print. I got a copy of that and another game the creators made called Roll Out on Ebay over Christmas. But considering how much I like these compact 1-2 hour experiences now, I wonder how much I will like games that used to take between 5-25 hours to complete.

This might be a reflection of my taste in general these days, though. I like that single player experiences have been scaled back to 5-7 hours in general before I am whisked off to multiplayer land, the exception being MGS4 which I was hooked on all the way through.

Return to sender

Spent the weekend in Fayetteville, North Carolina working on draft 2 of the Black Powder | Red Earth screenplay. I've been to Fayetteville 3 times now. To say that it is an alien place to me is an understatement. I've been to places where there are no roads and no one speaks English that are less foreign to me, which is a bit ironic considering how much I am interested in some of the units based there.

People range from good to surreal. But I imagine I come off just the same ^_^;

I picked up a MAV and some new speed load mag pouches from Eagle. If I ever have 5 minutes again maybe I will check them out. I was hoping to do a pistol course this year, but my schedule is so maxed out, I am pretty much limiting myself to things that are directly related to projects I am actively working on right now, aka I re-read "Broken Angels" by Richard K Morgan on the flight because it is the most bad ass scifi/mercenary story ever written. Takeshi Kovacs is probably my favorite character in modern science fiction followed closely(and maybe surpassed by) Neal Asher's Ian Cormac. Both are ruthles killers. One works for himself and the other for AI masters. Both kill people a plenty :)

I received a copy of the Akira 2019 Mechanix book from my amigo, Takafumi Matsubara today. I can't wait to soak it up. I've been on a bit of an Akira resurgance in case you hadn't noticed. I also managed to track down a few of the trades that Dark Horse released. I actually had purchased them all but 3 copies got lunched en route to my door step(or rather weren't adequately described by the sellers...sigh...mail order) :\

Cat Shit One
One of my older favorite manga is a book called Cat Shit One. I just discovered that the creator, Motofumi Kobayashi, has been at it again and released Cat Shit One '08. I also discovered that a mini-series is being produced roughly based on this work and will hit in winter 09.

More to come.