Here, I have done something entirely different than my normal kind of post.
Follow the link to my GooglePage to see exactly what.
Vagrant Story Screenshots - Part OneMore like this coming soon!
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
Wizards; a really horrible movie
Wizards is an animated film from the '70s directed by Ralph Bakshi. I recently had the misfortune of watching it. Perhaps at this point needless to say, it was a horrible and painful expereince.
To be fair,
Wizards was a very low-budget movie. It cost $1.2 million to make. For comparison, an episode of the Simpsons costs almost twice that at $2 million. The team that made the movie was very small and this was back in the 1970s before they had nice computer effects like digital color, transparency, motion tweening, 3D models, particle effects or any of that modern jazz.
Wizards's biggest problem is in its character design. Simply put, the character design is atrocious and inconsistent. The styles used are not consistent and if the characters were not together at the same time on screen, one might be inclined to believe that they were not from the same movie. Most of the character designs are just plain ugly. There are some that are neat, for instance Peace the assasin robot, Blackthorne the big evil dude, and umm... that is the
entirety of the list of good character designs.
Peace is a simple and elegant character design marred by crappy coloring techniques of the '70s.
He is almost entirely red and therein lies the problem. The negative transfer to DVD causes the RED to completely overtake the quality of the design so most of the time you really can't see how good he looks. In some shots, the red is darker and it looks much better.
Then the rest of the characters are simply a mess. Avatar, the old good-guy wizard is a short-stubby dwarf with mickey-mouse hands and a red clown nose. He looks really way to silly for a movie that takes itself this seriously.
There is Ellinore the fairy-something and her character design is overly sexualized as her nipples are constantly perky showing and her costume is so unrealistic as that if it was real and she were to turn around her boobs would pop out. Its honestly a little surprising that the movie is only rated PG with her around. But her face is drawn in such a way as to make her a little bit ugly and a little bit of a Betty Boop ripoff.
There Blackthorne's masked goons. They wear gas-masks, jumpsuits, gloves and boots. They are also all fatasses. They look neither endearing nor menacing and as villians they kind of fail.
Then there are at least 70 more character designs in the movie and they all suck. I could go on forever describing why, but you probably get the idea by now.
Then the next really noticable thing that is wrong with this movie is the audio. The sound effects are simply bad. I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with those dollar store toy guns that make "8 different sci-fi sounds." or soemthing like that. It honestly sounds like they got the sound effects from those toys. The music also is quite bad with minimalistic Casio keyboard compositions which sound cheesy and tinny.
the next major problem with the movie is the general inconsitency in it visually. The movie starts with some crappy live-action effects, then goes into sepia still illustrations in front of live-action effects. (This actually looks pretty good though.) Then after about 20 minutes, actual animation starts. The animation has many different background styles. Some are just live-action special effects. Some are crappy little paintings. Others are amazingly detailed pencil and pen drawings that make it impossible to believe the characters are really there in the scene. However, the worst part of the animation is Ralph Bakshi's experimental version of rotoscoping which I'll get to in a bit. There are some other weird visual styles also going onthat just don't look good when put all together.
Ralph Bakshi's version of Rotoscoping is at times the worst idea an animator has ever had. Rotoscoping is a method of animation where you have actors do the movie in live-action and then you have animators draw over it. It can look really cool. (See the movie Waking Life for an example of that.) But Bakshi screws rotoscoping up bad.
He thinks, "What if instead of having the animators try to actually draw in the details and neat things from the live-action footage, I just increased the contrast of the film and had the animators ink right over that? Then I could put that in front of crappy live-action special-effects or flat colors! It'd look just like animation!" Of course, it doesn't really look like animation. It looks really obviously like live-action stock footage (mostly from WWII and Midieval Reenactments) with the contrast set up really high.
This effect works best when he has the animators directly trace a tank and then actually put it in with the animation. The tank has a natural jaunt from the terrain it drove on makes it bounce up and down in the same way as a cartoon tank would. The red and black high-contrast details then make it look iconic.
But usually, it just looks trashy and cheap with silhouette nazis looking stupid. To try and make it look more like it was a part of the movie, he had the animators add little horns and wings to it. The whole effect looks stupid, stupid, stupid.
What about the plot? I haven't touched that yet. The plot is decent albeit a little simple. It is a weird mesh of nazi-symbolism, anti-technology propaganda and the typical fantasy fare of unlikely heroes who go out to destroy a great evil. The plot itself is really not that bad. It even had character development and that isn't a bad thing at all. The problem however is in the dialogue. The dialogue is not funny, not realistic, and is ultimately very boring.
The voice-actors are mostly able to do good things with the dialogue. The voice-acting is in most places, pretty good. However, interestingly enough, the voice-acting goes to crap when it comes to the character Peace. Peace has an annoying and toneless voice.
Ultimately, though, when it comes down to it, the movie is simply a mess. Its a messy jumble of inconsitency. The visuals range from "not bad" to "OH GOD! They used rotoscoped stock footage as a background in a fight scene? That looks TERRIBLE." It just isn't a good movie. I would recomend not seeing it.
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
Spore Gameplay Video - Google VideoI'm sorry to degrade to link-blogging, but this video was just too damned awesome. Its a video of Will Wright playing his upcoming video game Spore. The whole thing is absoutely incredible and I wholeheartedly look forward to the game Spore now after watching it.
Its kind of an important thing for the Game Industry because the game was made with an exceptionally small amount of people. As opposed to the massive 40+ person dev teams that are often utilized today, Spore is being made with about a dozen people and almost all of them are programmers rather than artists. Almost all of the art in the game is generated from the code.
Its really really incredible to think about. And the video is cool. But I warn you, its a half-hour long, so make sure you got some time before you decide to wach it.
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
God's faithful, turn away now.
I wrote a little something today. I wanted to write a rock opera and started writing some lyrics. I'm honestly, quite unhappy with them, but I feel like I should publish them anyway. THis is a shittily written semi-rhyming presentation of aetheism that fits a meter pretty closely. Try singing it to the tune of "Offend in Every Way" by The White Stripes.
Select the text to read it.
So you love your god,
You think he loves you too?
What if its not true?
Isn't that just odd?
You think you love your God.
What if he aint' there?
That something you could bear?
Is that worse for you?
Unspectacular, that's true.
But this much, I know.
Ther ain't a God, no mo'.
The Bible's full of shit.
Packed quite thick with it.
Death sentences abound.
God's evil all around.
That wnat you want from Him?
A holy murderer?
That is not public domain verse no matter how much you despise it.
I don't like it because I feel that it isn't ok to unabashedly attack anything without presenting evidence. I'm not happy with its quality in any way.
IF you want some good evidence for aetheism, turn to the Aetheism section on
Squidi.net or Google. Search "Bible Inconsitency." You'll find plenty of stuff.
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
A Sudden Epiphany on the works of Heinlein
I was recently reading the book by Robert A. Heinlein,
Stranger in a Strange Land. I must say, it is a book I am enjoying. There are many neat ideas presented around what so far is a plot that just barely holds up to coherence. There is of course, a plot present, but its not a good one and that isn't the point. The point of the novel is its many ponderings.
However, the ephiphany here is that the book
Starship Troopers by the same author is the same kind of novel. Its not a book with a good plot, and its painfully boring in most parts. However, the importance of the novel is its ideas on philosophy and governemnt. It has a plot about aliens attacking Earth and some asshole is joining the army to fight the aliens, but that is completely not the point. Those are the boring parts. The interesting parts are when he flashes back to a class in high school. I forget what it was called, but it was a dissection of politics and philosophy and was quite blatantly a way for Heinlein to get up on a soapbox and talk about these subjects. His ideas here are teremendously interesting and fun to read, but they don't really fit with the rest of the book.
The rest of the book is mostly descriptive of future technologies and idiotic musings of the portagonist. The futuristic war technologies are cool though and I guess some dumbass decided
to turn it into a movie. Unsurprisingly, the movie wasn't very good. However, the parts that made the book worth reading aren't really movie material so they were cut out. You're left with a pretty standard and uninteresting movie that some people like, saying its fun or campy, but honestly, it just isn't that good.
So I was thinking as I read, how this could be turned into a movie, (Its something I do when I read fiction to keep my mind focussed.) and I realized that it would be impossible to achieve the goodness of the book in the form of a good movie. Most of it is introspective thought or discussion of politics and philosophy. Interesting things are said, but good movies just don't come from endless discussion of the natures and meanings of the universe.
(Of course, there are exceptions.) Stranger in a Strange Land can only exist and be good as a book. If it were a movie, you'd have to cut out what makes it good in order to make it work as a movie with good pacing. At the very least, you'd need the world's greatest actors and actresses in order to portray the depth in some of these characters.
I recomend both of these books though. And while I'm at it, I might as well also suggest
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I also recomend one of the movies I mention here. I'm sure you can figure out which one.
Wow, I actually made a blog post that I feel proud of. Been a while since that happened.
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
A Poorly Executed Piece of Bloggery
This blog is shameful. I intended at the beginning to update it everyday with some piece I could manage to render from my ass, but I feel like I failed at that. My updates are far too rare, and often are literally just stuff I happened to have lying around.
I also decided I'd try and keep this away from the woeful muckery that has made up some of my recent posts, "there are few things I hate more than the times when I hate myself" is just the type of thing I wanted to avoid when I started this blog.
I'd like to continue doing this, but everyime I say that, it heralds much time of not updating. I'm gonna try though. I'll see if I can make my Mac or my Gmail account send me automatic updates telling me to update my blog.
Coming soon: Previously Promised Rant about the Public Domain law in the U.S.
Bow down to my awesome-ness for I am nifty!
