I know I’ll lose a lot of respect from friends and relatives in admitting this but I never read any of John Marsden’s critically acclaimed and fanatically loved young adult book series growing up. Crazy and unbelievable I know, but I guess I was just the sort of kid who was more concerned with where his next hit of creamy 16 bit video game goodness was coming from. So yes, I went in to this film fairly ignorant about the story and completely clueless as to the tone of the series. Read more [+]
“There came a day, a day unlike any other. When Earth’s mightiest heroes found themselves united against a common threat, to fight the foes no single superhero could withstand. On that day, The Avengers were born.”
The Avengers cometh. Well, not yet, but the above teaser trailer (more like an audio byte with some handsome animation) will surely do for now.
Last month’s Comic-con saw geek-favourite Joss Whedon announced as the man tasked with the challenge of making Hollywood’s superheroes come together as a single team ‘united against a common threat.’
Around the same time, romcom star Marc Ruffalo was presented as our new Hulk – the third in as many appearances under the new Marvel Studios banner – while Jeremy Renner stepped up as Hawkeye. Read more [+]
I hope some of you managed to catch How To Train Your Dragon in theaters (and 3D) and got as much out of it as I did. If you did that I also highly recommend you listen to this wonderful interview on the Speaking Of Animation podcast which interviews the directors and co-writers, Dean DeBois and Chris Sanders. As well as talking about their excellent work on How To Train Your Dragon, they also talk a bit about their past work, including of course directing and writing Lilo And Stitch when they were at Disney.
Podcast: How To Train Your Dragon directors Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois
Spoilers ahead though – so listen only if you’ve seen the film.
This interview is part master class in storytelling, part behind the scenes and all of it is fascinating. Run by Dreamworks animators and staffers, The Speaking Of Animation podcast is aimed at animators, but the show is excellent for filmmakers and film fans of all kinds. Take special note of Chris and Dean’s stories on how various story elements of How To Train Your Dragon were conceived and added, because you can see in the final product how well these ideas end up supporting and plusing the story by an order of magnitude.
A short film/trailer for a proposed new film based on the Mortal Kombat video games has hit the web. This gritty “realistic” remake was created to promote director Kevin Tancharoen vision of a new Mortal Kombat feature film. The 7 minute short stars Michael Jai White as Jax and Jeri Ryan as Sonya Blade. A few other characters make some appearances with surprising results.
For those of you have watched it, check out a certain character freeze frame below. Read more [+]
How To Train Your Dragon tells the story of a village of Vikings who have to battle with constantly being raided and pillaged themselves by swarms of dragons who steal their herds and destroy their homes. Our protagonist is a scrawny Viking-to-be called Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel; animated by many), who also happens to be the son of the village chief, Stoic (voiced by Gerard Butler; animated by many). Relegated to being an apprentice blacksmith, Hiccup uses his technical know-how to construct a cannon. One night during a dragon raid Hiccup manages to take down his first dragon using the cannon – but on finding the downed beast Hiccup finds himself unable to kill the wounded dragon and sets him free.
How To Train Your Dragon is the most recent 3D animated feature from Dream Works Animation, the same studio behind the Shrek series, Kung Fu Panda and Monsters Versus Aliens – and this may very well be their best film by a wide margin.
Halo is a multi-billion dollar franchise that’s taken the gaming world by storm and is slowly making the move to film; this animated DVD release is the first step. When Halo: Combat Evolved was released in 2002, I was one of the many to buy it. Hell, if you owned an XBOX you had to own this game, at the very least it was one of only a handful of games out at the time. I enjoyed the game, quite a bit in fact. It was new and exciting, with fast paced first person shooter action that rivalled GoldenEye 007. However even then I found the story lacking, it was hollow and generic and ever since then as each new game has come out they have tried and failed to make the universe even slightly interesting.
When I heard about this series of short animated films, done in a style similar to the entertaining Animatrix and the fantastic Batman: Gotham Knight, I was actually interested. This could have been what got me invested in the Halo characters and want to explore the universe they created… it could have been.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a film based on the book by Roald Dahl and while I don’t recall too many specifics of the book, I do recall it being clever, amusing and one of my favourite books for a time. I’m uncertain just how faithful an adaptation this film is, but it does still conjure the same feelings of awesome – well, with one exception. Read more [+]
For regular readers or anyone who reads the dates on articles you probably would have noticed a decisive lack of updates on Space-Meat recently. This is due to a few things, like that pesky thing called life getting in the way, but mostly I have been hard at work producing a new internet video debate show for Privateer Productions called The Lobby.
Here is the first episode and despite being rough and myself rambling on way to much, I think it turned out OK. Big thanks to Lee and Shannon from the hit C31 program The Bazura Project for being our guests.
Twitter
Youtube |
Copyright © 2012 Space Meat |
