The World's End

And the world was no more.  The apocalypse came and all we know and love was reduced to ash and smoldering ruin...  But I'm not here to discuss the fan reaction to Ben Affleck being cast as Batman, this is a review about Edgar Wright's latest flick (and 3rd in the "Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy") The World's End.  While the Batman announcement generated enough publicity and created a hashmark surplus large enough to shade and texture the Japanese Manga industry for two centuries, Wright, Pegg, Frost, and the rest of the usual suspects put out yet another ridiculously entertaining movie.

Pegg takes on the role Gary King, 12-step Escapee and lead instigator to a group of five formerly hard-drinking, hard-partying British youths, now all grown up with careers and wives, etc. aside for Gary, who remains obsessed with (among other things) completing a 12-pub challenge that he failed so many years ago.  A time when bands like Depeche Mode, The Pixies, Sonic Youth, and Janes Addiction were all the rage.  (Holy crap, just rattling those bands off makes me kind of nostalgic for the early 90's.)

Gary is an annoying alcoholic who still manages to convince his mature friends to reluctantly head back to their hometown and make one final attempt at the epic pub crawl known as "the Golden Mile".  The performance is very good and a nice change from the previous two movies where Frost was the one playing Id to Pegg's more responsible characters.  It's a good thing he can keep your attention and only be borderline too annoying, because the film for about forty minutes has nothing to do with robots or aliens.  I almost feel like I should tag that as a spoiler, because if you came into this movie knowing nothing about it (or Wright and Pegg's film making history together), you'd think this was one of those charming English Comedies like the The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, or when Jeremy Clarkson beat up Piers Morgan.

But yes, a little more than a third into the movie, things get more than a little out of hand as they tend to do in Edgar Wright movies (and real-life pub crawls).  There's an alien invasion, replicants, well-choreographed fight scenes that get more outrageous as the characters build up Super Saiyan levels of Dutch Courage with every pint consumed.  Throughout it all, they actually manage to keep a hold on the human elements, something that sometimes goes missing in the big action "blockbuster" movies when it becomes about how many CG buildings the FX house can annihilate.  There's a strange anti nanny-state message throughout that I didn't expect, but totally dig because with all the government spying stuff in the news nowadays, (Hi NSA, if you're reading this, please click on my Amazon Affiliate links!) a lot of people seem pretty concerned about being free...  To do what they want...  Any old time.

That's impossible, even for a computer!

Back in the early days of the internet, when X-Files fan pages and the *blink* tag roamed the web, I would frequent a number of amateur film sites run by teenagers like myself who were trying to create movies with whatever we had available at the time.   By today's standards, this included technology just a step above the phenakistoscope but not as steampunkishly awesome.  Remember VHS-C?  You're better off if you don't, unless you produce training videos for the Dharma Initiative.  And by "film sites" I mean personal pages on GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, and the like that read more like wish lists of the movies we wanted to make someday.  I'm talking old school, basic HTML, on dial-up connections that would be taxed to their limits by a simple blog with a few pictures.  That didn't really matter though because it was 1996, what the hell is a blog, and did you hear about this movie coming out called Independence Day?  Looks awesome.  Bonus points and a meteoric rise in the pecking order would occur if anyone managed to actually go through the somewhat hellish process of capturing their film-videos and (gasp) putting them up for people in the larger world to see.

After around eight years of slogging through with Pentiums, Pentium II's, III's, AMD Athlons, Semprons and Decepticons and the like, I started to realize that when it came to both hardware and software, my old "If it didn't cost so much, I'd be making indie films every month" excuse was growing less and less credible.  I had a miniDV camcorder and my dual core Athlon desktop could edit standard definition video fast by MySpace era standards.  I was at the tail end of film school, soon to have a Bachelor of Fucking Sciences degree in Film and Media Production (BFS Degree.  Look it up fool.).  I was doing a webcomic called Section 3! (Now resurrected maybe, we'll see) using mainly Photoshop 7.  Youtube was about to become a thing.

Then I got a job.  Like an actual job that didn't involve shoveling popcorn or stripping the coating from copper telephone cables (not even joking, the temp-world is a strange place sometimes).  The ultimate excuse for a procrastinating creative type is "growing up".  It was perfect because with HD available to all, tablet computers and a billion ways to get your work in front of people, I felt like one of those college sport stars that turns into a draft bust but whatever, I was getting paid.

But I still want to make movies.  I still want to tell stories, be it through comics, animation, film, or monosyllabic grunts while explaining my latest cave painting.  I decided to get back into it with NaNoWriMo and more recently, a new webcomic called An Arrow in the Moon.  As I did, I suddenly realized that all the stuff I hoped for back in the old days had arrived.  The things that were always "on the horizon" in the early 2000's actually showed up, RIAA and MPAA attempts to disrupt the tech be damned.  Video editing is not expensive anymore and the need to "capture" from sources is essentially gone or a one-step process.  A basic laptop in the sub $700 dollar range can edit HD video without a problem.  You can put your work up on YouTube, Vimeo, or just throw it up as a torrent.

So what's the point of this, the longest blog post I've put up to date here?  It's for me to complain like an old man about how easy you whippersnappers have it these days.  We would have killed for the stuff that exists now back in the day, I'll tell you what.  And even if we did have it back then, we had to walk fifteen miles in the snow to access it. And before that, we had to walk fifteen miles just to get to the snow.  Actually, this post is more of a letter to myself, reminding me that things are possible now.

So I need to get off my ass, you need to get off my lawn, and we need to start creating, because the technology is here, it's relatively cheap, and despite all this, I estimate 80% of the stuff coming out of mainstream media/entertainment is kind of garbage.

Below:  Amazon links to things I use, because they say I get money if I convince people to buy them.  Lacking items like Photoshop, higher-end Wacom stuff, and Some other Adobe products because they're all high-quality, but linking them here goes against my thesis of creativity on the cheap.

• Manga Studio 5: This program is the stuff if you're making comics.  I was kind of skeptical because the non-EX version is under a hundred dollars.  Amazon's got the best price I could find if you're not a current student.  If you are, I think you can go directly to Smith-Micro and get it for $50 bucks.
• Sony Movie Studio Platinum Suite 12: That's quite a mouthful.  Disclaimer:  I actually use an earlier version of this, but unless they completely dropped the ball, this program's got everything you need to edit HD video unless you're trying to get your stuff ready for 35mm theatrical release.  Sound tools are above average.
• SketchBook Pro 6 : Simple and cheap.  Missing some advanced features you'd find in Manga Studio or Photoshop, but great if you just want to draw without a bunch of nonsense everywhere or consider a lot of photo manipulation stuff to be "cheating".
• Monoprice 10X6.25 Inches Graphic Drawing Tablet: The only thing that is a little sketchy (ha! see what i did there?) about this thing is the pen.  It feels a little like it could break on you, but after a year of heavy use, it hasn't.  Also, the drivers are a little strange.  You can find updated ones at UC-Logic, but be warned.  The site is a little ESL.

Game of Thrones isn't back until 2014. You need your epic fantasy fix.

An Arrow in the Moon launches on Tuesday, 08/20/2013.  The intention is for a normal update schedule of Tuesday and Thursday.  It's brightly colored Disneyesque characters in horrible situations.  Maybe not quite George R.R. Martin horrible, but pretty violent.  The opening sequence is a pretty brutal (well, as brutal as my drawing skills are capable of portraying) fight scene, just to make sure people know off the bat that despite my somewhat cartoony style, I'm not shooting for kid's stuff.  Well maybe if your kids were like me and like violent medieval fighting...  But chances are they're not.  You decide, I'm not raising your damn kids, take some responsibility for once.

Sorry, about that.  Come back, I've changed.  Anyway, doing this comic has made me remember how time consuming the whole full-color, draw-ink-color process is, even though I'm doing almost all of the art for this thing on computer.  If I want to even remotely remain on target with this thing, I might be changing the art style after the opening sequence to something more streamlined.

On that note, I think Smith-Micro's Manga Studio 5 is my software of choice now.  I've worked with Autodesk Sketchbook 6 and Art Rage 4 in the past year and this might finally be the full package as far as comic artist software goes.  I'll probably be dedicating my next blog to the annoying journey of frustration that is drawing/painting software.  (I almost tried to install my copy of Photoshop 7, but though better of it.)

Wine and Meteors

The Julian Starfest is one of those local San Diego County events I've been to like three times now, but can't remember how I learned of it's existence.  All my friends who know about it appear to have learned about it from me.  At any rate, it's one of those cool events that doesn't appear to advertise much, but still draws a decent number of people.  I think there's a decent turnout anyway.  We got there as it was getting dark and you mostly hear rather than see the people around you or catch red-tinged glimpses of them (no white lights allowed in the viewing area).

Usually, the organizers do this thing around a new moon so as to take advantage of dark skies and whatnot, but this year was during the weekend of the Perseid Meteor Shower.  This meant we had a lot of dazzling streaks of burning space debris in the sky with the accompanying oohs and ahs from the crowd, and low cursing from me having missed it because I was fiddling with the settings on my camera.  A camera that's probably not ideal for low light astro-photography, but I'm not made of money so it takes all my crazy mad skillz to squeeze halfway decent images from it.

Did I mention this festival takes place on my HOME PLANET?
BEHOLD OUR TWIN MOONS!

Big Dipper above astronomy enthusiasts.

I may or may not have managed to catch a few shooting stars that I only noticed once I reviewed my pictures on a larger screen.  There were some planes and satellites floating about up there, but by trajectory I think I can safely guess that they weren't aircraft, or else there is some massive government cover-up regarding unreported plane crashes.

Left side, Middle, coming off the right side of the tree.  Meteor?

Center of the canopy roof.  Another One?

At about 11-ish, we called it quits and departed from the Menghini Winery (oh yeah, this all goes down on a vineyard up by Volcan Mountain (whoa...  Like Vulcan, because space and shit!), hence the title of this post.)  Holy hell, did I just use a weird parenthetical within a parenthetical?  Thought I was doing javascript for a second there.  Sorry.  Onward.

There were still people watching the meteor shower scattered around the grounds as we left, as evidenced by the fact that I nearly tripped over two of them on the way out and the constant murmur of stargazers in all directions.  There were probably more galactic fireworks to be seen, but there was an hour plus drive before returning to San Diego proper.  

Official Website:  Julian Starfest

Bigger Photoset:  Flickr!

You thought I gave up again, didn't you?

Got the post comic-con, back to work, jacked-up sleep pattern for a while there.  The one where you're ripped back into the normal world where you sit a a cubicle and have to catch up to the stacks of paperwork that built up like squatter villages while you were out having fun.  Depressed and tired from playing catch-up and pushing paper for a week, you can't muster the energy to blog or draw or much of anything creative-wise.  Not familiar with that?  You go to hell.

No seriously, don't go to hell.  I didn't mean it.  Here's some concept art from my now very soon to premier webcomic.  You can check out the page I set up at http://anarrowinthemoon.thecomicseries.com

But don't go there yet.  Unless you're a fan of CSS layouts and no content.

An abandoned fortress at the edge of the Ermynnland

Cearynth Covylli, the Queen of Rivers

The crown worn by the King or Queen of Rivers is a living length of Snake Ivy woven into a circlet with a Star Aquamarine at the front.