Last Zombie Standing

Two films released onto YouTube in a week, and both have been a long time in production. Here's the final cut of Last Zombie Standing, my entry with Team Special Circumstances in the Movieum Zombie Film Competition 2009. Watch in HQ here or on the YouTube channel. I held off releasing this so that the screenwriter and I could re-edit and put together this shorter cut with completed effects scenes (a slightly longer version was entered in the competition.) I had great fun making this film - enjoy!

Soupremacy: animated music video

Soupremacy is an animated music video collaboration between myself and composer David Novan. You can see the HD version here or on the YouTube channel. This animation was produced in Cinema 4D and edited in Blender.

Edit 6.12.09: Soupremacy has been in production for almost a year: I first posted a still image of the Rocket here in January!

Screenplay Babylon [Review: Babylon A.D.]

This film, in which Vin Diesel's future mercenary smuggles a mysterious young woman and her religious minder from a chaotic, kill-or-be-killed Eastern Europe to the richer, advertise-or-be-advertised West, surprises with both strengths and weaknesses but ultimately disappoints.

The casting is excellent - for your money you get Vin Diesel who, if his repertoire is limited to tough-as-nails mercenaries, tough-as-nails convicted killers etc., at least he plays them extremely well, plus Michelle Yeoh! as that religious minder who is peaceful but not weak, and Charlotte Rampling!! as a sinister, white trouser-suit wearing cult leader. The settings, particularly the poverty and lawlessness of the East, are well portrayed and the plot holds together (or at least it would do - see below.)

I felt the script for this film was poor - actually bad enough to kill the film. A particular low is Rampling's diatribe to her minions about their failure to recover Melanie Thierry's character, but all the leads are forced to deliver totally unconvincing dialogue. This is a real waste of talent and also, through bad, bad, bad exposition dumping, ruins what would otherwise be a cool plot - a cynical cult seeking to stage a miracle in order to become a real religion. And I can't bring myself to discuss the ending.

Given the presence of Vin - and for that matter Yeoh - you might be prepared to accept a lame script in fair exchange for the promise of extravagant stunts or thrilling martial arts action. Sorry - the talent is wasted here too. Action sequences are brief and unimaginative, and neither Vin nor Yeoh get to strut their funky stuff beyond the odd fisticuff or gunfight. There's also an entire troop of parkour stunt actors credited - but in their confrontation with Vin and party all they seem to do is jump around as if the seedy nightclub setting is actually a bouncy castle.

It's a real credit to all the actors here, Vin included, that they actually do as much as they can with such poor material. It's amazing how much a good actor can achieve non-verbally, but sadly in this case it's not quite enough to restore the balance.

Kindness from a stranger

A few weeks ago I had a bag stolen. It happened quickly but was a huge loss although I was lucky enough to be amongst supportive friendly company at the time. I quickly found what some others in this situation may also have discovered - that it's the personal things, or the intellectual property, that cause you the most distress. In my case the photos on the camera or the half-written drafts on a flash drive rather than the camera or drive itself.

Yesterday, a stranger tracked me down and returned the flash drive with contents intact. I simply feel a need to report the event.

Earth vs the Neutrino [Review: 2012]

The sun is spewing out more and more neutrinos – and they’re not the usual ones that pass through the Earth without so much as a blip on a billion dollar detection facility. No, these are special neutrinos that boil the Earth’s core. Cue a series of plucky, lucky escapes as cardboard cut-out characters drive their cars or fly their planes away from continental collapse, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. Here’s why I expected not to like 2012: the two and a half hours running time, and the themes - we’ve seen earthquakes, mega-canos and tidal waves before. Yawn.

Here’s what I liked about 2012:

The triumph of spectacle over realism or plot is total and shameless. There’s no pretence that any of this holds together. In reality the aeroplane escaping the collapsing city might have avoided some skyscrapers but would have hit one of them; in the film world the vision of lucky escape after lucky escape, coincidental meeting after coincidental meeting, is the point.

This is very much an old school disaster movie. There’s no way to avert the crisis – we are at the mercy of the elements; the planet, and life itself will survive with or without us – our quest is only to survive the cataclysm not prevent it.

The Arks, when they appear, are awesome, colourful creations of sci-fi art. They deserve to be found on the cover of a Golden Age paperback.

The idea of an optimistic novel about human selflessness, so bad it only sold 500 copies, ending up on an Ark by chance – simply because another character was reading it – is cool.

Emmerich’s trademark landmark-trashing scenes are more artistic and more fun than before, if not actually more meaningful: it’s not just tidal waves and cracks in the ground – the White House destroyed by the John F Kennedy aircraft carrier; as Vatican City falls a crack runs through the Sistine Chapel roof separating Man from God. It’s as if the world is actually being destroyed by irony. Admittedly you’ve probably seen many of those moments in the trailer.

In the face of disaster, do we become selfish, seeking our own survival, do we try to save our closest loved ones, or do we become completely selfless, risking our lives so that strangers might survive? This is not a deep philosophical film. But Emmerich’s answer – that there’s a bit of all these things – seems fair enough.

One thing jarred for me which was the science: not so much that it was clearly all bullshit or that the exposition was so crude – rather, was it really necessary at all? Why not make a movie genuinely about ancient prophecy or even unexplained catastrophe and just cut the scientists out altogether? The science strand made “more sense” (a relative term) in The Day After Tomorrow but adds very little to the plot here.

Overall I found this film to be watchable and enjoyable mainly due to it's brazen silliness and infectious sense of fun - perhaps the most fun you can have while watching billions of people die. Incidentally watch out: there will be not one but two Asylum takes on this movie - Megafault and 2012: Supernova. Meanwhile I look forward to Emmerich's adaptation of The Cherry Orchard next year - that cherry orchard is going down.

Dream a little dream [First impressions: The Temporal Void]

This is an early update - it will be centuries before my descendents finally reach the end of this novel. Set centuries after the events of the Commonwealth novels, The Temporal Void is the sequel to The Dreaming Void and there will eventually be a third book. I hesitate to call this a trilogy though.

The archetypal fantasy trilogy is the Lord of the Rings, and this illustrates the point that the three parts of a trilogy, while they tell a coherent whole story, should still be separate novels with their own very different flavours. TTV simply carries on from TDV as if you had turned the page - there’s no compromise or even recap, and nothing to suggest a specific plot focus for this novel. It’s as if the author actually wrote a single, 2500 page novel, which has been simply cut into three parts to facilitate packaging.

Having said that, more of a good thing is sometimes still a good thing. The Void storyline continues in two parts – the story outside the Void of complex, multi-stranded interstellar politics, and the Discworld-esque story inside the void. Interestingly, while the outside world is full of sci-fi trappings – wormholes, augmented humanity, clones, spaceships and aliens and planet-eating weaponry, there’s no attempt to make the science coherent or plausible so it might as well be fantasy.

Inside the void, technology doesn’t seem to work and instead magic rules supreme – but it’s a simple magic, and most of it comes down to a single ability, telekinesis – for example the ability to shoot fire is explained by the ability to telekinetically spin up a cylinder of air. So despite the fantasy language this plot strand is much more sci-fi.

How to get ahead in CGI

We used this scene in Last Zombie Standing but during the 48 hour period I only managed a low resolution fluid sim. Here's what it should have looked like:

As I'm trying to get faster at these techniques, I always look at what the time constraints were for any particular shot. For this one they included researching tutorials and examples (this can often be the most time consuming part!), finding a decent freeware spine model; fine-tuning the position of the alpha mask; trying out different variations of the fluid flow; baking at a half-decent fluid resolution. Rendering was surprisingly quick but there aren't many objects in the scene apart from the spine and the fluid mesh.

For any composite effect to work you need to have some kind of interaction between the live action and virtual elements. Examples include lighting, shadows, foreground objects, reflections or physical interactions - in this shot the fluid is partially obstructed by some of the leaves on the ground.