The Empire Strikes Flatpack [Review: Aniara]

The space cruise ship Aniara begins its three-month mission to bring thousands of moderately rich Earthlings to Mars, leaving behind an environmental catastrophe. Amongst the passengers is MR (Emelie Jonsson), a technician responsible for tending to MIMA, an AI that can give the colonists soothing visions of Earth before the disaster. But shortly after departure a collision leaves the Aniara drifting off course with no engine, challenging Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) and his crew to try to find a solution and keep the passengers happy.

Aniara is a Swedish-Danish movie – and you can tell this as it takes place on the decks of a rectangular cruise ship clearly designed and built by the Ikea-Lego Corporation (Assemble Your Own Better Worlds). There’s some clever low-budget sci-fi filmmaking – the interior of the Aniara has been filmed in airports, shopping malls and hotels, or perhaps airport shopping malls and hotels. CGI is sparsely used, basic but effective, mainly limited to exterior views of the drifting Aniara.

The Aniara. Slightly rippled with a flat underside.

Aniara is based on the famous epic poem by Swedish Nobel prize winner Harry Martinson, which as well as this 2018 movie has also inspired an opera and several obscure albums in musical styles from jazz to metal. The original poem incidentally is subject to disgraceful anti-English discrimination. While the Swedish, French, Japanese and Spanish editions are all on Kindle for under £14, Sjoberg’s English translation starts at £117 in paperback only. And this isn’t even the most depressing thing about the poem.

Emelie Jonsson carries the film, playing MR as a character determined to be happy and optimistic, to persevere and to see the best in others. She believes in love and kindness. She’s perhaps a symbol for the human spirit. While other characters, such as MR’s roommate the astronomer, swing constantly between positivity and negativity, it takes a lot to bring MR down, and when this happens it is painful.

Beautiful but misleading poster for Aniara. While the woman in the centre is MR, the main character in the film, she generally looks happier than this. However she does occasionally look over her shoulder. The spaceship in the foreground is not the Aniara and indeed is never seen in the movie, and I don't recognize the coridoor behind MR's head either.

I loved the economical and atmospheric setting, and the contrast between MR’s optimistic naïveté and the growing despair of the Aniara society. Will hope triumph over darkness? I won’t give away the ending but I repeat, this is a Swedish-Danish movie. The movie is divided into years of the voyage, with each year bringing new, sinister developments. It’s bleak – only three years into the voyage there appears to be a line-dancing revival, and things go downhill fast from there. The film ends not with a traditional Hollywood bang but an indie Scandinavian whimper, which is in keeping with the tone and story but may disappoint some.

Aniara is a deliciously dark indie sci-fi drifting in the direction of three stars.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

Meet The Parents [Review: Get Out]

Photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is travelling with his girlfriend Rose (Alison Williams) to meet her parents for the first time, and is anxious about how they will react to an interracial relationship. On arrival he is greeted warmly and his fears appear groundless - but the parents have their own eccentricities, and the more he gets to know the Armitage family, the more he becomes convinced that there is something strange and sinister afoot at their household.

Get Out is a well-received horror movie from 2017, directed by Jordan Peele. It has won several awards including the Oscar for best screenplay - and well deserved. This is a clever film. The theme of racial intolerance and stereotyping is explored intelligently to play all sorts of psychological games with the audience, while subtle clues are incepted to pave the way for a horror twist in the final act. The movie opens with a subversion of a stereotype - a black person becoming increasingly nervous as he walks through a white neighbourhood, and proceeds to a fairly brutal kidnapping - this scene signals from the start that this is a horror movie, as otherwise the build-up of tension in the first act is so restrained that you might forget this and think you are watching some other kind of drama. There is a challenge in a film like this - if you make racism the main theme throughout, how do you come up with a horror twist that's even more horrific at the end? I don't want to spoil the movie, so all I can say is that this goal is achieved.

There's little to criticise here. In addition to the script, the performances are excellent and the setting deeply atmospheric. There are one or two tiny plot holes, including an escapology feat that I still haven't figured out, and a completely superfluous and ill-advised use of a candle, but that's about it.

Meeting the parents is a terrifying concept in itself, explored in depth in the films Meet The Parents (2000) and Meet The Fockers (2004). These films are sometimes misclassified as comedies rather than psychological thrillers. They are however enjoyable, unlike the all-time worst meet-the-parents movie, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1968). I have watched this double-Oscar-winning film to spare you the pain of doing so - its' excruciating to watch in the 21st century, even knowing that it was progressive and well-meaning back in the day, and exploration of racial issues is clumsy, a million miles away from Peele's brilliant script.

Get Out succeeds on all levels. A truly horrific three stars out of five.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

U Can't Skek Sis [review: Dark Crystal episode 2]

Episode 2 of The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance has many pleasures. Deet has found her way to the surface, and despite being unused to the glare of the three suns has met her first podling and her first fizzgig who may prove to be a bit of a scene-stealer. The Skeksis are as treacherous as ever - not least to each other, and Rian and Brea are both in so much trouble for different reasons.

With some movies or shows there is a drive towards realism, whether through special or visual effects, with the ultimate goal of making the audience forget they are watching a created fantasy. Here the effect is different. It's never in doubt that you are watching puppets - Muppets, even, but the artistry is so good that you still accept them as real characters and care about their struggles.

I have taken a decision not to binge-watch The Dark Crystal. It's too good - I want to take a bit more time and enjoy each episode. Also, at this point two episodes in I feel a need to go back and watch the 1982 movie, strictly for research purposes.

Fantastic Beasts And Thra To Find Them [Review: Dark Crystal episode 1]

The world of Thra is changing. The Skeksis, alien vulture-like creatures who have ruled over the native Gelflings for hundreds of years, have plundered the power of the Crystal to sustain themselves, and this is beginning to influence Thraian lifeforms in sinister ways. Most of the Gelflings are extremely gullible and view the obviously evil Skeksis as benevolent lords, but one or two are beginning to smell a rat. Junior guards Rian (Taron Egerton and Neil Sterenberg) and Mira (Alicia Vikander and Helena Smee) are searching the Skeksis castle for an escaped Spitter when they have an unfortunate encounter with the Skeksis chief scientist; meanwhile Gelfling princess Brea (Anya Taylor-Joy and Alice Dinnean) becomes suspicious of the tributes offered to the Skeksis lords during the annual tithing ceremony, and underground-dwelling Deet (Nathalie Emmanuel and Beccy Henderson) discovers that her favourite baby nurloc has become a little irritable. Something isn't quite right.

Set before the events of the 1982 movie, The Dark Crystal is a new TV series produced by the Jim Henson company and available on Netflix. Like the movie, it's an ambitious attempt to tell an epic science fiction story through puppetry - the cast, and the many forms of wildlife on Thra, are all portrayed by puppets. However this is not an anti-CGI campaign but a pairing of visual and special effects, with live-action puppetry transported to a computer generated landscape.

Thra is a planet rich in fantastic beasts, and they have been created with imagination and humour - this is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the episode. Imagine Avatar re-created by the Muppets. In fact there are plenty of similarities between Pandora and Thra. Both ecosystems have been imagined in great detail, and there does seem to be a lot of bioluminescence about on both planets.

The first episode has to introduce the planet's backstory through a brief history lesson, introduce the many Gelfling factions, and begin the stories of the Gelflings and Skeksis central to the plot - as a result the action switches from region to region rather like an episode of Game of Thrones. And without providing too many spoilers, as with Game of Thrones maybe you shouldn't get too fond of any particular characters.

Speaking of characters, each major role in Dark Crystal is credited to two people - a voice actor and a puppeteer. The voice cast is stellar - see examples above, but the list also includes Mark Hamill, Simon Pegg, Sigourney Weaver, Helena Bonham-Carter, Killjoys' Hannah John-Kamen and a few Game of Throners for good measure. Look at the full cast list on IMDb here and weep. I haven't heard of any of the puppeteer cast but I now wish I had - they are incredibly talented.

Conclusion: a strong first episode that provides exposition, starts off several plots, introduces characters and gives some idea of just how epic this series could be. The rest of the series has much to live up to.

The Only Whale Is Essex [Review: White Space]

Space... the final food frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Essex, it's continuing mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new recipes, to boldly eat what no man has eaten before.

White Space, also released as Beyond White Space, is a 2018 sci-fi movie. It is the future, and mankind has taken up space fishing. Captain Richard Bentley (Holt McCallany) commands the starship Essex and its dysfunctional, squabbling and unfeasibly good-looking crew. Their mission: to catch space-crabs (these are giant, edible asteroid-dwelling creatures actually called Clickers, not some sort of space STD) under the watchful eye of inspector Navarro (Zulay Henao). However Bentley's father perished seeking Tien Lung, a legendary dragon-like space creature, and Bentley is obsessed with revenge. Yes, this is another sci-fi take on Moby Dick. And no, this is not going to end well.

The best aspects of White Space are the ship and the crew. The Essex is well designed inside and out, it has character - part submarine, part trawler, it's dark and atmospheric, there's plenty of blue lighting which is important in sci-fi, and by the end of the film you can feel reasonably familiar with it. Is it named after my home county of Essex, England, famed for its orange lifeforms? Or for the various towns or counties also called Essex in the US? Perhaps it was named after David Essex, who finally receives the acclaim he so deserves for the song "A Winter's Tale" in the 22nd century. We will never know. The visual effects are great for the various spaceships, a little less great for the creatures.

I enjoyed getting to know the crew - interesting characters and interesting relationships, although Hawthorne (Mike Genovese), the marinated ancient mariner, is a bit of an annoying cliché. The cast are relative unknowns, at least to me. Perhaps I should get out more.

I actually think this film would have been better if it had just focussed on the captain and crew with their various obsessions, and let their tensions, arguments and misbehaviour go even further - but instead the writers throw in such highly original elements as Space Pirates (TM)! and a Parasitic Life Form (TM)! which add little and get in the way of the story.

White Space is a decent B-movie, and as Moby Dick sci-fi adaptations go I found it more enjoyable than 2010: Moby Dick. It gets enough right to be watchable despite its flaws, and manages to reel in a leviathan 3 stars out of 5.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

Bird On The Wire [work in progress: Peahen]

[Peahen, modelled in Blender 2.76]

[Animation test]

This is a work in progress, there's a lot of work still needed on the jerky movements and some issues to straighten out (literally) with the blanket simulation. I started modelling this character in Blender for a project that has now changed direction. I may develop it further and use it in a different project in future.

U Can't Touch This [Open Theremin]

In her book "Method for Theremin" Clara Rockmore, one of the greatest theremin players, defines a thereminist as one who approaches and welcomes it as yet another voice with which to interpret real music, not a magic toy for producing strange and eerie sounds.

[Open Theremin custom case version 2]

I have to be honest. When I built my Open Theremin my intentions were not entirely honourable. I intended to create a soundscape for an animation. I did have some ideas about musical elements but strange and eerie sounds were definitely a major part of the plan.

However my intentions have changed. The theremin is not an instrument you can just pick up and play, and it quickly became apparent that I'd have to learn the basics to control it. I've been working through books by Clara Rockmore and Carolina Eyck, and the more I've practiced, the more I've enjoyed trying to play music, even if it's not quite a virtuoso performance.

[Presented for your amusement...]

I still have plans for the animation, and a theremin-based musical score is still a possibility. Strange and eerie sounds are now on the back burner, and while I can't quite describe myself as a thereminist yet, I'm enjoying the challenge of becoming one.

Eerie, Indiana [Review: Stranger Things 3]

Stranger Things season 1 celebrated the Eighties. Stranger Things 2 started to get a bit creepy around the Eighties if we're being honest. Stranger Things 3 has been stalking the Eighties in violation of its court order for months, and now the Eighties hasn't been seen for several days  - we suspect that Stranger Things 3 has kidnapped the Eighties and is holding it hostage in some kind of fortified basement dungeon, possibly in preparation for some kind of nightmarish ritual.

Stranger Things 3 is set in a strangely exaggerated 1985. I'll try to avoid major spoilers for those of you who haven't yet binge-watched the whole of season 3. This is just to report that Stranger Things 3 is definitely worth watching, it's up to the same standards of insanity, creepiness and Eightiesism as the other two series. Your favourite characters are back (whoever they happened to be). Some minor characters from previous series come out of the shadows - it happens quite late in the current series but when given a chance Erica (Priah Ferguson) really comes into her own.

There are baddies trying to re-open the breach to the Upside Down (this is only a minor spoiler for the first scene of the first episode), and these particular baddies are absolutely consistent with the global political situation in 1985. My only minor criticism is that we don't get any sense of what motivates them, or exactly they want from the Upside Down. It's not exactly prime construction land.

On the other hand, the mysterious forces from the Upside Down set into motion during series 2 are also up to something nefarious of their own, and they certainly do have a real motivation - this aspect of the plot is a slow burner but it's beautifully thought out, with everything falling into place and making sense about two thirds of the way through. The new big bad is a clever development of ideas from season 2, and also gives the Duffer Brothers plenty of opportunities to reference iconic movies such as The Blob or Terminator 2.

It's also really satisfying seeing that all of the main characters, without exception, have grown and changed since season 2. It would be interesting to see this in other movies from the 80s - there was no sequel for ET (I'm not counting the Atari game) so we never really get to see how Elliot and Gertie were affected by their rather strange childhood.

Here there's a lot going on for the younger generation about the transition from childhood to adolescence - and particularly about what happens when Mike, Lucas and Max are going full steam ahead with this while Will is in a different place and Dustin... well, just watch. Different life challenges await for the young adults, particularly Nancy and Jonathan who are working in literally the worst local newspaper ever, and for the adult adults - you might have thought that Joyce and Hopper had suffered enough over the past two seasons, but no. The challenge for the writers is to keep all these stories going in parallel, and this is achieved in an interesting way through synchronicity - in each episode, all the groups are doing something in common, whether that's searching for someone who can help solve a puzzle or dealing with a romantic break-up.

Stranger Things in general, and this series in particular, has really impressed me. It stands head, shoulders and very long legs above most other Netflix content, as well as other eighties nostalgia pieces such as Super 8 or Ready Player One. Now the visual style has become so well defined I'm really interested to see where it goes next - perhaps the Nineties?

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off To Work We Go [Review: Prospect]

In what may be possibly the most unwise Bring Your Child To Work Day ever, astronaut and prospector Damon (Jay Duplass) and his teenage daughter Cee (Sophie Thatcher) land on an alien planet looking for treasure - naturally-occurring gemstones that must be harvested delicately from an underground lifeform. They only have three days before the mothership leaves the system for ever, so when they successfully recover a gem Cee wants to rush back to their shuttle but Damon insists on searching for a larger cache. The father-daughter team are not alone on the planet - there are also other groups of prospectors and mercenaries about, all looking to strike gold and get out in time, and not exactly committed to good sportsmanship and comradery. When they are ambushed by another pair of prospectors, Cee is left in the difficult position of having to cooperate with Ezra (Pedro Pascal), one of their attackers.

The low-key setting of Prospect is very clever - this is smart sci-fi written to wring the most from a low budget. Most of the action takes place on the planet's forested surface, there is a toxic atmosphere so everyone has to wear spacesuits and filters and use temporary shelters and tents. The futuristic touches include medical kits with spray-on wound treatments and electric scalpels, many different kinds of railgun. The creatures that grow the gems are pleasantly Cronenbergian. The end result is strangely Western-like, this is a disorganized, greedy gold rush not an organized campaign. There are no uniforms (redshirt or otherwise) each spacesuit, gun or any other piece of equipment is different.

This movie is a mixture of science fiction, Western, action thriller (Chekov's railguns go off in the third act, also the first and second), survival thriller and psychological thriller. The writers are clearly familiar with Kurt Vonnegut's Rule 6: "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of." Cee in particular is challenged physically and emotionally throughout the movie with one Prisoner's Dilemma after another, and I can only say I am deeply impressed by Sophie Thatcher as an actor and look forward to seeing what she does next. Her performance alone justifies the perfect score of three stars out of five.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

Hot Chip [Review: Upgrade]

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

Grey Trace (played by Logan Marshall-Green, and yes Grey Trace is a name) is a car mechanic in the near future. This is something of a rarity when most people seem to be digital workers, but he fills a niche repairing and upgrading retro cars belonging to rich collectors. He and his wife Asha (Melanie Vallejo) return one such car to reclusive billionaire programmer Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson). Eron, Eron… where have I heard a name sounding like that belonging to a rich and eccentric tech mogul? No, I musk be mistaken. Anyway, on their way home Grey and Asha's self-driving car is hacked and diverted to a deserted scrapyard where they are attacked by a gang of thugs, leaving Asha dead and Grey paralysed and left for dead. He is mysteriously rescued by Eron who offers him a  cure for paralysis in the form of STEM, an experimental AI chip implanted into his spine. When the chip wakes up and starts talking to him things get a bit weird.

With it's near-future setting and speculation about human-computer interfaces and our dependence on technology, Upgrade may look like an indie science-fiction movie. Don't be fooled. This is actually a well-developed setting and backstory for what is really a violent martial arts thriller about Grey's quest for revenge. When taking on the gangsters Grey gives STEM temporary consent to take over his body and execute impossibly deadly moves - the result is a more lethal and messy version of Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo.

Upgrade is a great example of a movie that is deliberately not a blockbuster. The CGI effects are content to set the scene, add to the darkness of the atmosphere, and then sit back and appreciate the nicely choreographed action with everyone else rather than trying to hog the limelight. The fighting and action scenes do hot up as the plot progresses and Grey comes up against tougher and tougher opponents, but there's no CGI-laden boss battles, everything stays small scale and human, and it's this perfect balancing act that earns Upgrade the ultimate accolade of three Sci-Fi Gene stars.

Upwardly Mobile Highway [work in progress]

A short test of the dashboard and road animation.



[Produced in Blender 2.76]

Devil In The Detail [work in progress]

Working on various assets for the road animation:

[produced in Blender 2.76]

It Only Takes A Thereminute [Open Theremin part 2]

For an amateur thereminist, and let's face it, apart from Carolina Eyck we are all amateur thereminists, the most important question of all is: how will I customise my theremin?

Now let me think.

OK. Hands up everyone who was surprised by this.

I'm still getting over the shock of this device actually working. I'm not anywhere near being able to play music on it - the following demo video is rated R for Raucous and should not be watched by anyone.

I Saw Her Standing Theremin [Open Theramin part 1]

I am going to need some truly weird sounds to mix into the soundscape for the road animation - so I have literally no choice but to build a theremin. My hands are tied (which may make playing the theremin difficult).

Named after its' inventor Leon Theremin, the theremin is the most science-fiction-y of all instruments, famous for being used in movies such as The Day The Earth Stood Still and Mars Attacks, and also famous for not being used in the Star Trek theme tune (it's actually sung by a soprano) or the Doctor Who theme tune (they used pretty much every possible sound generator except a theremin).

For this DIY project I'm using the Arduino-based Open Theremin v3 design by Urs Gaudenz. You can read about the history of this interesting project, find out more about Leon Theremin and order your own kit here.

 The kit includes an integrated theremin circuit board, connecting pins, switches and LEDs (the Arduino and USB cable were purchased separately) ...

...and also some of these things.

You just need a few extras - the Arduino itself, some kind of stand e.g. a camera tripod, some earthing wire, and either a decent pair of headphones or a speaker and a set of very, very tolerant family members and neighbours.

One round of dodgy soldering later:

My evil plan worked! Now all I have to do is learn to play it...

If I Had A Thanos [Review: Avengers Endgame]

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

SPOILER WARNING

This review may contain spoiler warnings

2018's Avengers: Infinity War ended with the destruction of half of all life in the Universe, including half of the Avengers cast. I wasn't hugely surprised to find, and this isn't really much of a spoiler, that Avengers: Endgame turns out to be about an attempt by the remaining Avengers to bring the band back together and do something about it.

I was more surprised by the downbeat, bluesy tone of much of the movie. I would expect to see more personal depth and character building in the individual superhero stories, and there's plenty of this in Ant Man and The Wasp, and Captain Marvel - it's hard to get the same depth in an ensemble movie, but Endgame does better than most. The movie opens a few years after Infinity War, in a world reacting to the shock of that Thanos moment through memorials and support groups. Meanwhile the scattered Avengers have each reacted in different ways, and there's a reality to the transformed Thor, Hawkeye and Hulk that makes a lot of sense - possibly having fewer other characters overshadowing them means these characters can be more central. There's also a lot of gentle humour to be found.

However Avengers: Endgame is still not exactly an arthouse dogme experiment - I'm gutted that Lars Von Trier turned down the invitation to direct. There are plenty of CGI set-piece battles, and these are quite lovely but also confusing if you try to follow them. Why is Captain Marvel more powerful than Thanos one moment, and at his mercy the next? I gave up and just enjoyed the fireworks. The same applies to the main plot, the Avengers' plan to address the absence of half the Universe. Giving the writers credit, they have deliberately taken a certain kind of sci-fi plot and tried very hard to give it an original twist by disallowing the obvious routes. The end result serves the movie well but really doesn't stand up to logical analysis - luckily as a Doctor Who fan I have become immune to plot holes through repeated exposure so this did not spoil Endgame for me in the slightest.

Overall Endgame is a satisfying movie and a satisfying end to both the Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy movie cycles. I am sure the great Stan Lee would approve of this movie's marvellous review score of three stars out of five.

The Road Is Long [work in progress]

Continuing to work on the car scene, trying out some different colour schemes. Animation trials to follow - Freestyle rendering is a bit slow so it may take some time to get together enough frames to animate.

This project could go in several different directions from here. I've enjoyed gradually building up the car and adding detail to the road, and I could quite happily keep on doing so forever.  The end result could be an unstructured film or music video, or just something to do on a rainy day.

However I do have an almost-complete script as well and this was part of the reason I started modelling the car. So it might also be good to complete the script, get some voice over talent together and make a more traditional short. The script does call for some more work on modelling and animation.

I also have some serious plans for the soundscape - it needs some old-school weirdness and I know just the thing. Watch this space.

[produced in Blender 2.76] 

Wheels On Fire [work in progress]

Continuing to develop the car-and-driver scene:

[produced in Blender 2.76]

Objects In The Rear View Mirror [work in progress]

Continuing work on the dashboard and starting to think about the driver. Staying with cartoon style for now...

[produced in Blender 2.76]

Medium Latte [Festival Report: Horror-On-Sea 2019]

I was only able to attend one out of the six days of Horror-On-Sea this year so I made the most of it, taking in 6 feature films and several well-chosen short films. I picked up some... unusual DVDs on the second hand tables, so more on that story later when I've watched them. I ended the day in the casino beneath the venue for a drink and a chat with some of the festival organizers and filmmakers - as I found last year, this is a friendly, down to earth festival where the Underworld can meet the elite. After a brief flutter I left the casino up by £4 and a free pen, so can't complain about that either. I have added screening one of my films at Horror-On-Sea to my bucket list. In order to achieve this item I may need to actually make some films.

Themes for this year, at least for the day I attended, included vampires, mediums, cats, hipsters, curses, parallel worlds, international film, great memorable characters, and bonkers. Bonkers is the new jump scares.

Overall I was bowled over by the quality of the films screened. Every single one was either highly enjoyable, or still highly enjoyable if slightly too long. I'll post individual reviews of some of the films later, but I'd like to highlight some of the highlights - so here are the Sci-Fi Gene Awards for Achievement In Horror:

Snakes On A Plane Award for Achievement in the Naming of Horror Films:
awarded to Polterheist (UK, dir David Gilbank)

Last Temptation Of Christ Award for Achievement in Theatrical Portrayal of Jesus:
awarded to Vidar The Vampire (Norway, dir Thomas Aske Berg and Fredrik Waldeland)

Hidden Figures Award for Advancement of the Cause of Feminism:
awarded to Space Babes from Outer Space (USA, dir Brian  Williams)

If the winners would kindly proceed through the interdimensional gateway to the parallel universe where there is actually money for this kind of thing, I (or my interdimensional double) look forward to welcoming them to the glamorous award ceremony and presenting them with their antimatter trophies.

I Like Driving In My Car [work in progress]

Update - dashboard with some optional extras

[produced in Blender 2.76]

Paradise By The Dashboard Light [work in progress]

Modelling a dashboard in Blender:

Also starting to consider render style for this project:

(produced in Blender 2.76)