Mark Shirra’s “A Great Big Robot from Outer Space Ate My Homework” is yet another terrific animated short spawned by the Vancouver Film School. Nobody’s eating their homework over there.
Really nice work on the materials and textures, but it’s funny enough that you might not notice that at first. Nice one!
Harvested from 3D Total.
What if they’d based a film on an H.P. Lovecraft story during his lifetime?
Not only would it have lacked the shlock of “Re-Animator”, but it would have been… silent! In glorious black and white! With thrills, chills, and title cards!
Just like this one, in fact.
What we have here – “Filmed in Mythoscope” – is a re-creation of what that might have been like. Don’t expect expensive (or even inexpensive) CGI here, folks. It’s all filmed with practical effects like hanging miniatures and the action takes place in wonderful, low- to no- budget sets. The most advanced thing going on here, except in the editing, is some judderingly retro stop motion animation.
The actors do a creditable job and the film, which weighs in at a brief 72 minutes, just approaches its own low budget nature – with quivering tentacles – and absorbs it, makes it its own, as a feature of its period style. It’s a great example of turning necessity into a virtue.
And should you buy or rent it, don’t fail to watch the making-of material in the bonus features. Once you know that the South Atlantic and the ruins of R’Lyeh were filmed in somebody’s back yard, you’ll be about ready to give it a go yourself.
It’s a fine adaptation, a curious object, and a lot of fun to watch. And should you speak a language other than English – even I think, Finnish – you can watch in your own mother tongue. The fact that all the dialogue’s on title cards meant that the makers could translate the movie into an eldritch and unspeakable variety of languages. Which, compelled by the will of the Old Ones, they did. Nifty!
I’m always on the lookout for new additions to the Secret Laboratory, whether it’s sharks for the moat, or… in this case… nifty analog gauges to tell me whether space pirates have breached my defenses, or whether my coffee’s getting cold. (As if!)
The Device Patented Process Indicating Apparatus promises to be all this, and more. Though I think it’s likelier to tell me how hard my cpu’s working.
The Device is a handsome, wood and brass built unit that offers two analog gauges and an indicator light; it’s a programmable, um, Device, and has a USB port so that it can talk to your computer. The custom software allows you to tell the unit what it should be monitoring (like my CPU usage). Though the web site mentions both “Electrotherapeutic Shock Intensity” and “Ebay Auction Status”, which, um, indicates just how versatile a Device it is. Whillikers!
Just wish it was available already – like those Weta rayguns!
[tags]computers,hardware,usb,gizmo,widget,apparatus,retro,analog,device,mad scientist[/tags]
My personal web site was, as you’d expect, my first. In its first few years it went through substantial changes – after all, I was learning how to design sites at the time – but around 1999 it settled down and since then I’ve mainly made only visual changes to it. That’s partly because I’d accumulated so many inbound links that I don’t want to make huge changes there any more. Why did I get all those links? Well, because I was giving things away for free. I still do. It’s absurdly easy to give things away, and people like it. And I was used to doing it.
Mysterious and strange – Yannick Puig’s “I Lived on the Moon“, set to the song from the Kwoon’s album “Tales and Dreams”, uses 3D rendered animation combined with effects that feel like 2D in a 3D space. The idea reminds me quite a bit of cut-out animation (think Terry Gilliam) though the visual style is softer and painterly.
But the foreground characters are fully animated and nicely lit in 3D, in a surprisingly successful style. This is a haunting, lovely piece of work.
Gleaned from 3D Total.
