Once again vimeo serves up another tasty morsel. ‘Everything I Can See From Here’ delivers one of the funkiest and scariest aliens I’ve ever seen: day-glo dreads, cowboy boots and one mean bitch of a ray gun – what more could you ask for? A toasted whippet perhaps. Thank you Sam and Bjorn for spawning this little beauty!
Archives
All posts by weirdlight
Every frame of this short animation is a thing of utter brilliance…I am humbled by the talent displayed here.
Be immersed…
Caldera -Evan Viera
Over recent months I’ve been focusing a lot of energy on my YA sci-fi adventure, Etherwheel. As always inspiration comes from all angles and I’ve been drawing huge amounts of it from the twisted, dribbling, tentacled brilliance that spews from the nibs and brushes of CreatureBox.
The inkspawn of Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin (both Lead Artists at the awesome Insomniac Games), CreatureBox specialize in character and creature design, comics and concept work. Their illustration has a sense of humor and tone of voice that really hits the spot for me and I can’t help but visualize my own characters in their distinct style – if only I had the readies to hire these doodling maniacs to give life to the creatures in my head!
Their website and blog are definitely worth a regular visit and you can easily kill a lunch break sifting through their comics, sketchbooks and galleries. Vast amounts of talent and boundless imagination… CreatureBox, I salute you!
Loving this animation, a great idea beautifully executed. Enjoy:
Sometimes I look at our species, with all of our technology and ‘intelligence’ and I do wonder what the hell we’re up to… we really seem to be missing the point as we charge about the planet fighting and killing and generally making a bloody awful mess.
Now whales, they seem to have got this whole intelligence thing sussed. They have massive brains, not too different in complexity to our own, we know they are clever – probably more so than we give them credit – they are perfectly adapted to their environment; they do not degrade or deplete the resources which they rely on to live; they have evolved into the perfect animal to dwell on this planet, a planet that is approximately 70 percent water. Whales basically rock and yet we continue to massacre them in their hundreds.
Here is what the poet Heathcoat Williams has to say on the matter:
From space, the planet is blue.
From space, the planet is the territory
Not of humans, but of the whale.
Blue seas cover seven-tenths of the of the earth’s surface,
And are the domain of the largest brain ever created,
With a fifty-million-year-old smile.
Ancient, unknown mammals left the land
In search of food or sanctuary,
And walked into the water.
Their arms and hands changed into water-wings;
Their tails turned into boomerang-shaped tail-flukes,
Enabling them to fly, almost weightless, through the oceans;
Their hind-legs disappeared, buried deep within their flanks.
Free from land-based pressures:
Free from droughts, earthquakes, ice-ages, volcanoes, famine,
Larger brains evolved, ten times as old as man’s…
Other creatures, with a larger cerebral cortex…
…
Whale families, whale tribes,
All have different songs:
An acoustic picture-language,
Spirited pulses relayed through water
At five times the speed sounds travels through air,
Varied enough to express complex emotions,
Cultural details,
History,
News,
A sense of the unknown.
A lone Humpback may put on a solo concert lasting for days.
Within a Humpback’s half-hour song
There are a hundred million bytes.
A million changes of frequency,
And a million tonal twists…
An Odyssey, as information-packed as Homer’s,
Can be told in thirty minutes;
Fifty-million-year-old sagas of continuous whale mind:
Accounts of the forces of nature;
The minutiae of a shared consciousness;
Whale dreams;
The accumulated knowledge of the past;
Rumours of ancestors, the Archaeoceti,
With life-spans of two and three hundred years;
Memories of loss;
Memories of ideal love;
Memories of meetings…
(Extracts taken from the book-length poem Whale Nation by Heathcoat Williams – Blue whale image created by the brilliant artists of Disney/Pixar)
I watched the Dark Crystal again the other day and it still entrances me even after so many years. This is a film that had a profound effect on my imagination as a child and continues to fuel and inspire me to this day. The coupling of Froud’s concept design and Henson’s ability to bring such creatures to life produced a truly unique piece of storytelling.
Reveling in the genius of its puppetry, I got to thinking about how the craft of model making and animatronics has been such a solid foundation for modern special effects and CGI. Poor George Lucas has taken a lot of hits in recent years for his continuous tinkering with the Star Wars franchise. In all honesty I’ve never had much of a problem with the new movies and animated shows, I like the fact another generation is growing up with Star Wars as an influence, and credit where credit is due, Lucas, ILM and Henson really set the bench mark of quality where model making and animatronics were concerned.
However, with the new Star Wars movies I do think Lucas made one huge mistake, he put too much focus on the CGI and stepped away from the animatronics and model building that made the first movies so captivating. This is most apparent in Yoda (less said about the Vodaphone abomination the better). In the original films Yoda was a puppet, a fantastic amalgamation of latex and micro mechanics given life by the brilliant Frank Oz, and although we all knew the little green nutsack wasn’t real he felt real, he occupied the same space, the same air as Luke; they shared the same light. In the new movies Yoda is all very impressive with his ninja moves and his intricate expressions but he feels removed, detached – fake. He’s not nearly as engaging as when he was a puppet. And this is something I feel many filmmakers have fallen prey to in the CGI revolution.
I’m not saying I dislike CGI, I love it, and when you have a whole world created in 3D without flesh and blood actors in it, then the suspension of disbelief works more effectively, if you look at any of the Pixar movies, or the jungle scenes in Avatar, or the dark golem world of 9, then you become totally absorbed in the hyper-reality of the world, it is dreamlike, but, more often than not, CGI spliced into real footage can be lacking.
Two directors whose work I feel continues in the vein of Henson and early Lucas are Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro. Both can see the merits of model making and animatronics in helping to create totally immersive and believable worlds. They successfully meld CGI, actors, models and puppets into a seamless spectacle.
I was fortunate enough to work on a kids TV project with a puppeteer who had worked on del Toro’s Hellboy 2, playing the role of a creature in the troll market. His description of the set and characters and the way del Toro had such a love of the puppets and creatures in the scene was enthralling. When you look at the sequence in the movie it is a testament to how the puppets, prosthetics and set all gel perfectly, suspending our disbelief in a way that CGI can sometimes fail to do. Del Toro’s creatures in general are a feast for my imagination and the fact so many are actual physical occupants of our world makes them all the more pleasing, what I wouldn’t give to visit his creature workshop, although maybe not at night!
Jackson is the same, he opts for that ‘touchable’ object, whether its in the mindboggling ‘bigatures’ of Moria or Minas Tirith, or the oily ooze-dripping maw of the Mouth of Sauron, he gives his actors, and more importantly, his viewers something real to react to.
It pleases me greatly that there is such a strong return to the use of this craft in the mega-buck blockbusters being created today. For a while it looked like model making and animatronics might be lost beneath the tide of CGI, but fortunately the dedicated worldbuilders can see how the crafts enhance their visions making them even more real to our sophisticated but easily tricked eyes.
When I write of monsters or aliens I always picture a beautiful puppet in action, every frown and sneer, lurch and roar, perfectly played out by twitching circuits and meticulously rendered latex flesh. Long may this balance between the real and digital reign!
Here is the showreel of Gustav Hoegen – a true master of the craft! Just check out some of the crazy beings he has brought to life:
Scenes produced for LEGO’s online Siege of Helm’s Deep game. I really do love my day job:)
An artist who totally melts my brain every time I look at his work, Adam Spizak. Hyperreal, twisted beauty…and just check out the detail, it goes so deep. If I was making a movie of Neuromancer I’d want this guy heading up the concept design.
Kill an hour or two gawking at his digital wizardry:
Been away for a while…here is some very tasty CGI:
Sometimes being made to feel insignificant can be a positive experience. It’s so easy to fixate on the day to day stresses and strains – deadlines, clients, getting paid – it all becomes so ‘important’.
Thank you Chrome Experiments for reminding me of the vast and beautiful mechanisms that lie beyond our blue skies. What am I but a mere crumb on creations great banquet table. Work can wait, I’ve got a nightsky out there that needs my attention!
http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/
“We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.”
― Brian Cox
Weirdlight & Inkdust 