TORONTO AFTER DARK

The From Inside short film will be screening at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, October 19-25, 2007.

The From Inside short is a 9 minute film which serves as introduction to the From Inside feature length story. Working with the first 15 minutes or so of the feature length film, I cut together a piece that stands alone. It doesn't give much away in terms of the feature-length story, but it serves as a great introduction to From Inside: the visual language, the characters, the world...

More info can be found here:
Toronto After Dark

Stills from the short:

THE VOICE of CEE

I am very excited and pleased to announce that we have found the voice of Cee.

Corryn Cummins.

Corryn brings to the role a perfect sense of sadness and persistence, of softness and strength. There is only one character in From Inside who speaks; Cee. The emotional weight of the entire film rests on one voice. Corryn carried this weight with heart-stirring quiet ease. She is Cee.

We recorded voice this past weekend in LA at Titmouse Studios.

Titmouse Inc.


Corryn in the booth


Ekaterina Slepicka, engineer (thanks Ekaterina and Titmouse!) and Brian McNelis, producer


The Director


After recording voice, editing at Red Velvet Studios, LA

ON THE MONITOR

Checking renders. The top shadow pass is flickery and fuzzy. The bottom one is not. This is a frame from a shot that is 150 frames long. The shadow pass took 4 minutes to render each frame. Since the top render was so lousy and since I forgot to turn off shadow casting for the rail, it had to be re-rendered. That's a 10 hour mistake. I'm fired.

ON THE MONITOR

Killer shadows. More killer shadows.

This is from one of the train pick up shots I mentioned... oh, about 8 years ago.

INDIE SPINNER RACK

I am interviewed by Mister Phil and Charlito at Indie Spinner Rack. They do an awesome comics podcast and I had a great time talking with them.

Make sure to check out their archives -- some great interviews to be found there.

Thought I'd add a few show notes. So, check out the interview at ISR and come back to this post for some extra comic book geekness below:

________________________________

Indie Spinner Rack #93
Show Notes

Thanks to Charlito and Mister Phil. It was great talking with them.
I loved Mister Phil's story about the From Inside stand at the comic book store. Awesome.

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Warren Publishing:
These were big magazine-sized comic antholgies published through the 70s and early 80s. Mostly black & white, occasional color pages. All the greats: Alex Toth, John Severin, Richard Corben, Frazetta, Neal Adams, Al Williamson...

I didn't read Eerie, Vampirella, or Creepy as much as the magazine 1994. I was lucky to have a drug store where the register didn't mind selling kids magazines that were clearly labeled as "Provocative Illustrated Adult Fantasy."

I loved the work of the Spanish and Filipino artists in 1994: Alex Nino, Jose Ortiz, Alfredo Alcala, Rudy Nebres. The work by these guys looked (and still looks) like nothing else being done in comics (so, seek out old copies of 1994, kids). Their black and white work was a heavy influence on me.

I've always thought that the artists whose work you copy (what? I didn't say "trace") when you are learning are the ones that influence you the most - even if whatever you end up doing in your own work doesn't look similar. For me, those artists were Alex Nino and the other 1994 contributors. Man, they loved their black ink.

Alex Nino:
info
wikipedia article re: Warren
Comics Journal article about Warren Publishing

Here's a page by Alex Nino. Amazing:




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TUNDRA

Tundra was an independent publisher founded by Kevin Eastman (Melting Pot, Heavy Metal, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).

Tundra contracted From Inside, but the book was published by Kitchen Sink after acquiring Tundra.

Here's a Comics Journal interview with Kevin Eastman about Tundra and his work. It's a pdf from the Heavy Metal site. Kevin publishes Heavy Metal magazine now.
link


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CALIBER COMICS

Caliber published my first series, Ashes. They published The Crow, Dead World, Baker Street, Kabuki... my last comic book series Golgothika.... the anthology Negative Burn...

Caliber published a ton of really great black and white comics before they folded. Most of the books are still in print. Check the site out.

Official Caliber site

Old friends from the Caliber days:

Nate Pride

Vince Locke

James O'Barr

Desperado

Guy Davis
Be sure to visit Guy's Illustration section... and the Comicwork section... and the Marquis pages... you know what, just click through his entire site. I've just decided Guy Davis is one of my top 5 favorite comic book artists.

Who are the other 4? Paul Pope. Frank Miller. Pander Brothers. Michael Manning.

Grinder web site My music, illustration, album covers, etc

Golgothika pages

The big chair!


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Star Trek #6
It's the first comic I ever read. I must have been about 5 years old

I was thinking about this Star Trek comic and how there was another comic I saw when I was young that made me want to seek out more comics. That book was Adventures on the Planet of the Apes. A friend of mine owned the comic, but something about the book disturbed him so much that he wanted to get rid of it... by giving it to me.

The reason why the book bothered him was because there was a drawing of a decomposed person on one of the pages. I held the comic up to him and said "You mean THIS picture?" He was so upset when he saw the drawing of the skeleton that I thought he was acting... so I kept showing it to him... until I finally figured out that he wasn't pretending.

I was about 8 or 9 years old. That was probably the first time I realized that art could have a very real effect on people. Even little 2"x3" panels in a Planet of the Apes comic book. I looked at the kid I had turned into a puddle and thought: "Awesome." (Actually - if I remember right - my exact thought was "With Great Comic Book Art, Comes Great Responsibility.")

Sometimes I am amazed by what you can find on the internet. Issues #1-4 of Adventures on the Planet of the Apes in pdf format.

Check out issue 1, page 6:
Fucking scary!!!!!!!

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Nails!

What's a fanzine? That was how bloggers blogged before the internets were invented:
wikipedia
Factsheet Five (the meeting place for all fanzines)

RENDER WANDER

What is a "render wander?"

That's what happens when the progress bar on your computer says "Rendering" for 3, 4, 5 days in a row.

Let's say a shot is 10 seconds long. That's 240 frames. Depending on the scene's complexity, it could take my computer up to 15 minutes to render each frame. Shall we do some math?

240 frames X 15 minutes each = 3,600 minutes (ie: 60 hours... ie: 2.5 days).

Here is a quote from Michael Bay about rendering Transformers animation: “The visual effects were so complex it took a staggering 38 hours for ILM to render just one frame of movement,” reports Bay, “that’s unheard of in this industry.”

Let's say there were 25 minutes of special effects in the 2.5 hour Transformers film (that might be a low estimate). There are 1,440 frames in 1 minute of film. 25 minutes = 36,000 frames.

36,000 frames X 36 hours per frame = 1,296,000 hours. (ie: 4,000 days. ie: 148.4 years).

I gather, then, that Transformers is still rendering? (I'm kidding. I know there was a room someplace at ILM with 1,296,000 processors in it - each one working on a single frame while the animators were asleep). (I'm kidding again. Animators don't sleep!).

Anyway. The point I believe Michael Bay is making here is that the longer your rendering times are, the more kick ass your film is.

And the longer you have to wait for your renders to complete, the more often you go for a render wander. You get up. Wander. Eat. Read. Whatever.

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By themselves, a lot of the windows, icons and menus in Maya (3D animation program) look interesting to me. With the addition of a couple textures and some brush strokes they make for nice abstracts.

That's what I do for render wanders. Stare at the monitor until it starts looking like abstract art. Or robots. In disguise.

Here is the Maya screen that became the artwork at the top of this post:




Here's another window:



And what it became:

SHADOWS

I haven't posted for a while. So here is something I am working on. Shadows = render wander.

FIRST THREE MINUTES

Watch the the first three minutes of From Inside.

Check out the MEDIA section at frominsidemovie.com

The clip is a visual introduction to the three main characters, the Train, the Wasteland, and the Girl.

3D WORLD

I am interviewed in 3D World magazine. I talk about Style and Budget and how I get them to play nice with each other for a project like From Inside. In real life I don't talk so much.

It is Issue #89.

Here is a link:
3D World

FOUR LETTER WORD

My second-most-favorite 4 letter word: DONE.

Not COMPLETELY DONE. Saving those two words for later. All of these "DONE"s represent the first 2 1/2 minutes of From Inside. That's about 1/2 of the pick-up shots I've mentioned in the last few posts.

I promise to follow up this photograph of a shot list with the actual shots. The whole scene. Soon.

POST-APOCALYPTIC POST

Thought I'd mention a few post-apocalyptic films that made an impression on me in the 1980s when I young and impressionable (not like now - impressionable, I mean).

Through the 80s there were a number of great post-apocalyptic films. Looking back, I can see they influenced From Inside. I liked the sci-fi apocalypse films of the 80s - Road Warrior (one of the very few Perfect Films ever made), Terminator, Akira, Escape from NY, Nausicaa (one of my favorite animated films), etc - but it was the depressing stories I really gravitated towards...

Anyway , add these to your Netflix queue:

Luc Besson's Le Dernier Combat, (The Final Battle) 1983. Brilliant for its almost complete lack of dialog.. and raining fish... and rocks.

Testament, 1983. Post nuclear movie. This one affected me more than the made-for-tv The Day After - which was released the same year (actually, I think Testament was made for tv also, but it was too good for tv and got a theatrical release instead). Testament is a small story. I liked that about it. The scene where Jane Alexander is bathing her child after the explosion (was that Lukas Haas!?!) in their kitchen sink and lifts him out to reveal a sink full of blood -- powerful.

Threads, 1984. The best movie ending. Ever. You have to sit through 2 hours of dated filmmaking, though. Do it. No fast-forwarding. Struggle through it and the last few seconds of the film are the most powerful last few seconds you'll ever see. The last cut on Ruth's daughter; brilliant.

Kuroi Ame (Black Rain), 1989. Hiroshima and its aftermath. Tragic.

Grave of the Fireflies, 1988. Even more tragic.

When the Wind Blows, 1986.

Interesting that most of the post-apocalyptic films in the 80s featured a single, apocalyptic event - usually a nuclear explosion. Brazil would be a good exception to that, but in general, I guess there was a lot of nuclear anxiety in the 80s. Most post-apocalyptic stories today do not have a single defining event, but rather a long slow grinding away of order. Children of Men, The Road, Oryx and Crake...

ON THE MONITOR

Making skies. This is from the 5th pick-up shot of the train (5 of 28!).