Monday, February 3, 2014

Polar bears instead of dragons at Super Bowl XLVI Siege up for VES Award










Just two more days to the biggest sports television event of the year in the US: The 46th NFL Super Bowl will be played this Sunday, the Championship game of the American National Football League. While most are anxiously awaiting this years already classic rematch between Tom Bradys New England Patriots and Eli Mannings New York giants at the Indiana Colts Lucas Oil Stadium, the final match of the season is also known to have the most expensive, and brilliantly created ad campaigns.

Okay, so normally I would agree that most commercials out there are just scrambling your brain, but there are certainly a few gems that can make your jaw drop and the Super Bowl has made a tradition of it to show some pretty impressing stuff. The huge amount of viewers (100.000.000 world wide) and the extremely high costs of air time during the match, makes the Super Bowl the perfect showcase for exclusive and expensive commercials. The average cost for a 30-second spot this year was $3.5 million to $4 million Dollars. Remember last year, Coca Cola had the brilliantly CG animated Siege, directed by FX&Mat and created by the multi Oscar nominated and winning studio Framestore.











Above and below: 3D models for the dragon from Siege. Framestore won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and the BAFTA in 2008 for their work on The Golden Compass and was nominated in 2007 for Superman Returns, in 2009 for The Dark Knight and in 2010 for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.


The London based CG house also worked on every Potter movie since the first one came out and has worked elaborately on the final one, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 (the last of the eight movie franchise and the second based based on J.K. Rowlings seventh book) which became the third highest grossing film ever (worldwide a total of $1,328,111,219 Billion dollars). Framestore, along with Moving Pictures Company and Double Negative have collectively worked on the VFX for Hallows 2. Tim Burke, David Vickery, Greg Butler and John Richardson are nominated for their work and are up for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects this year, but will have to compete with the extremely talented creative team behind Rise of the Planet of the Apes (also nominated are Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Hugo and Real Steel).



above and below: designs and 3D models for Balfour the main character in Coca Colas Siege and the Orc general and his beast.
Siege is nominated for the 10th annual VES Awards, the awards for outstanding visual effects given by the Visual Effects Society. Framestore is among the nominees in the category Oustanding Visual Effects in an Animated Commercial or Video Game Trailer.The ceremony takes place February 7th. The VES is the entertainment industrys only non-profit honorary society dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences and applications of visual effects. It represents the full breadth of visual effects practitioners in all areas of entertainment from film, television and commercial to music videos and games. It currently has 2300 members in 26 countries.

This week Coca Cola announced it would be trading the dragons for their regular Polar bear characters, as they would be part of a much larger campaign (theyre having their own party at CokePolarBowl.com where you can watch the game live and comment on it through facebook, etc). So unfortunately no sequel to Siege. If youve never been able to watch this brilliantly animated commercial, check it out below, (you can toggle 1080p HD) Ive added the polar bears vid behind it (sure, theyre cool too!). You can also head over to Pixologic who have the video up on their site, followed by some behind-the-scenes footage and an interview with the creators. If you want to read what Framestores visual effects supervisor Diarmid Harrison-Murray had to say about it, you can also read his interview at FXGuide. Anyway, gonna have fun watching the game Sunday, so Cheers guys!




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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Cómic The Walking Dead 103

Cómic The Walking Dead # 103



Aquí esta On-Line el Cómic N° 103 de The Walking Dead en Español sin Descargas ni Registros."


Open publication - Free publishing


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Cómic The Walking Dead 4

Cómic The Walking Dead # 4



Aquí esta On-Line el Cómic N° 4 de The Walking Dead en Español sin Descargas ni Registros."


Open publication - Free publishing - More 4

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Mob of the Haunted Mansion my Disney story reprinted

As of this week you can find one of my Comic stories for Disney collected in the Summer Holiday Special, published by Sanoma and for sale at all the HEMA stores!


Well, its official: its summer alright! And to celebrate it, all the major Comic publishers here come out with their own Summer Holiday Special! Sanoma had already recently published their usual Disney books: The regular Donald Duck Summer Holiday 2011 comic book special (which has appeared every year since 1978) andthe Beagle Boys Summer Holiday 2011 comic book. Theyre filled with comic reprints, games and trivia and the usual coloring page, which should keep your kids busy, while youre trying get your family to your place of destination alive, at least, thats the idea!

Reprint.

The HEMA concern, a nationwide chain of department stores, which has also branched out in Germany and Belgium, teamed up with the folks at Sanoma Media to create their own line of Summer Holiday Books this year. They all have the same graphic design on the cover, sharing the title Op vakantie met (On holiday with) and focus on different characters like Nijntje, Barbapapa, Nickelodeon, Hello Kitty and of course: Donald Duck !

Its nice to see the guys at Disney had chosen one of my stories for the Donald Duck version. Gespuis in t spookhuis, ( Mob of the Haunted Mansion) is a good lenghty thriller with some nice plot twists and enough laughs to cheer it all up. I can understand they wanted to reprint it again, as it keeps you to your seat long enough and definitely intices a re-read.
Originally it was 15 pages longer even, and I got it back the first time around from Tom Roep (editor in chief) saying it was way too long! (I primarely used to read the Barks library books and they all have these huge stories in them, so I guess I modeled it after that).





Above: two pages from Mob of the Mansion as it was first published in 2001. The Disney crew had designed their Weekly magazine around the story (the issue had black pages) with a contest winning you some cool prizes and games for your Nintendo handheld.

Hall of Fame.

Mob of the Haunted Mansion was one of the stories I did with Bas Heymans for the Donald Duck Weekly, its a 20 page story, first printed in May 2001 and it has definitely been picked up abroad, as it was translated in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Poland and Norway. In the Netherlands, the story even made the cover of Donald Ducks Funniest Adventures #4 and it also served for the cover of issue 32 of Disneys Hall of Fame comic book series in Norway.




One of my other stories done for Disney, Donald Duck: Temporarily Millionaire (also with Bas Heymans) was published in April this year in Aku Ankka Ekstra issue 156 in Finland. (the monthly Donald Duck Extra magazine). Below: various covers from around the world, which published the ghost story in their respective comic magazines. The Dutch cover is the last one on the right.


The other three stories in Hemas Donald Duck Summer Comic Book Special are The Caravan Race by Ben Verhagen and Jan Kruse, Timber by Paul Halas with Flor Collins and Vicar and The Egyptian Princes Secret by Marco Rota. The books are for sale now in all the HEMA stores and cost € 4,00 Euros each.
HEMA has 445 department stores in The Netherlands, 62 in Belgium, 8 in Germany, 3 in Luxembourg and recently opened 4 stores in Paris, France!


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The Walking Dead 53



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Hergé and Le Petit Vingtième

























Above: covers of Le Petit Vingtième issues 7 and 18 from February 13 and May 1st respectively, carrying Hergés first Tintin comic adventure Tintin in the land of the Soviets.

Before Georges Remi aka Hergé became famous as the artist and creator of Tintin, he worked for the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, creating illustrations to go with some of their articles. This was in 1925. Three years later, like so many other newspapers, Le Vingtième started a seperate comics supplement called Le Petit Vingtième and Georges became Editor-in-Chief.

Le Petit Vingitième was a small, eight page supplement and started publishing Hergés first ever Tintin story Tintin in the land of the Soviets (Tintin au pays des Soviets) in their 11th issue, on January 10, 1929. A year later the magazine would expand to 16 pages and Hergés introduced his gag strip Quick & Flupke.

The first nine stories of Tintin were published in Le Petit Vingtième until publication of the magazine was halted after May 9th 1940,  when the Nazis invaded and occupied Belgium. Publication of the last story, Land of the Black Gold (Tintin au pays de loir noir) was never finished.

After the war Tintin got his own comics magazine, which would publish the many other stories Hergé and his studio would create. Studio Hergé was founded in 1950 and it is no secret that much of Tintins later adventures was drawn by his assistants, Belgian comic masters such as Edgar P. Jacobs and later also by Jacques Martin and Bob de Moor.



Above: After finishing the publication of Tintins first adventure, the magazine left their fans guessing where Tintin would go next, but a week later showed Tintin amidst the African Jungle. Covers of issues 21 and 22 advertising the start of Herges second comic story Tintin in the Congo, which started in issue 23 of June 5, 1930. In comicbook form, this story would later be renamed Tintin in Africa.

Flup, Nenesse, Poussette et Cochonnet.

While Hergé published his first Tintin adventure, he also created a twenty page short story titled Flup, Nenesse, Poussette et Cochonnet. The comic was written by the sports editor of Le Vingtième and was published in the premier issue of the comics supplement, on November 1, 1928 until March 7, 1929.

I had never seen it before and recently stumbled upon this story, at a great French website containing many archived works of Hergé. Unfortunately the owner, Daniel Bellier just recently passed away. If you want to check out or read the original editions of Hergés comic newspaper publications check out his site http://www.bellier.org (hit the entrée button once youre there).

With gratitude to Belliers site, check out one of Hergés first comics below. Its twenty pages (in French), although pages 15/16 are omitted and have not resurfaced yet. Make sure to click the images for a much larger view:

























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Finally RAGE!











Founded by rocket scientist John Carmack, pioneer of 3D game engine technology and father of the First person shooters, id softwares new game Rage will finally hit the stores today in the US, after four years of hard work! The official European release date for both PS3 and X360 is October 7th, so I guess Ill have to wait till Friday to get my first headshot!

Rage: facts, fiction and mythology.

In 2004 astronomers discovered 99942 Apophis, a giant asteroid bound to hit earth in April 2029. Although scientists have since calculated it will pass our planet at a near distance, they found out that Apophis would near the Earth again in 2036. The original calculations by NASA in 2004 estimated Apophis impact to be the equivalent of 1440 megatons of TNT.











In Rage, Apophis (named after the Egyptian god of chaos and darkness) does strike Earth, erasing more than eighty percent of human civilization. Though scientists found a way for humanity to survive, the experiment known as Project Eden, fails. Thousands of Arks, carrying people that were put in cryogenic sleep using a high-tech drug known as Nanotrites, were destroyed. Most survivors mutated due to the untested drug, turning them into monstrous beings. The player aka US Marine Lieutenant Nicholas Raine, awakens around 2114, only to find ruined cities in a wasteland full of mutants and a superior military class known as the Authority, the new rulers of Earth, who secretly had their own Super Ark to start a new utopian society.




Left: Darkhorse published the first of their three issue limited series of the comic book in June. Right: The Trade paperback will be released October 19th. Story by Arvid Nelson with pencils by Andrea Mutti and inks by Pielugi Baldassini. Cover by Stephan Martinere. Building on the games storyline, there was also a novel written by Matthew Costello, which was recently published by Del Ray.

Inventor of the FPS genre.

Texas-based Id Software was founded in 1991 by programmers John Carmack and John Romero with game designer Tom Hall and artist Adrian Carmack. They rocked the video game industry when they created a whole new genre with the release of the first 1st person shooter Wolfenstein 3D in May 1992. Heavily censured everywhere for its use of swastikas and bloody violence, the original game had you searching for the leader of the third reich in the nazi stronghold castle Wolfenstein.

Even more violent as well as graphically innovative, their release of Doom in 1993, was received with both praise and public outcry. The PC game that made headlines as being a virtual mass murder simulator was installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows. The plot of the scifi-horror shooter centered around a space marine that had to fight off interdimensional demons after experiments in teleportation between the moons of Mars by the Union Aerospace Corporation created a gateway to Hell.


Above: powerful artwork for id softwares critically acclaimed shooters. The cover for Doom was done by illustrator Donald Ivan Punchatz.

Armadillo Aerospace.

For Rage, John Cormack wrote a completely new game engine called the id tech 5. His previous game engines have been licensed for use in many other shooters, like Half-Life, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. In 2000 Cormack also founded Armadillo Aerospace where he is the lead engineer. The company has won several NASA funded competitions and is now working towards building suborbital crafts capable of commercial spaceflight. The Id tech 5 engine will also be used for Doom 4, which is currently in development using a new scripting language that is based on C++.


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Friday, January 31, 2014

ILM on the water simulations of Battleship



Today, the VFX team of ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) uploaded a new video showing more of their work on their recent movie Battleship and the creation of a completely new fluid simulation system, which had to be re-engineered completely from the ground up for this film. It includes interviews with Grady Cofer, Pablo Helman, Willi Geiger and Nick Rasmussen of ILM. As always, make sure to check it out in full HD below.

In 2007, Nick Rasmussen, Ron Fedkiw and Frank Losasso Petterson already received a Sci-Tech Award from the Academy for the development of the original ILM fluid simulation system. Simultaneously, Duncan Brinsmead, Jos Stam, Julia Pakalns and Martin Werner were awarded that year with a Sci-Tech award for the design and implementation of the Maya Fluid Effects system.

For this years Sci-Tech Awards, seven achievements have been selected from various companies for award consideration. Among them, Lucasfilm for Zviz, a previsualisation system, WETA Digital for Tissue, a Physically-Based Character Simulation Framework and PDI Dreamworks for their new Lighting tool. The 2012 Scientific and Technical Awards will be presented at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills on February 9, 2013. The event will be hosted by actress Zoe Saldana and actor Chris Pine (from the upcoming Star Trek: Into Darkness).












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