Monthly Archive for July, 2004

Christ, what a week. To keep this post in some way art related I’ll pop up a sketch from some work I’ve been doing for a friend of my mum. It’s more whippet action folks! Actually it’s kinda fun, because I can get cartoony, and I don’t get the opportunity much these days. This one is for a T-Shirt design, there’ll be three in total; this one is a reference to the snoozing habits of whippets. Weird how an animal that lives to run can be so damn lazy when it’s not outside…

Phew now that’s out of the way I can have a whinge.

This week has been pretty much one of the hardest I’ve had since I started working in games.. why? because I feel like a complete newbie right now. I’m learning Maya on the job, and so there’s little room for error. Every model I create has to be exported and optimised for the game as I go along, so as well as trying to get to grips with what must be one of the most difficult programmes ever created I also have to wrestle with the in-house tools and game engine. It’s a scary old prospect I can’t deny it. Hopefully I’ll get it more as time goes on, I have to really seeing as it’s now my job and something I asked to do!

I’m just so damned tired at the moment… oh who am I kidding I’m no good at this online whinging malarky, there’s millions of people worse off than me. I’m too tired to sit here pouring out my troubles for a non-interested/existent audience.

In other news our copy of Hellboy finally arrived this week! Woo-hoo !!! I have to admit that it’s not quite as frenetic as Spider-Man 2, although I think even that suffers from some sag in the middle and Alfred molina just isn’t onscreen long enough if you ask me!

Hellboy is every bit as good as I hoped, and all the more for it being a more steadily paced film. Mike Mignola’s work really shines through this film in so many ways. I wasn’t that enamoured of Blade II, I thought it was severely lacking in plot compared to the first one. And the resurrection of Whistler was not much short of pathetic really, God only knows how they’re going to explain his daughter away in Blade Trinity. Maybe all his family have some sort of resurrective power similar to the beasts in Hellboy.. anyway, although I didn’t think Blade was Del Toro’s strongest film (in fact I think it’s his weakest); I always thought the sickly yellows and highly saturated reds would be perfect for Hellboy. And boy he certainly hasn’t disappointed. There’s a little deviation in the expansion of Liz Sherman and Broom sticks around for a bit longer in the film, but on the whole I really think they’ve caught the essence of the comic perfectly. I’d like to say something more illuminating and intelligent than that but I’m afraid my brain is fried.

We’ll definitely go and see it on the big screen when it comes out in this country, until then I can hug my dvd and watch it whenever I feel glum. Which will probably be quite a lot.