Happy Birthday - Rosario Dawson

31 today !!

Happy Birthday Lance Henriksen

70 today !

Seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Damien: Omen II but it wasn't until The Terminator and Aliens that people started to really notice this guy, great in Near Dark, Pumpkinhead, The Quick and the Dead amongst others, he's been in a shed load of stuff over the years !

Logo's

Here are some logo's that I put together in Photoshop a while ago, the top one is based on Silent Running

This one is from the film Saturn 3 with Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

This is from The IT Crowd, the Channel 4 comedy series with Richard Ayoade, Chris O'Dowd and Katherine Parkinson.

And the last one is from Aliens, the logo on the Power Loader's leg.

I've did these as large size PSD's for putting onto T-Shirt's, the only one I've done so far is the Saturn 3 one, and that's looking a bit faded now as it's a few years old.

25mm Miniatures

It's a long time since I painted these 25mm Cyberpunk and Aliens miniatures, I used to take them to work with me at the Odeon and paint them on the projection box bench between running the movies !! I glossed all the figures with Polyurethane Varnish to help protect them. I used fuse wire that we had in the projection box spares drawer to add details like cigarette end and bullet casings to the bases.

Splinter of the Minds Eye - comes to TV

As and 11 year old back in 1978 and a huge fan of Star Wars I remember the day I went to the local newsagent with my mother, and up there on the book shelf was a Star Wars book, amazed by this find I went pocket money in hand to snap up this find. The book was Splinter of the Minds eye written by Alan Dean Foster, who had also written the novelization of Star Wars, even though George Lucas gets the final credit. I read this new book in a single day, and loved it, after all it was Star Wars, and this was back when they hadn't even announced what the sequel to the first film was even going to be called. My only disappointment was the fact that it didn't feature Han or Chewbacca. Later in the mid 90's this novel was turned into a comic by by Terry Austin and Chris Sprouse for Dark Horse Comics. Now there's news that this tale will be turned into an animated TV film by the same team behind the popular CGI Clone Wars animated series. How this will work is a bit puzzling, as it really throws the continuity of the series by having Luke fight Vader before their duel on Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. The novel itself had a strange inconsistency, this being that during the lightsaber fight between Luke and Darth Vader, Vader states that he knows Luke is the pilot that shot him out of the way during the Death Star trench run, when it was Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon who fired the shots that disrupted the course of Vader's fighter.
I look forward to seeing what they do with this, I know Anthony Daniels will no doubt be up for doing C3-PO's voice as he voices the character in the Clone Wars, and Mark Hamill has a track record of doing cartoon voice overs, it just makes me wonder if they can get Carrie Fisher interested in voicing Leia ?!

Mind you Lucas hasn't been strong on series continuity recently, in an episode of Clone Wars from series one, Anankin travels to the Lava planet of Mustafar, later to be seen in Revenge of the Sith, in this episode we see the the base there fall into the Lava and the bad guy Separatists flee this planet, so why would they later go back ?!

Diamond - Graphic Novel

A while back I built a CG Sno-Cat model for artist Dylan Teague for him to use as reference for a graphic novel he was illustrating. see my posts about it HERE
Recently Dylan sent me a signed copy of the finished Graphic Novel, and some of the original artwork. Sadly the novel is in French, but still the pictures are great !!! Cheers Dylan !!!

Happy Birthday R. Lee Ermey

66 today !!

What is this Mickey Mouse shit? What are you two animals doing in my beloved head? Why is Private Pyle out of his bunk after lights out? Why is Private Pyle holding that weapon? Why are you not stomping Private Pyle's guts out?

Happy Birthday Alyson Hannigan

36 today !!

When I make my all girl Sci-Fi movie Alyson is definitely part of the ships crew ! :)

Blue hippy cats my avatar review

This is really well done !!! Quite creepy in it's realism !!!

Moon - Duncan Jones BAFTA win

Great to see Duncan Jones awarded the 'Outstanding Debut' prize for his science fiction film Moon at the BAFTA's !!!

Lionel Jeffries - Rest in Peace

Grew up watching Lionel Jeffries in such films as Two Way Stretch, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, First Men in the Moon he also provided the voice for Fred Bassett in the TV animation and directed and wrote the screenplay for The Railway Children with Jenny Agutter in 1970.



The Rada-trained star, who was associated with a number of children’s classics, was 83.Jeffries was an instantly recognisable figure and became a familiar face in film and TV for decades.A spokeswoman for his agent, the Liz Hobbs Group, said: “We can confirm he did pass away this morning. It was following a long illness.”

From Online

War of the Worlds ????

Awesome cover art for Spanish edition of War of the Worlds !! :)

The Asphyx: Digitally Remastered Special Edition

I always liked this early 70's Horror film since I seen it on TV many years ago, now I'm pleased to see there's a special DVD version coming out soon.

The Asphyx

The Making of The Empire Strikes Back

If this is half as good as the Star Wars one they released then it's still going to be great !! According to Amazon.co.uk it get released July 20th and is 372 pages.

Happy Birthday Michael Ironside

60 today ! "See you at the party Richter !"

Blake's 7 Visual FX : Part 3 - Worst Android effect ?

Quite possibly the worst attempt at an android head ever, from the episode Project Avalon. It's naff because it's literally chroma-keyed in and it seems to float about as the head and camera aren't still, plus if they've removed some sort of panel from the side of here head then how come her hair goes behind the supposed hole ?!

Viper Pilot's Helmet

There's something still very cool about lots of the designs in the original Battlestar Galactica show, here's a great replica of the Viper Pilot's helmet's with that great Egyptian feel to them.

www.efxcollectibles.com

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2010 Costumes - Oscar Nomination

As a follow up to my post about 2010:The Year We Make Contact I thought I'd mention something that really disturbed me about the Oscar's for 1984, amongst the five films nominated that year for 'Academy Award for Best Costume Design' was Patricia Norris for 2010. They brought on some extras dressed in costumes from the film, to some funky Sci-Fi music and had a few of them doing robotic dancing, pretty crummy. My surprise was that it was even nominated, after all 3 of the costumes the extras were wearing came straight from 2001:A Space Odyssey, those been the red spacesuit, the dark coloured smoking jacket and a white bed robe Bowman wears as an old man, the rest of the films costumes are made up of stock overalls covered in patches, seen already in better films like 2001,Dark Star, Silent Running and Alien, T-Shirts and men in suits, and the NASA looking spacesuits I mentioned in my 2010 critique. This and the fact that Bob Ringwood who designed the wonderfully original costumes for David Lynch's Dune that same year didn't even get a nomination. Look at the photos and judge for yourself, but I know which one I would have nominated out of the two.

The eventual winner that year was Theodor Pistek for Amadeus

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SF or Sci-Fi ?
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Which do you prefer as a short term for Science Fiction ?