Trevor's Blog

  Kung Fury is a lot of things. It's silly, ridiculous, it's funny, and it's unabashedly stupid. But, at it's core, it's a self aware parody of cheesy 80's films. Cop movies? Kung Fu movies? Time travel movies? If you name it, it's in there.  Released in 2015, Kung Fury is the passion project of filmmaker David Sandberg that pays homage to the cheesy films of the 80's. Taking place in Miami in 1985, it follows a half kung fu master/half cop who goes on a wild quest to stop Adolf Hitler and his kung fu nazi's from taking over the world.  It's also the most gloriously ridiculous uses of CG and VFX I have ever seen.    While the project was all funded by a Kickstarter made by Sandberg, he didn't have enough money to do filming on real settings. Because of this, majority of the settings and objects in the film were made using digital effects and green screen. While it's obvious the settings and objects in the film are CGI, they're done so...

 One of my favorite shows streaming on Netflix right now is called "Love Death and Robots"  The show, which was originally meant to be a remake of the 1981 anthology film "Heavy Metal", is an adult anthology show consisting of several animated shorts spread across each season. Each short ranges in style and tone but the overall theme of all of the shorts goes back to the title.  I remember watching the first season of the show back when it premiered in 2019. While I loved majority of the shorts, one of them that really stood out to me, visually at least, was the third short of season one: "The Witness".  "The Witness" is a thriller following a woman who witnesses a murder and is spotted by the killer. She is then pursued through the streets of Tokyo as she attempts to escape the killer.  Once separates this short from the others in that season is the distinctive style. The art style is done completely in CG and looks very much like something out ...

I'm sucker for VFX heavy commercials, specially those that can use CG in a cool way. I don't care if it's old or new, if it's well done and even goes beyond what a commercial can do with CG then I'll admire it.  One of my favorties is an old Wile E. Coyote commercial adversing a Pontiac. Now I know I don't need to explain the setup, at this point it's obvious, but what really caught my attention about this commercial is how it's visually executed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qstlyYkQNIU Here is a commercial that start off with just 2D characters on what looks what a seemingly 2D background. But when I rewatched it I notice that it wasn't just 2D characters on a 2D background. It was 2D characters combined with a heavily stylized CG background.  I picked this up because some shots and how they look and move are way too smooth and "robotic" to be fully 2D backgrounds. Not to mention that some of the rocks in this  shots look too perfected...

 In my previous post about the Reel FX Looney Tunes shorts, I mentioned that one of the failed attempts to bring one of the characters into the realm of CG in a feature film was Marvin The Martian.  Now, while this film never got made, there was some test footage released for it back in 2012. I remember not only seeing the test footage at that time, but even using for the basis of a presentation on the history of CG and how it evolved for a public speaking competition.  Entitled "Marvin The Martian in Yule Be Sorry", the movie was going to follow Marvin wanting to destroy Christmas only to get trapped in a box by Santa Claus and shipped to a trouble making kid: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xw9bwr Running at a good three minutes, it's not anything spectacular, but it's good to get some idea of what they were going for in both the tone and the CG look of Marvin. I think out of everything showcased in the footage the highlight IS Marvin's model.   The CG model...

 As a big fan of Looney Tunes, I would say I know a good amount of Looney Tunes content out there.  From shorts, to specials, to movies I know a good amount of the history and different eras these characters have went through.  One of these eras was an extremely brief time to try and get the characters back into the theaters. I call this short era the "Reel FX Shorts Era".  As shown in the image above, what made this era of shorts distinctive from the countless Looney Tunes theatrical shorts that came before them was that they were completely CGI. The first time that a handful of these characters had entered the 3D realm.  These were made around the time that WB was trying to bring the Looney Tunes back to the big screen in some way and using computer generated imagery. I remember around the time between 2008-2012 WB was announcing Live Action/CGI hybrid films starring certain characters. Movies based on Bugs, Marvin, Speedy Gonzales, and Pepe Le Pew were all an...

For my Afrofuturism Collage Project for my Intro to Computer Graphics class, we had to take five or seven things that meant a lot to us and find images of those things that could represent what we wanted to put in the collage.  One of the images I chose to showcase what meant to me was a projector, meant to show that I love movies. The image I picked to showcase that was this:  While I thought this was a great image to use to showcase what I'm passionate about, I knew I couldn't just "use" this image for my collage. It's clearly someone else's work. So, I thought "How can I make this my own?" and came up with a great idea.  First, I imported the image into Photoshop as background.  Secondly, I put a layer over the image of the projector and decreased its opacity so I could see the image clearly.  Thidly and finally, I began to trace over the image and adding my own spin to the look of the projector. Making it more cube like and blue, adding a little ...

Over the course of about 17 years Spongebob Squarepants and his friends have graced the silver screen in three feature films.  While the first movie was fully 2D animated and the second movie utlized both 2D and 3D animation, the third movie took a much different apporach stylistically: It was the franchise's first fully computer animated film.  Entitled "The Spongebob Movie: Sponge On The Run" and directed by series vetrean Tim Hill, the movie takes inspiartion from the "road trip" plot fo the first film and the plot of the "Where's Gary?" special as Spongbob and Patrick head to "The Lost City Of Atlantis City" to rescued Gary after he is kidnapped by an evil king.  While the film's story isn't nearly as grand scale as the previous two films, the one big thing it does have that amps up the underwhelming story it is working with is its animation. Done by Mikros Animation, who did the animation for Dreamwork's "Captain Und...