Dum de Dum.
A couple more things I’m working on - or rather the evolution of last weeks too WIPS. A bit more fooling and they’ll be all done. Also another reproduction of one of Sargents’ studies.
What? Animation?
Something I dug up from my last year of school - though sadly not the version with the explosion at the end - oh well. Thanks goes to andy for shrinking this sucker down for me, enjoy.
from Sean Bigham on Vimeo.
OK Jordan.
PS the fighter bays are on the bottom. And its rendered sexier now.
Poop
This post is a bit all over the map. It starts with a finished version of a capitol ship i sketched in an earlier post, then a completed turn around that i had 1/2 done for school for a run cycle (hooray cartoon characters). A couple of in progress characters I’ll be pushing further and rendering out in the next couple weeks to boot then we have a study of the work of Sargent I think I’ll be doing more of these master studies to work my colors further… Then there’s my bus/lunch break sketches for the month, enjoy.
More Tings…
Here’s a couple more things. The backview for the Modern Bioshock Big Daddy is done - I may need to add some dials to the gun but otherwise this one is at last done. High fives!
Also here’s a quick coloring of the girl with the gun that was posted in the last slew of uploads.
Revamped site design…
For the last day of my wcb work week I’ve revamped my main website and converted the whole thing to delicious css. That’s right, not a single damn table. It took awhile - but eventually I was able to reteach myself everything I’d learnt in class 3 years ago. Which wasn’t very much to begin with, but it allows me to build a descent site. The infamous intro page is BACK! I was also finally able to add titles to my images so you can know what they’re supposed to be.
Alas it is time to go back to regular work… hopefully I can find some way to maintain this recent ambition.
Written by Sean Bigham No commentsWCB = lots of progress on stuff
I’ve been pretty busy the past few days courtesy of being kept off work thanks to a self inflicted fractured toe - HIGH FIVE! But seriously. I was able to go back to a few projects I’ve had on the back burner or have been meaning to start up. So here we go. To start I’ve decided I’m STILL not done with the big daddy redesign and may even have a couple more beyond this to go and have started on the back view - I’ll post that in the coming weeks. Anyways in the new version the pincer arm is now fixed up to be more bad ass and the weird part of his left arm above the gun has been tubified.
Remember that horrible spaceship i whipped up to try and apply to bioware with? It was pretty sloppy and I’ve been milling over a redo of it for awhile now. So I took the time and sleeked it out into a cooler starship. It still retains some reference to Mass Effect ships - but made sexier…
Also if there’s one thing my portfolio is seriously lacking at the moment its women. So here’s another prelim sketch I’ve started for the heroine of the sol-fungus story. She’s a military trained translator who belongs to the human survivors of the epic ’sol-fungus’ incident in which a self replicating biological singularity occurs on earth and devours the solar system. Armor and such is kept to a minimum but features a pressure suit/flak jacket combo just in case things get crazy.
And here’s a bunch of sketches from my joyous bus rides downtown to work every day.
The Ball rolls once more.
A few things have been happening as of late. To start I’ve recently gone in and done a major overhaul of the artwork adding in process for most of the creatures and a variety of touchups here and there.
Next up I have by first published work for the Kaakuluk, Nunavut’s Discovery Magazine for Kids as a two page interior spread. As a first experience with having to work with both an art director and a cultural adviser it was pretty interesting and went relatively smoothly. The final piece was a bit taller and had floating caribou parts awaiting integrated design work which I’ve removed from this version. The illustration is of a traditional hunting scene involving an Inuit tribe showing all the ways that Caribou are used within their society from food to tools.
Thought it would be a fun to try and redesign the Big Daddies from Bioshock with a bit more of a modern take. I tried to keep some of the basics of the character the same while adding a bit of an extra flavor. The tesla coil seems kind of impractical but seemed like a neat modern/futurish weapon that could be tacked on - possibly used for over the top welding? Working on the little sisters next and possibly a big sister since i detest their new design so very much…
MIT’s Remedial Science Classes — Also: Knowing is a huge piece of shit
There’s a brief scene in the terrible new Nicholas Cage/Alex Proyas special effects thriller where Nicholas Cage, reputed astrophysicist, is teaching a class at MIT. It isn’t really clear what this class is… whether they’re undergraduate or graduate students. There are space-y decorations around the room, so I guess it could be assumed that it’s some kind of astronomy or astrophysics class. He says, more or less, that he’s going to introduce them to some ideas, that might help get the ball rolling for their term papers.
It is important, here, to use the classic Nicholas Cage voice while playing out this dialogue in your head.
“There are, like, two different ways of viewing the universe, man, the theory of, like, determinism, and whoa, random chance. Determinism is, like everything happens for a reason, and random chance is all of this is the result of random chemical reactions and genetic mutations.”
He tosses around a ball that’s been painted to look like the sun while asking random facts about the sun. The kids in the class know how hot the sun is, and that it has a bunch of hydrogen in it. Whoa! Excellent work! Class dismissed!
Meanwhile, there’s a chalkboard behind him with some hardcore space Calculus that goes unmentioned (but the camera lingers on it for a moment… You see that there? That’s some fucking MATH right there. This guy is a fucking genius).
I can barely formulate a response to this. It should be easy, considering how common this sickness is.
Dear Everyone Who Is Ever Going to Make a Movie,
DO NOT PUT A CLASSROOM SCENE IN YOUR FUCKING MOVIE UNLESS YOU HAVE ACTUALLY ATTENDED A COMPARABLE CLASS YOURSELF. THAT MEANS EVERYONE INVOLVED.
That means, go to a local University or Community Fucking College, and tell them you’re a fucking screenwriter or film director or actor, and ask to sit through one or five of their classes on X (here, Astrophysics… I think).
Right now, the CLASSROOM SCENE is brain-damaged screenwriter shorthand for “I want to say something directly to my audience, but that seems clumsy, so instead, I’ll have a bunch of twenty-somethings stand in for my audience, and I’ll be represented by the lecturer.” It can also be screenwriter shorthand for “I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.” In Knowing, it seems to be a bit of both.
One. University level science lecture, even the most fun and entertaining ones, tend to be pretty information dense. The lecturer tends not to quiz his students on fucking random trivia, but rather, if he’s going to be asking questions at all, it’s going to be something the requires a proper understanding of the material, usually involving problem solving or mathematics.
Two. Gibberish. His entire “science” lecture comes across as pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo, even though it’s stated in the film that Nicholas Cage is an atheist (formerly a Catholic). He says, “Why, dude, is it, like, that our Earth is at the exact right position from the sun for life to survive… did this happen for a reason, or was it, like, you know, random chance?” His students, apparently all members of MIT’s Special Education Program (I didn’t know they had this) have no rebuttal. Lottery winners. Lottery winners must think, “Why me? How is it that I picked the exact right numbers… it must be magic, a miracle.” Whoever wins the lottery always reels at the specialness of their improbable victory, but SOMEONE ALWAYS WINS THE FUCKING LOTTERY. That is a statistical inevitability. With all of the galaxies and all of the stars and all of the planets (we suspect) in the universe (and that, only the universe that we can see), it seems pretty fucking likely that there are going to be some planets formed in the habitable zone with the right basic materials to get this life thing started. We won the lottery, so obviously we’re able to look at our improbable position and marvel at how unlikely it is that we’re all here… but it had to happen to someone, somewhere. He then tells the students that he thinks it’s all just random chance and coincidence. A scientist. A man who by all means, should believe in things only when there are sensible reasons and explanations, has made exactly zero arguments for how all of this can happen without a capital R reason behind it, but he believes it anyway.
His class is enraptured. His MIT class. His class that must have been top of the fucking pile at their respective high schools or colleges across America, now attending arguably the most prestigious science school in the world, are completely satisfied with this, the stupidest science lecture they have likely ever heard. And another scientist has walked into the room, partway through the lecture. He has heard this. He walks up to Nicholas Cage and he says, “That’s some heavy stuff, bro.”
Not, “That’s the stupidest fucking lecture I’ve ever heard, turn in your science gun and your science badge.”
At a point, later in the film, there’s this guy in the woods that’s creeping out Nicholas Cage and his kid, so Nicholas Cage heads out into the woods with a flashlight and bat, and he shouts, “You want some of this?” and then he hits an innocent bystanding Tree with the bat… implying that the “this” in his statement was, in fact, referring to getting hit with a bat. Judging by audience response, this was the funniest scene in the movie. It was clearly not meant to be.
I’m about to spoil some things.
Written by Andrew LeBlanc 6 comments