TMNT
We saw the new Ninja Turtles film a couple of Wednesdays ago, and it was so good we're definitely going again. I posted my review on the Wonderblog ( www.wonderfist.net/blog ), but that was then.
This is now, so I'm going to add this last word on reflection: the best and most refreshing thing about the film, which I thought was really good, was that it unveiled to us a new, smaller animation company who ISN'T following the Dreamworks route. In fact in interview, which you can read here: www.comicbookresources.com/new… , the producer says as much.
"We just didn't want to do a DreamWorks movie where everyone's a famous player, where the names of the actors are bigger than the title of the movie."
Music to the ears (eyes?) of any animation fan. Well, any animation fan who can tell you their name without having to think too hard, anyway.
THINGS I'M MAKING
Work continues on various projects. I'm getting back into writing, having just finished a revision (total overhaul) of the script for a comic, which Andy "2hands" Tunney
is down to illustrate.I can't tell you what it is yet, but I can tell you about writing it! I first wrote this comic on holiday with my family as a teenager - I wasted most of the holiday on it, in fact. The problem was that I just wrote it as it came to me, and the result was a fat thirty-eight page mess, written mostly in awful cliches and chunks of flowery prose designed to hide the fact that the actual panels they were describing would be very boring.
For this new version I was determined to do it properly now I'm something like a grownup, and so I wove the whole thing very carefully together in such a way as to have each scene depend on the one before it and after it, resulting in a neat 22 pages that magically contain all the good stuff from the stupid version and none of the stupid. It was quite a challenge, but I did it. Whether it has its own brand-new stupid is up to whoever gets to read it to decide.
I think it's pretty good though, so that's done, and I've been writing out some ideas for short stories that I might send off to... oh. Who do you send short stories to again, exactly?
In terms of drawing, I'm still ploughing my way through my comic and thinking about actually making and selling it now. After a long period of quiet, the team at Travelling Man Manchester are pushing the creative side of their weekly comics night (7pm-10pm Thursdays). That should be great, and I hope to get a fair bit more done there than I sometimes do. I was particularly useless at this last one, having discovered I'd drawn everything I could possibly draw on paper (for currently open projects) and needed my computer to do anything at all. Not much help when you're in town. I'll make sure to take some inking along or something next week.
But apart from that, Abby "1nose" Ryder and I have come up with some ideas about how to shove ourselves forwards a bit and get things moving career-wise. We just need to work out who to aim them at. Watch this space. Or even better, this one:
- Dave Bulmer