Thursday, December 29, 2011

EPIC Unaired Pilot Episode of the Week

If you’re looking for a new drug for your police procedural buzz, then I’m going to taunt you with what could have been, had this show been picked up by NBC.

As with recent news, a la Whitney getting a prime-time slot in the fall comedy line-up and sidelining Community, NBC has really been goofing on their executive television decisions.

Ratings may matter, but targeting the dumbest demographic isn’t always the best decision. If you kill smartly written and produced series, somewhere a long the way the market is going to decline. Can’t ride the success for too long.

Exhibit B: Ron Moore—creator of 2004’s Battlestar Galactica, you may have heard of it—had a show in the works that would blow all of its contemporaries out of the water. Adding to the fact that the show’s premise effectively blends two completely different genres of fiction into something that you can actually see on screen, this pilot throws around some ambitious concepts, and it’s exciting.

Full pilot below, albeit not the best quality.



The final few minutes throw a curveball that, whether you were expecting it or not, would be a pretty awesome storyline to play out.

The sceptics can suck it, this looks way too fun to have passed up. Thanks, NBC.

Thanks for all you do to kill good television programming. 

Sunday, December 25, 2011

The Meaning of Holidays

Happy everything and Merry everything else! Love each other for a few days!

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Save the Internet; Watch & Listen to this Video.

Thirty minutes of your time to educate yourself about a potentially destructive piece of American legislation that will cripple and destroy everything about the Internet. This guy is a UK Law graduate. He’s smart. Listen to him.

Everyone will suffer. Corporations, Internet platforms, social networking, digital content creators, consumers, producers, regular people, you, me, your children, your ability to enjoy creativity, cultivation of ideas, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg, Shaun Parker, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs’ idea of technology progressing society and culture, independent artists/filmmakers/producers/musicians, YouTube videos, Facebook accounts, memes, internet entrepreneurs, free speech, access and freedom to information, and the future of the digital age and new media.

You censor information, you censor people. You censor people, you censor freedom.

Fuck you, Congress. Everyone suffers. Globally. AROUND THE WORLD.

SPREAD THE WORD.

http://www.americancensorship.org has been, fittingly, taken down.

This cannot happen. If this happens, it’s another step to a world in the near future that no one wants to see. Please. Don’t let stubborn 50-year olds tell our generation what’s right and what’s wrong about an innovation that we grew up with.

Send this video out to everyone you know, tell them to watch it. Tell your American friends, tell your parents.

Tell the Internet, before its voice is gone for good.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

A Case in Pride

I’ll sound like a broken record soon, but time and time again I encourage most people I see to start reading comics and graphic novels. If there’s at least a hint of interest in simply reading, as in prose fiction, the threshold of picking up a comic book, or a closed graphic narrative, is not far away.

And as the dwindling demand of mainstream comic books is seeing its decline, probably the earliest one to go in the slow, steady, inevitable decline of all print media, I’m concerned.

Losing comics is like losing an entire language—no, imagine losing television. Losing cinema. Losing plays. If that was gone from the combined cultural context of a society. The worst case scenario is, in the 5,000+ year history that sequential art has existed on Earth, that it’s going to die out because of the social contexts and mass preconceptions and the pop-culture pothole it can’t seem to get out of.

The cynic in me broods, but I have high hopes. Despite the marginal attention it gets in its actual domain—minus the adapted properties other mediums suck out of it, providing no aid in pushing a potential consumer base into the works that inspired such properties, I have hope that comics may survive—nay, thrive, if it can climb its way out of those social and cultural barriers it’s been trapped in for the last 20 or so years.

I just finished reading Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, a cartoonist and a comics theorist—yes, I consider it an actual term, like it deserves to be, and the things it taught me about the medium—the artform—is that there’s way more importance to what it has to offer and and what it provides to the literary world than I originally thought, and most likely more than anyone of my peers or elders think.

It’s a great textbook, a great study and a great tool. If you have any doubts picking up a comic, whether for the potential self-ridicule or judgmental peers, this book quells those anxieties. It made me feel privilege to be a fan, a participant, in the medium of graphic storytelling. It’s a special kind of medium. Like no other.

So, in wondering why there’s not more attention to it, I tried searching for any kind of academic presence towards the medium, because I know old professor-types still read comics no matter how sophisticated they want to seem. Hell, some may embrace it.

Like this guy.

Henry Jenkins – “Comics and Graphic Storytelling: A Sample Syllabus”
He teaches at the University of Southern California, and his students are lucky.

There are programs at SCAD that teach sequential art, and may art schools around the world also offer sequential art programs of study or related courses, which is awesome—no matter how small it is, the comics industry and consumer base will always look for, and find, new artists, inkers, pencillers, letterers and the like.

But teach the academic worth of comics and graphic storytelling as a literary medium, as far as I can tell, is a far-off dream. At my school at least, no such courses exist, sure they may be touched upon by professors who want to spice up their syllabi with ‘fun’ comic book topics. Most pop culture courses refer to comics of staples of Western identity, but most of the time it ends there.

Where’s the deconstruction of Alan Moore’s iconography and character symbolism in Watchmen? Art Speigelman’s mastery of storytelling craft with Maus? The superficial beauty and representation of intimacy through line, shape, and panelling in Craig Thompson’s Blankets? The history and source behind the cultural contexts that characters like Superman, Batman, or Archie provide?

Not in textbooks your school makes you buy, that’s for sure. Jenkins in his proposed syllabus provides Understanding Comics as required reading among Will Eisner’s great Graphic Storytelling & Visual Narrative (that inspired McCloud’s book), and a great sort of graphic novel examples: Batman: The Killing Joke, Persepolis, The Unwritten.

If these names are new to you, Google them. Now. Learn. Teach yourself. Indulge in this medium, for the sake of its preservation and cultivation. So you can read comics in a classroom, and no one is allowed to be ashamed, because there’s no reason you should be.

Maybe, put down the Hemingway and the Plath and the Dostoyevsky and pick up some Alan Moore, some Grant Morrison, some Charles Shultz.

Just pick up a damn comic, and be proud you’re reading it.

The schools might follow suit.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

EPIC Cinematic Trailer of the Day (also Spike VGAs)

Right now, Spike’s 2011 Video Game Awards are in full swing, and a slough of awards have already been won, with Portal 2 rightfully taking many of them, including sweeping the voice performance category, as well as Minecraft snatching a well deserved indie game victory.

Pretty happy with what’s been shown so far, save for the uber-casual vibes I keep getting from both host (though he was great in Tangled) and audience—the way they say ‘graphics’ just irks me, maybe it’s just my elitist geek showing through—but one of the greatest things about gaming award shows is that I can see the trailers live as well. Conventions are lame in that you have to be there to see them.

Despite the fact that I just saw Charlie Sheen onstage and Modern Warfare 3 win an award, it’s still a good feeling when you feast your eyes upon something like this:

Naughty Dog Inc. are the guys behind the Uncharted franchise. Three games in, they’ve established themselves as one of the most innovative game developers when it comes to interactive storytelling. They did the games industry a huge favour, if you already didn’t know.

They’re developing this. So hopes are high, and that’s helped well along by this amazing cinematic trailer above. What’s wrong with that zombie-or-whatever’s head in that trailer? Well, it’s not science fiction.

It’s just science.

Okay, not fully just science, but damn it, this concept is outstandingly cool for a post-apocalyptic game, and there’s already been a huge surge in recent years, we’re hoping for a fresh take. Could this be it?

Naughty Dog has yet to fail its fans, or its industry. Or its console. If this is a PS3 exclusive, Microsoft might finally have a run for its money. Console-war pointlessness aside, this trailer is a definite reminder for me of how far video games have come artistically as a form of more than just cheap entertainment.

It’s a medium that’s like no other, and should stay that way. It should be the next step. If this lives up to what this trailer is teasing, lets hope games like this push that notion forward.

Previously: Dead Island’s GDC ‘11 Trailer gave me a similar reaction.

UPDATE: Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim takes Game of the Year, along with Best Role-Playing Game. Bethesda Game Studios takes developer. This makes me happy, and makes up for Charlie Sheen / MW3 combo (a fitting one, actually).