Of Critters and Animation

Two new animations for the month.


Spiderbot rig by atezel at creativecrash.com. Story: Patrolling spiderbot encounters a flawed cube in the cube making factory.



Audio from Seinfeld "The Wink". Animated in Flash.

Both of these took me forever to get into a format and size that youtube would like. I like hd264 in mov format, my version of After Effects doesn't understand the new version of Quicktime I guess and it won't give me these options. I can get it to render out a version in avi, but its usally a gig and that would take forever to upload to any site. In the end I have to compress it until it looks decent. I have to upgrade After Effects so I can get some of that sweet HD264 compression action again.


I want to watch Critters again. I watched it when I was a kid and it freaked me out. It wasn't until I watched Dead Alive (Brain Dead) that my fear of horror films disappeared. It was so over the top that anything else won't bother me.

I love the first version of horror films. Its back when people aren't expecting Jason to appear or Chucky isn't cracking jokes. Sequels just spread the initial butter out until its just a thin layer. However some sequels, like Aliens and Chucky II, improve on the original concept.

Speaking of horror films, I watched the Mystery Science Theater version of The Beast of Yucca Flats this weekend. Wow. Worst Movie Ever. It's bad. There is barely any dialogue, and if there is its obviously a post production recording. Most of it is narrated but all his dialogue is confusingly poetic, such as telling the audience that the characters are "moving towards progress" over and over. There are a lot of scenes that have no purpose, such as people moving from one place to the other. There is a lot of violence, but no blood so you can never tell if someone is dying from a shot or just wounded. Most of all, Tor Johnson plays the Beast. The same Tor Johnson of Ed Wood fame. The movie is so bad but you can see the plot and how things could be better edited right in front of you. That's why I think its time for a remake of The Beast....starring Vin Diesel as "The Beast"!