Tag: movie

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life randomness

Photoshop– you sure you’re doing that right?

I was walking around the mall this afternoon running a couple of errands before I start my new job on Monday, and I happened to come across a poster for the upcoming Scott Pilgrim movie. I thought it was pretty cool as a teaser type poster (I’ve always been partial to bass and drums). That is, until  I took a look at its feet:

What jumped out at me was how oddly angled and out of proportion (relative to the figure as a whole) the sneakers looked. And let’s not get into the shadow. For a second I thought the whole thing might have been an optical illusion created by overly baggy pants, but the jeans looked loose or relaxed, but definitely not baggy. I also looked Michael Cera up on IMDB, and found that the kid’s close to six feet, so not only did the shoes look like they had been replaced, but they were now tiny as well (I’m fairly confident in saying that, if anything, Mr. Cera would not want to be known as the guy with the tiny feet).

Just so things are in context, here’s an image of the whole poster. I took the liberty of really quickly drawing a rough “wireframe” of where I think the original feet were placed.

I’m hoping the reason such slipshod work was put out was because of time constraints. I’d hate to think this exemplifies the type of quality the studio’s marketing people (whether in-house or not) are putting out.

So, tell me– am I correct in my observation? Am I completely off-base here? I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this.

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daily365 vector

Create Something Every Day (#daily365)– for May 10

Foiled again!

The lack of variety in my “f” fonts on my PC was pretty surprising. Don’t get me wrong. There are some sturdy workhorses there– stuff like Futura, Folio, Franklin Gothic. Just not a whole lot of visual variety. So I turned to yet another of those free fonts that I’ve collected over time but that have very little practical use. Kinda like that pair of banana yellow socks I had back in the 80s.

When I looked at FlutedGermanica’s lowercase “f”, I was struck with how much it looked to me like a flint-lock pistol. I took part of an illustration I made for a proposed version of a logo for my church’s youth group, and, inspired by some noir and noir-ish film imagery, I put this together. Hope you’re enjoying– as am I– this romp through the alphabet.

©2010 rafael armstrong
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daily365

Create Something Every Day (#daily365)– for April 14

My piece for 4/14 centers around Remo Williams,  one of my guilty pleasure 80s movies (MegaForce is another, but we’ll leave that for another day) . Joel Grey’s character, “Chiun”, a Korean master of Sinanju, has some of the best lines (two of my favorites are “you move like a pregnant Yak” and “you drive like a monkey in heat!”). This one, on the nature of fear, has stuck with me for years.

Enjoy!

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daily365

Create Something Every Day (#daily365)– For March 3

I’m almost caught up!

I was in the library earlier today looking through their music book section for anything that might have substantial amounts of Blue Note imagery to use as reference and inspiration for this month’s CSED. Alas, I found none today. So (and to briefly digress), in an effort to catch up with my daily posting, I decided to forgo the theme for this (yesterday’s piece).

Some notes on this piece:

I was going to write this whole long-winded piece on how I love the 80s and its films, and how WarGames impacted me as a geek growing up then. Over the weekend, and purely by chance, I caught on one of the local channels what could only have been a direct-to-video (or are we just saying direct-to-dvd now?) sequel of WarGames. Sadly, it was mostly a thinly veiled re-hash/updating of the original. But it inspired me to dust off some Photoshop effects I had not used in a while in order to create this:

How about a nice game of chess? ©2010 rafael armstrong

Hmmm… Maybe I should go with a different theme for March?

Thanks for sticking around and reading this. Your comments and feedback are always welcome.

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daily365 life randomness vector

Create Something Every Day (#daily365)– for Feb 22

As I write this, it’s well past midnight on the morning of 2/24, which means that by now I’m technically a couple of days behind on my #daily365. So I have a little catch up still to do.

On Feb 22’s CSED:

I spent the late late evening on Monday (2/22) watching the movie Johnny Got His Gun. If you’re a metal fan in your 30s, you’ll remember this as the movie Metallica took clips from for use on the video for One. And, if I understand correctly, it had not been released on dvd until recently.

So, after watching the movie and being inspired by the dvd cover/one-sheet, I had this visual pop in my head, and it was just a matter of (mostly) drawing it out in Illustrator. Unfortunately I passed out last night before being able to sit down at the computer.

©2010 rafael armstrong

I know that visually it’s similar to a previous piece, and I’m curious at this point in the year how (not if) patterns (visual, thematic, other) will eventually develop. I guess we’ll just have to see.

Your thoughts and feedback are always welcome.

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daily365 vector

Create Something Every Day (#daily365)– Feb 17

The idea for today’s #daily365 came about earlier this evening, when it occurred to me that MegaForce,  one of my 80s guilty pleasure movies, may have, in fact, been remade last year as G.I. Joe. It’s not a knock on Joe, which I enjoyed for what it was– a fun summer-popcorn-big explosion-action flick. No soliloquies on the nature of humanity, no heavily layered dialogue. Just pure, unabashed fun. It’s just that I noticed some parallels between the two, and it made me wonder.

Now, this realization, for some unexplained leap in logic, led me to my favorite movies of all time, and I decided that I would take a stab at a minimalist “poster”. I immediately thought of Empire Strikes Back, but couldn’t come up with an idea I could crank out within my self-imposed time limits. Having seen this (again) in the last couple of months, I decided to take a crack at Bogey instead.

©2010 rafael armstrong

Hope you enjoy. As always, your feedback and comments on this (or any other piece, for that matter) are always welcome.