electric indigo

The base color is a 3:1:1 mix of Tamiya white:light grey:sky grey, the darker tone is 1:1:1. I used gloss white to get a satin finish so I could apply the decals without having to gloss coat the kit. The decals are really excellent, super thin film and perfectly registered. I'm tempted to use the same color scheme on the FA-27.

RAWR! Still not finished, but getting there.

Final steps on the Raptor. I built a tiny HUD; need to do some paint touch-ups, then glue everything together.

I was very impressed by The Fountain, not only because I can personally relate to the story, but also because it's creative use of the potential of Science Fiction. Aronovski is something like today's Tarkovski. And while the drama get's a bit over the top at the end of the movie (in the Maya scene), I can enjoy it for the actors, the color composition, and the cinematography alone. I read that the dying star was not CGI, but microscope photography of chemical reactions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs3mNIu70-E That scene is from the workprint and includes a not-too-subtle approach of the Alien with it's tail (and a silly walk that was fortunately cut), it lacks the shot of the tail going up Lambert's legs (which was actually a shot from Brett's scene). IIRC, in the shot where Ripley finds her dead mates, you can see something that could be a bloody naked leg dangling in the frame on the right.

It has been done before! In "Alien", we never find out what happened to Lambert, but the sounds are quite suggestive.

Wasn't there a short story from Clarke first?

2010 was merely an illustration to the narration. 2001 was a vision in itself that surpassed the source material.

For those who read the novel, there's an intersting comment about translation errors at the amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/review/R393K0RSATEL9...=cm_cr_rdp_perm I recommend the book to everybody who found the OVA at least mildly interesting. While there is the amount of weirdness you expect from japanese SF (topped by Rei's method of identifying a JAM in human form), it is more accessible than the animation, and fans of the Tom Clancy approach to introducing military hardware will love Kambayashi instantly. IMO the novel and the animation compliment each other in a nice way, with the book giving you depth where the OVA left you puzzled, and Yamashta's and Takeuchi's aircraft designs fleshing out the hardware of Faery's outlandish Air Force. I also found it interesting to populate the story with the character designs from the animation, as Kombayashi's choice of characterzation is endless internal monologue, which doesn't give much life to the protagonists, making them plot puppets instead. The nature of the conflict on Faery and the situation of the humans on their isolated base is made much clearer in the narration, which is broken up into self-contained episodes. Since the material screams "instant OVA", it makes you wonder what Gonzo tried to accomplish with their changes. Oh and there are lots of really exciting dogfights.

I fail to see how the movie could have been improved by additional gore. -You know, we have this really cool premise, what should we do with it? -F#ck it, let's just have some slaughter and things blowing up.

Too bad the second half and the supporting actors put it firmly in B-movie territory.

It's a snap-fit injection kit. Here's the page from Wave: http://hobby-wave.com/LINE_UP/kit/macross/...hawk/index.html

I can get over the Jar-Jar thing, but I admit that the price is bothering me.

Raptor 2.0

La Jetée is awesome. We need a sub-category to nominate films that weren't maybe the best, but deserve special mention. For me, that would be Aronovski's "Pi" and "The Fountain", Tarkovski's "Solaris" and "Stalker", Richard Kelly's "Donnie Darko", and this little gem: Phase IV from Saul Bass, and no, it's not a Mutant Ants schlockfest, but really clever and brilliantly filmed SF. Sorry, but the only thought that the pre-2009 Trek movies provoke is "Why the heck do they keep hiring 10 year old fanboys for scriptwriting".

HOOOO- LEEEE SH1T!!

http://static.rcgroups.com/forums/attachme...3-46-n69bhc.jpg and there's a new variant of the possible intake shielding: http://radikal.ru/F/s51.radikal.ru/i134/10...a68e33.jpg.html

It's the 1/72 kit from Platz: http://www.hlj.com/product/PLZX-10

I finished the novel and felt inspired enough to start painting my Sylphid kit

no Lasers = not Science Fiction

We have new evidence in this most important matter:

The CFs we see in episode 2 are also a more greenish yellow than olive green, so the color is not too far fetched. Was there ever an official illustration of the VF-25 CF? I don't think they have the black and white chest stripes.

That's a very interesting montage you made there. So Matrix is "Welt am Draht" with a Megazone 23 plot structure! Btw. "am Draht" = "on (the) line". Internet avant le lettre! I had a big WTF?! moment when I watched Matrix and they changed dimensions through the phones like in that obscure TV movie from '73 - and then even the rest of the concept turned out to be just the same.

You could also say the author wasn't bold enough to take his concept one step further. And you can't be serious calling "Neuromancer" un-cinematic. While it may not have minute descriptions, it is full of very visual ideas. As for sophisticated SF movies, I think that "Children of Men" is one of the few that I can recommend to adults.

In terms of life-altering experience, it would be "Alien". I was nine when I saw a tiny b/w photo in a magazine of the Space Jockey that had grown into his seat - I had nightmares for three days. Other pictures that haunted me where the strange orifices is the alien ship, the extendible jaws, the alien eggs, the doomed anti-hero crew in their Snowy White coffins - all just photos, years before I saw the movie. Later I got my hands on a book of the concept design for this movie, which introduced me to that field of work. Then came the photo novel, and I did not dare to look at the pictures of the split skull at the end. And when I finally saw it in the cinema around '84, it did surpass my expectations. "Odyssey" and "Star Wars" were great, but the did show me stuff in motion I'd seen before in illustrations, book covers or comics, but Ridley Scott and Giger opened up a door to an entirely different world.