electric indigo

Looks like a worthy update. On the visual side, it's already a winner. Let's hope they come up with a decent plot.

The good thing about Bandai's Macross F kits is that they sacrifice structural stability for the transformation, but not the design. So, contrary to older kits of the transforming variety, you can just build a kit in either fighter or battroid mode and both will look good without heavy modding. So the construction is more complex and the price is higher due to the transformation, but the kits are still much cheaper than what you'd pay for 1/72 resin kits.

This one isn't too bad, either:

Seperated at birth?

New pictures at Amiami

The body color should also work for the CF 25, right?

Here's the crop of the hi-res photo. Like I said, if it's shopped, it's very convincing. What's most dubious to me is that there is still no single other photo of the painted plane.

PAK FA's cockpit & HDTV HUD

What's the chance of having almost the same weather and light condition and cloud formation on Jan. 29th and Feb. 12th and catch the bird at almost the same position over the runway? I vote for two pictures taken at the firsth flight, from slightly different positions and with different cameras. And then somebody took his time with photoshop and delivered a really convincing shop job. There's a high res version where you can even see different warning labels on the hull.

Don't f#ck with The Hitcher.

MG went creative on the 27:

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