Flesh Flowers

On Saturday I got the opportunity to attend the Glasgow Film Theatre’s five-film horror mini-festival, Fright Fest.

The Tripper, directed by David Arquette. An amusing pastiche of 70s low-budget guerrilla “nobody ever lost any money taking a bunch of teenagers to the woods an chopping them up” films. The teenagers/20 somethings are students/drop-outs on a drug-taking weekend at a music festival, a wild party spoilt by a Ronald Reagan kill-all-hippies chainsaw/axe nutter in the woods. Nice to see Jason Mewes, Jay of Jay and Silent Bob fame, playing himself again, and it’s not often you get to see Candy Flipping – the taking of LSD and ecstasy – onscreen very often these days. A great start to the day.

S&Man is a “documentary” on “underground horror” by J. T. Petty, who described himself as a maker of underground horror. His IMDb citation has his one low-budget horror (Soft for Digging, 2001) but all of his subsequent work as been writing credits on video games, notably after Tom Clancy gives an “idea” for the next title in his franchise, Petty then does the actual writing. His documentary focused on three production companies who, at best, can best be described as “completely and utterly perverted and demented”. Toetag Pictures and Bill Zebub Productions have the common thread of depicting the graphic torture, rape, and murder of women – though not necessarily in that order. “Hey! You shot me in the crotch”. No, really. The eponymous S&Man Productions of the title is a lone-man who follows women with a video camera (allegedly without them knowing), then approaching them to be in one of his movies. If they say yes he stalks them for a bit more, then takes them into a location and pretends to murder them, through strangulation, stabbing, the entire range. Charming. Except is it? Presenting itself as a documentary S&Man looked at this Eric Rost, living in his mother’s basement, making his demented movies. Except it’s not true. Eric Rost doesn’t exist, nor do his movies, and his website is a MySpace stunt by the director. Eric Rost is played by the actor/comedian Erik Marcisak. This was only known in retrospect. Was Petty’s goal situationist, or is he simply an opportunist liar? I objected to Petty’s assertion these were “horror” films and not pornography. Petty justifies his assertion on the grounds these films don’t feature penetrative sex. That’s a pisspoor criteria. The notable thread of all the films discussed was grotesque sexual violence, the only people who’d want to persue these fims (the ones that do exist) are men with violent sexual fantasies. That’s it. The entire market. Toetag and Bill Zebub produce rape porn. It’s as simple as that. I don’t feel a five-film Horror Film Festival really needs a documentary on nonces, let alone a part-Day Today part-Dispatches film on pretend nonces.

The Messengers, by Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang, sometimes known as the Pang Brothers. A pair of Hong Kong horror legends their first Hollywood film is, in a word, dull. In more words, dull, obvious, clichéd, slow, uninteresting, and with special effects that would make Ray Harryhausen turn in his grave – and he’s not even dead. Boring. Worthless. Avoid.

Turista, to be re-titled Paradise Lost, follows a bunch of whiney white tourists stranded in Darkest Brazil with only pocket-robbing locals and industrious organ thieves. The film has been critically panned, though I’m not sure it was a bad as the reviewers have made out, I certainly felt uneasy about casting basically every brown person in Brazil as in on a grand conspiracy to rob gringos, the film’s message explicitly stated to not take the bus anywhere in Latin America but to fly between metropolises. But some great locations and lots of tension. Watch it for free if you get the chance.

Motel Hell, 1980. A bone-fide old-school classic. Directed by Kevin Connor, who went on to have a modest career directing TV shows like Hart to Hart and Remmington Steele. Written by Robert Jaffe (who also wrote the disturbing Demon Seed), Steven-Charles Jaffe, (helped produce Near Dark, The Fly II, Strange Days, Star Trek VI, and, strangely, Ghost), with an uncredited writing contribution by Tim Tuchrello (a respected sound producer, recently sound-editing Apocalypto). This film could not be crazier, less-likely, more more-fun. What’s the secret meat in Farmer Smith’s special smoked meat? Human flesh, silly! This is the most lunatic, light-hearted, take on Psycho or Texas Chainsaw Killer you could hope for. Best part? I couldn’t choose between a pigtailed Nancy Parsons (the big gym-teacher from Porky’s), Farmer Smith wondering in a Southern drawl about the “karmic implications of all of this”, and the rows and rows of victims, buried up to the necks with vocal chords severed. They were like rows of gargling cabbages. Nasty, sure, but played for fun the whole film through. The gloriously dead-pan double entendres “don’t worry, my dear, one day I’ll teach you to smoke meat” had the audience in stitches. A brilliant finale.

Project Mayhem IV

Today none of the members of my former team turned up for any lectures, whereas my entire current team has. We have re-branded, Noob Games has become Project Mayhem, i.e. it’s our team name. We have yet to finalise a game-name. The lecturer, who doubled laughing at the team name, has a blog about the various teams but I don’t have the URL to hand, I’ll post it when I know.

We did a few tech-tests, mostly playing animated models. With a few clicks in the art package to create a loop-the-loop effect, just a single ‘play’ command the effect happens. Very cool, and very easy. The art guys are now having to model, skin, light-map, and then put in lots of amazing animations. The pair of them are heroes!

For my part I want more programs, professional add-ons to language used, to cover items such as shader creation, object rotation, AI, and dynamic lighting. The cost of these programs are about £15 each, I’m in the process of talking my classmates into these programs. If we share the costs it’ll be a couple of quid each, plus we’ll make much better games.

Project Mayhem III

I am a traitor! I have abandoned my friends, Jay and Silent Bob to their own devices, I have joined a rival enterprise, Noob Games (not my idea) working on a space-invaders game we’re calling Project Mayhem (my idea). I am sad I dumped my two pals, I hope it doesn’t affect my budding friendships with them. I had to dump my team-members by SMS today, because they weren’t in, which says it all really. Today was a day of lectures concentrating on programming 3d models, planes, textures, and cameras. None of those who missed today’s work know anything about those subjects. That was my final straw.

I’m happy with this move. My two team members are enthusiastic students, one proficient in the 3D art package, the other a master of it. They’re both bright enough to code, though they have left me to that, something I’m very happy with. I’ve been wanting to work with “the master” anyway, he’s a bright spark and can go far in the industry. Very creative and competent. It does mean the technology is placed on my shoulders, which I love. The main problem will be stopping them producing too much artwork to code and use within our timeframe.

The goal is to make a visually arresting shooter: part Space Invaders, part Asteroids, part R-Type. The backdrop will be 3D rendered objects and planes, the ships and missiles 3D rendered objects. There is be bump mapping, light embossing, reflective shaders, coloured lights, and lots of 3D, phased noise.

It will be good.

In Search of Hawkwind

For those of you know don’t know, Hawkwind are a seminal psychedelic rock band; formed 1969 from buskers and hippies, they gave hundreds of free gigs to help raise donations for various worthy causes, attended the legendary Isle of Wight festival where they played for free and got tribute and recognition from Jimmy Hendrix, and have for the last thirty five years toured Britain, Europe, and America, with a distinctive Space-&-Fantasy set of lights, lasers, poetry, readings, and music that predated dance’s ambient, groove, and chill-out, by at least three decades. You might not know their work except their famous single “Silver Machine”, you might not know any of their band members except Lemmy. They got Lemmy before he was famous, and they sacked him, giving him the impetus to form Motorhead. If you have heard of Cream, after they split they got the legendary drummer from that crew, Ginger Baker, and sacked him too (headline: world’s best drummer sacked by world’s worst bass player).

(click to enlarge)

It turns out they sacked a lot of people over the last thirty five years, and it’s those hirings-and-firings, and the often bitter recriminations that arose, rather than the music, that is the content of Carol Clerk’s “The Saga of Hawkwind”. I could put the 550-page tome down, discovering endless revelations and allegations. I’ve heard it said from Hawkwind fans they found the book “depressing” in parts, sad to see the dirty laundry of a Love-&-Peace band. I don’t see it that way, their music (and live shows) speak for themselves, and the ins-and-outs of the band is incredibly interesting. As Clerk says, sometimes ‘more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap’. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, it’s not a good work to introduce someone to Hawkwind to, but it’s a great read for fans.

Now I know I’ve seen Hawkwind live at least once, where they headed a 12 hour event, the Mildenhall Rock and Blues Festival, above such acts as Mamas Boys, a sub par English Whitesnake, the Atom Seeds, a sub par English Chile Peppers, and the Mean Red Spiders, not the Canadian white-noise pop outfit formed in 1995, but the unknown blues band who gave us the immortal track “she’s a whore in the kitchen and a cook in bed”. For some reason my mind is trying to convince me I saw Hawkwind a second time. This might be, and probably is, pure imagination on my part. But I can’t shake the feeling…

Nonetheless, it looks like I have opportunity to go to the now-annual Hawkfests, a private festival run by Hawkwind, mid June in Derbyshire, a nicely-central location in England. I’m very, very much looking forward to it.

Project Mayhem II

Yesterday I got the option to join another project team, a pair of guys doing a simple vertically-scrolling space invaders shooter using 3D models. One of the team is very good at the modelling program too. They had their third member has abandoned them and joined another pair due creative differences: he wasn’t keen on an arcade shooter so he has joined the Mario(ish) 2D platform team. The team-switching has been taken in very good humour; no-one is getting huffy or anything. From my point of view a space-invaders shooter is slightly simple, though it does have the advantage of being completely feasible.

Much relieved I have a safety-net I walked with the team-mater who attended college this week (let’s call him “Jay”) to the absentee guy’s flat last night (let’s call him “Silent Bob”). I have two concerns about any team: first is media creation; second is project direction.

Working on the assumption I’m be the lead coder in any project, at least one member of the team has to be able to produce media, reliably, using our 3D modelling package Softimage. The alternative team has the most proficient modeller in the class, but it turns “Jay” is a competent modeller himself and should be able to produce the art assets.

The second issue, project direction, can be put simply: I don’t want to work on a project I don’t want to work on, particularly a project I don’t think we can finish or make an excellent game of in our limited time. The game I most wanted to make was a Matrix(ish) version of Risk, taking over virtual territories with mini-games; think the circuit-board sub-game in Paradroid. Jay suggested everything else, from a sequence of unconnected mini games, physics-based games, to his pet favourite: a 3D turn-based strategy war game, think X-Com with tanks (so that would be Advance Wars, then). The trouble with that project, as I see it, is we don’t have enough time to get it working and looking good. It’s too ambitious, and the bare-bones minimum (one tank, one walker, basic background, limited animation) will look naff.

We kicked ideas around last night and “Silent Bob” voted for a Space Risk, an option I took. A 3D environment presented in a 2D sideways view, scrolling left-right to extend the play arena. Players vie to control a solar system. The models we will make will be simple spheres (planets, moons) with the cool texturing effects, rotation, and the like; irregular spheres (asteroids); and space-stations, satellites, derelict spaceships, etc., again with cool texturing effects (I’ve already researched them). We’ll arrange some kind of troop-movement/reinforcement thing, and some kind of attack mini-game.

The proposed team name is “Acid Plane”, though “Acid Glaze” is more appealing. I’m putting forward Cosmic Warlords for the game name.