May the Fourth

This is one of my favorite McQuarrie paintings, one I recently bought a glorious ​print of​ from Dreams and Vision Press. Not the Cloud City since introduced in Empire, it's depicting the floating Imperial Prison on Alderaan from one of the earlier drafts of Star Wars, modelled on the side of an aircraft carrier, with a few exotic buildings topping it off. Worth noticing of course are the five Colin Cantwell prototype tie fighters, and the then Millenium Falcon (known as the Pirate Ship in the scripts) getting ready to dock.

May the fourth be with you.

Drew Struzan

While the Hollywood marketing departments have committed creative suicide long ago, and are now being run seemingly by a batch of monkeys — admittedly relatively well-trained, but monkeys nonetheless — there was a time when artists like Drew Struzan helped shape the magic of cinema from well before the audience saw the first frame of the film. He is arguably the greatest poster artist to have worked in Hollywood, and his style is indelibly linked with many of the great movies of past decades, in the minds of the film fans who've grown up in his epoc.

Well, there's a documentary in the works, and while it's almost done, it's run out of money, and needs your help to crawl the last couple of feet across the finish line.

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Far Away

I'm tripping on Red Dead Redemption (and spaghetti westerns in general) these days, as well as its amazing soundtrack, and I came across this live rendition of Jose Gonzales's Far Away, recorded on a rooftop a few blocks from the Squarespace Office.

Great song, amazing game

Portal's Community Level Builder

Absolutely amazing. Having been a level designer for over a decade, I can't stress how impressed I am with this. Granted, they can do this because the environments of Portal supports it, but that's part of the brilliance, isn't it?​​

Geek

Being a geek is all about your own personal level of enthusiasm, not how your level of enthusiasm measures up to others. If you like something so much that a casual mention of it makes your whole being light up like a halogen lamp, if hearing a stranger fondly mention your favorite book or game is instant grounds for friendship, if you have ever found yourself bouncing out of your chair because something you learned blew your mind so hard that you physically could not contain yourself — you are a geek

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Orson Welles on Repetition

Q: A critic who admires your work very much said that, in The Trial, you were repeating yourself…
Welles: Exactly, I repeated myself. I believe we do it all the time. We always take up certain elements again. How can it be avoided? An actor’s voice always has the same timbre and, consequently, he repeats himself. It is the same for a singer, a painter…There are always certain things that come back, for they are part of one’s personality, of one’s style. If these things didn’t come into play, a personality would be so complex that it would become impossible to identify it.

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Fincher on Taking Responsibility

“What you learn from that first [film] - and I don’t call it ‘trial by fire’; I call it ‘baptism by fire’ - is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so you might as well have made all of the decisions that led to people either liking it or disliking it. There’s nothing worse than hearing somebody say, ‘Oh, you made that movie? I thought that movie sucked,’ and you have to agree with them, you know?”

...and five more thoughts on filmmaking from David Fincher.

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Valve's New Employee Handbook

You'll want to read this.​

I have so much love for  Valve, I don't know where to put it all anymore. Aside from consistently putting out games that are genuinely innovative ​and fantastic, to see that they're actually run like this just makes me want to give them a huge hug.

I know a certain game company that I may or may not have worked at, which could do with a quick perusing of this book, and perhaps a few minutes contemplation on whether their practices might need some revisiting. 

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The Complete Star Wars Storyboards

Click for high-res version.

It frustrates me to no end that whenever I go hunting for Star Wars storyboards on Google Images (I do this more often than you'd think), I usually end up with links to a Flickr set which has long since been taken down. My own Flickr set that is. Long story short, Lucasfilm asked Flickr to take it down, they did so promptly, without asking, or indeed saving any of the images on there (including some images that Lucasfilm had no rights over, though that didn't stop Flickr), and I largely stopped using Flickr that very day.

All bitterness about Flickr aside, I love the old storyboards, and it looks like Lucasfilm is getting ready to put something along the lines of The Complete Star Wars Storyboards into production, which with the quality level of their recent making-of books, would be a fantastic addition to any collection

Instagram as an island economy

There are some people who only produce comments or "likes," the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes.

Don't know if it's true, but it's funny.

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<3

​Listen, you know, and I know, that I don't want to be that guy. But when you have to be that guy, be that guy. Own it

‘Theft’ Law in the 21st Century

So what are the lessons in all this? For starters, we should stop trying to shoehorn the 21st-century problem of illegal downloading into a moral and legal regime that was developed with a pre- or mid-20th-century economy in mind.

 

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Guady Patter

The Maltese Falcon (1941):​

Wilmer Cook: Keep on riding me and they're gonna be picking iron out of your liver.
Sam Spade: The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

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