Added 1 new A* page:Here's a sci-fi movie you can watch online that you may not have seen! It's H.G. Wells' 1936 film Things to Come (Wikipedia link), and you can watch it for free on YouTube right here.
Coming out pre-WWII, Things to Come starts off with a dramatic presentation of the London Blitz--four years before it happened! Wells' prophetic and quite impressively destructive version doesn't take place in London, actually, but an English town, which we then follow through the war--which lasts for decades!
That's when things get pretty weird (and this is only maybe fifteen minutes into the film :P). Devastated by decades of war, disease, and privation, the town's surviving pocket society reverts to a kind of primitive, anti-technology state. The same actors who began the film in near-contemporary England play their own generations of descendents, who play out Wells' ideas of what challenges the presence of technology will pose for us--will we find technology in opposition to our own needs and inclinations? What will happen when technology becomes incredibly destructive?
It's a far-ranging film, and pretty far out--make that VERY far out--by the end. It's quite a good looking film, and some of the effects are even quite good looking by modern standards--there are some really massive super-science bombers ("peace bombs" =p), for instance, that look pretty darn awesome, and later some huge, floating, partially transparent tele-screen things that are quite convincing. Not all of the effects are that successful, and a few of the actors are a bit clunky, but this is indubitably classic sci-fi, and raises some big questions in the bold, straightforward way that sci-fi movies don't really attempt anymore.
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An in-progress snapshot of today's page, right after I'd repainted the face:
This was one of those ones where I thought I had a perfectly good face drawn, but it was in fact two faces--or more specifically, the face from two different angles: the eye and upper part was one way, the mouth and lower part was just enough of a different way to make a difference, and the nose couldn't quite hold them together--so there was nothing to do except repaint it--except the nose. :P
The redraw got a little wild--and I left some of the pencil line around the eye 'cause it seemed to kind of work; now I can call myself a "multimedia" artist, woo!
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Oh, yeah--bet you thought Selenis' helmet was a solid dome, eh? The old version she had in previous episodes, with that big collar thingy, was, but this ultralite travel version is inflatable! Maybe I'll regret this move, I dunno, but I've debated it with myself for so long that I wasn't getting any further with it one way or the other and finally just figured I might as well throw it out there. Aside from solving the story/layout technical issue of what she does with her darn helmet when the takes it off (now it can just fold up into her suit's neck or something! ie disappear so I don't have to worry about it :)), there had been the long-troubling question in my head of how exactly does she get it on/off if it closes under her chin? It was either make it flexible, or have it be like folding sections that lock together--but that seemed a little clunky. I suppose a flexible helmet, even made of eh you know super-advanced whatever it is, probably can't be as resistant to piercing damage as a solid helmet--but man, the convenience! Heck, you could take along a second--third, forth? however many you need!--as a spare just in case!
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