The Movies and Doug Chiang

Just got back from seeing the War of the Worlds. Wow! It was definitely beyond anything I had expected. I havn't read, listened to, or seen the original, but this was an excellent movie. Dark, tense, horrifying. Great acting, great John Williams score. And of course great visuals. I really didn't expect to be very emotionally involved with an alien movie. But in the theatre, it's a different world.

It was fun, I went to see it with my brother, two of my sisters, and a bunch of their (and mine too, but their age) church friends. The Narnia Trailer was awesome for the third time! And what made it even better is that every one of the 10 people I went to see it with, were in the play we did at church. Mrs. Mcreadey to my left; Then Mrs. Beaver; then a Dryad; then her sister who played Lucy; Then Susan, then another two dryads (my sisters) and then I think Edmund (my brother) and Peter. Me being Aslan of course. It was so much fun to see all of our characters on screen, just having played the parts.

And then the next trailer was looking good, some movie about a young film maker, looks interesting, oh Adrian Brody, that's cool,..sailing somewhere fantastic, looks interesting, and then: FROM PETER JACKSON! Oh my gosh it's King Kong!! Looks very good. Can't wait.

And also, they played the absence of the Sharkboy and Lavagirl trailer! That was very awesome!


Oh yes, before I forget, I was going to mention that the Concept Designer for War of the Worlds is one of my fav. artists: Doug Chiang. He did a lot of the design for Star Wars 1 and 2, and most recently came out with an illustrated book called Robota, that you can see at Barnes and Noble. At the left is a painting from the book. It was originally going to be an animated movie as well, but I think that fell through, but you can still see the beautiful trailers on apple.com . Watch Trailer 1 first to see Chiang's wonderful painting, then watch trailer 2 to see them brought to life on the computer. Pretty Amazing! Apparently now their going to make a computer game out of it. Drat. I like movies much more then games. But if you want to see robots sword fighting to awesome music in some sort of medieval church, all rendered to look like a renaissance painting, watch the latest trailer here. Robota definetly has that mixture of the ordinary with the fantastic that everyone says is the mark of good art. (Everyone being Brad Bird, Tolkien, Robyn Miller, Susanna Clarke, and What'shisname course.)