Californian in Virginia

I've been in Virginia for about a decade now. While it does feel like home in many ways, I'll always be a California native at the core. I think I need this on a T-Shirt.

No Man's Sky

1970s era sci-fi art comes to life in No Man's Sky from Hello Games.

Every planet procedural. Every planet unique. Every planet unexplored. http://www.no-mans-sky.com/ http://www.twitter.com/hellogames Music: http://www.65daysofstatic.com/

MILIUS

Influential and controversial filmmaker John Milius worked on prominent films such as Apocalypse Now and Jaws before being ostracized by Hollywood. The documentary Milius is now available for streaming via Netflix. Click on the image below to watch! 

Slave 1

I first saw The Empire Strikes Back in the theater in 1980 at the age of ten. As an avid fan I collected everything I could on the movie. One of the best books was "The Empire Strikes Back Sketchbook". There were a number of pages dedicated to the design sketches of Boba Fett's ship, Slave 1. In the book, It stated that the design idea came from a street lamp near Industrial Light & Magic, which was located in San Rafael at that time. 

Years later, myself now employed at ILM, I remember walking to lunch one day and looking for those street lamps to no avail. I figured the city had most likely upgraded their municipal lighting scheme. 

Then just a few weeks ago I was walking down the street from my home in Richmond, Virginia where I now reside. And low and behold, a single street lamp that looked oddly familiar. Its interesting to finally see what I imagine is the same type that inspired the original design idea.

I love the thought of utilizing/tweaking the design of everyday objects to create believable and seemingly original designs for things like spacecraft, robots, etc. 


Collaborative Scanning: Project Tango

This is just getting insanely cool. 

The future of 3D scanning is that we'll all be able to do it together! Check out this demo by Paracosm of the Google ATAP Labs Project Tango phones. Paracosm and Google Labs have been working side by side to create the technology to make collaborative scanning possible.

SLOMO

Excellent little documentary. If you ask me, Slomo has figured it all out.

Aronofsky

Tad Friend has a great piece in the latest New Yorker profiling writer/director Darren Aronofsky. For my money Aronofsky is one of the top filmmakers working today. Click on the image to read the article online. 

Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky

Starlog Magazine

I spent many hours of my childhood combing through the articles and images in Starlog Magazine. It was the precursor for so much of what we experience today as geek culture. But Starlog even went in depth into the process of filmmaking and visual effects. It had a huge influence on my interest in cinema and my desire to work in the industry. 

Thanks to the Internet Archive you can now get any and/or every issue of Starlog for free in almost any form. I picked out some of my favorites and sent them to my Kindle app on the iPad. Happy nostalgia. Click on the cover image below to go to the archive and have a look.


© Matt Wallin. All rights reserved.