Completed: Robocop.... but

I'm not really going to 'review' it... or at least thats what i told myself before i didn't get a credit...

okay but seriously i wont be saying much on the negative side cause
a) i'm not a fan of sci-fi... it can be fun but doesn't tend to be my thing.
b) i can't hate something that gave me a paycheck.

now.... i think it's story time.
Back in the days of old (5 or so year ago?) i started my first day of college. I was scared but excited to learn more about art then i would if i just continued to self teach.
one of my classes focused on Colour theory and we spent the entire semester painting Achromatically.
at the end chunk of every class (after about 1-2 hours of painting) we would stand everything up and critique it cause one cannot grow if one does not have their hard work torn up in front of them (metaphorically of course)
one point that came up with damn near every student despite talent or amount of years they had been doing this was that we always needed to up the contrast of the values.
Contrast is a funny thing, when you have things like colour you can kind of trick the eye into seeing something as brighter.
however, depending on the value the 'lighter' colour may actually be darker... or in the worse case scenario it may be very similar to everything around it.

i think it's about time to shit on my own art~

this is a one layer thing i did for fun to play around with some stuff in photoshop (before i moved over to sai)
I like it because the pop of colour helps define her in the space.
however

same exact picture, i just desaturated it and it's all just a very similar gray mess. no pop, no definition (other then the lines) and just pretty boring.

While this one the other hand....

i'm not terribly thrilled with how this all turned out... i do have lots of contrast in colour thanks to having a fairly limited pallet but in the end... it just doesn't click... however if i desaturated this

theres a lot more definition, she pops from the background a lot more cause there is contrast which makes this picture more 'interesting' to look at despite the fact that i like the other one more.

SO.... that out of the way....
i felt like some scenes were lacking in contrast.
mostly ones where the black robot fought other black robots in a dark room. it made the action a little hard to follow cause it was hard to focus on what was the main character and what was he supposed to be fighting.
coupled with shaky cam (which i'm not a fan of but i understand it's use in the film) just made me wish he stood out more.

the shaky cam also made me sad cause it made it really hard to see the sets, which i know from experience were really really cool. specifically this one set which is huge and had the incredible painted marble and is used in a close cropped shot of a talking head.

however the film wasn't terrible, better then some other things i've worked on, there were some odd choices but i understand why they were made even if i don't agree with the outcome. i'm happy i got to see it with the audience i had and yes... i'm a little bummed that my name didn't show up at the end... or if it did i didn't see it.
The story was a fairly decent update considering we have different sensibilities now compared to when the original was made.  The pacing was good, never felt like i needed to check the time or wondered when it was going to end.
but all that being said, this film would have been that much better had they kept him silver... the black was just a little too hard to track during the action.
still i had fun, which was more then i expected.  (cause yeah.... i really don't like sci-fi)
though i know a lot of die hard fans probably are not going to be happy... can't please everyone... there are some nods to the original... some good and some.... forced but hey their heart was in the right place.

oh but if you have epilepsy, when you get to the scene where they turn off the light just leave the room for a bit... even i was feeling queasy at that.

now i just need a certain other film to be remade and maybe i could end up working on all three.... *nods* doubtful though. (but funny to think about)

i believe the film comes out on wednesday, if you are at all minorly curious about how they updated it go see it, if not then maybe just wait a bit... it'll probably be more enjoyable if you're not paying 15 bucks just to see it (cause ticket prices are really really high here)