Month: July 2012
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King John’s House
I live in Romsey which is a little market town on the eastern edge of the New Forest in the UK. It’s an ancient place. William II’s body was carried through here in 1100AD after his hunting ‘accident’ and we’re close to Winchester, capital of King Alfred the Great (871 – 899). The problem is […]
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Weird and wonderful 3D short films
I love computer animation and ever since I had a BBC B 32K computer in the early 1980s I’ve been trying to teach myself how to make my own short films. What surprised me is that computer animation doesn’t seem to be any quicker than traditional hand-drawn methods. You would think it should be. Whereas […]
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Aelita, Queen of Mars. 1924
Silent Science Fiction movies are understandably dominated by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) which is a truly astounding piece of German Expressionist film. Two years before the Soviet director Yakov Protazanov, made Aelita, Queen of Mars, based on the novel of the same name by the writer Alexei Tolstoi. While not on the same level as […]
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The portraits of Otto Dix
Having your friend to paint your portrait is always nice, especially if they’re a famous artist. Unless your best mate was Otto Dix, the Expressionist painter who lived and worked in Germany between the wars. Scarred by his experiences in the trenches of World War I, Dix specialised in brutal and unforgiving pictures of the […]
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Warwick Goble’s original illustrations to The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds was first serialised in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897. By sheer luck, many years ago, I came across the complete bound set of that year’s issues in a little second hand bookshop in Ilkley selling for a few quid. So I’m lucky enough to have a copy […]