EDIT [3-Jan-10, 01:38]: The 2010 New Year Card is online.  View it here.  There's an image as well as an embedded video to watch!

Well, there's just a few minutes to go before it isn't New Year's Day anymore, so I thought I'd make this post before that happens.  If you're reading this, wish you a very Happy New Year!

As per tradition, every year, there's a New Year Card uploaded on my site, and this time also there will be one.  I couldn't finish what I wanted to do in time though, so that's why it isn't up yet.  I will edit this post when the card is uploaded and email people.

EDIT [18:44]: I just checked IllustrationFriday.com and saw that the topic for this week is "Pioneer".  So I'm submitting this drawing for that, since Quentin Tarantino in my mind is a pioneer in cinema!

I had this idea sometime back, to do a bunch of drawings inspired by Quentin Tarantino movies (this because the typical collage type drawing wouldn't suffice — there are too many memorable characters from Tarantino's movies!).  The first one that I did was one of Christopher Walken as Captain Koons from "The Gold Watch" sequence in Pulp Fiction.  Here it is below —

That was done with a black and a blue ballpoint pen.  The above image is a photo (not a scan) of the drawing, tweaked a bit using Curves in Photoshop.  And as you might have guessed, there is a video of me drawing this, which is embedded below —

I tried to replicate the Tarantino "trunk shot" in the video.  The typefaces used in the video are all from Tarantino movies — Friz Quadrata Bold, Avant Garde and Benguiat.  The music used in the video is called "Express to Goo Land" and is an early piece by my good friend Pablo Dictter.

I've been on hiatus for a long while due to some personal matters.  Suffice to say, it's affected normal activity (movies, art) for me for the past few months.  Anyway, things will be getting back to normal around here, and to start off, here's wishing everyone a Merry Christmas.  I'm posting an unfinished drawing that I started doing in September, featuring some movies I'd watched around that time —

This one is notable since I did it in pencil (4B and 6B), as opposed to ballpoint pen like some of my other drawings.  The version I've put up here is a photo and not a scan.  My Best Movies of 2009 drawing is due soon, and I'm doing that also in pencil, inspired by what effects I could get with this piece (so you see, it's not entirely a waste).

The movies featured in this picture (you can guess) —

• Gamer — A fun little movie from the creators of the Crank movies, Mark Neveldine and Bryan Taylor.  In the future, players will be able to control real humans in an FPS game called "Slayers", and a participant (typically a death row convict) who survives 30 sessions will get to go free.  Gerard Butler is Kable, a man who has only a couple of sessions to go to freedom.  Entertaining.  Rating: 7/10
• 9 — A sock puppet (number "9") awakens in a future world where humanity is dead.  What happened to the world and why are there mechanical beasts that want to destroy 9 and the other puppets like him?  Shane Acker's atmospheric animated feature must be seen on the big screen.  Rating: 8/10
• Angels & Demons — Slick movie with high production values but strangely underwhelming.  The plot involves Dr Robert Langdon racing against time to save kidnapped Popes from death, and thwart the Illuminati who want to detonate a doomsday device.  Rating: 7/10
• District 9 — Stunning science fiction movie from writer/director Neill Blomkamp that is definitely one of the best movies of the year!  In 1982 a huge spaceship shows up over Johannesburg, however, first contact is not at all like what we imagined, since the ship is populated with malnourished and dying aliens.  The creatures (dubbed "prawns") are made to stay in the shanty-town District 9.  28 years later, the MNU (Multi National United) initiates an effort to relocate the aliens to a different colony, and official Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) has an encounter with alien technology that will forever change his life.  Extraordinary movie with some stunning CGI and brilliant action and gore sequences!  Rating: 10/10
• Monsters vs Aliens — Underwhelming movie about a group of monsters under US Government supervision who must team forces to save Earth from the evil Gallaxhar.  Some bits are funny but otherwise I expected a lot more from this movie (considering that the screenwriters of Kung Fu Panda were also involved in this).  I didn't see it in 3D though I doubt the extra dimension would have helped much.  Rating: 6/10

Next post, I will put up one more drawing I did, and that's a completed one.

Here is a drawing I did showing some movies that I watched in August 2009.  I am currently working on a drawing showing the more recent stuff I watched, that I will upload once it's done.  The below image was created out of a bunch of pencil drawings — I put them together in Photoshop along with the mini-reviews.  The typefaces used are Museo (for the headings) and Franklin Gothic Medium Condensed for the text.  You can download a 2560 × 1600 desktop wallpaper version (2.2 MB) by clicking on the image below.

The standout movies out of this bunch would have to be Star Trek which would definitely find a place in my "Best Movies of 2009" list, and Drag Me to Hell which was a fun little movie.

ShockTillYouDrop.com announced a contest towards the end of July, where one can create a fan movie poster for the upcoming Rob Zombie movie Halloween II and submit it to them.  The contest ends August 28 (the release date of the movie).  The winning entry will be selected by Rob Zombie and the submitter will get a print of the poster signed by Zombie.  I am not sure whether the contest is open to entries outside the US, but regardless I thought it'd be a cool thing to do, so I made a poster —

Click on the image above or here, to view the poster on my gallery.  You can also watch a YouTube video that shows the entire process of creation of the poster.  It took a lot of effort (many hours of work spread over the last two weekends) to make the poster as well as the video, but I am very happy with the end result.  Let me know what you think!

Recently, I got to see the trailer for The Book of Eli, an upcoming science-fiction action movie starring Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman and Mila Kunis.  The trailer was released at Comic-Con International, and looks quite nice.  The movie will be released in 2010 and is directed by Allen and Albert Hughes.  I was quite inspired by the trailer and so I did this drawing after watching it —

Nothing fancy, the drawing was done with ballpoint pen, a photo was taken and that was coloured digitally.  The drawing was intended to be part of a larger piece, with the movies that I want to see in 2009-10 (similar to what I did last year).  I also filmed footage while drawing this, so I put that together into a video and uploaded it to YouTube.

You can watch the video by clicking here or on the above image.  I think the video came out pretty nicely.  The music track I used in the video is the "Survivalism (Celebmix)" by Celebutante, from the open-source Nine Inch Nails Remix Album, The Limitless Potential.

As I'd mentioned in an earlier post, I started watching the TV show Lost in June, and by now, I finished watching all 5 seasons of the show.  Without a doubt it is an excellent TV show — with well-written characters, intriguing mysteries and plenty of twists to keep things interesting.  I am waiting to watch episodes of Season 6 in 2010!  In the mean time, here are two drawings I did based on Lost —

This is a picture of Terry O'Quinn as John Locke, one of my favourite characters from the show.  I did this at the time I was watching Season 2, hence the "Lost numbers" — 4 8 15 16 23 42 — are on the drawing.  The characters are told that they must enter these numbers into a computer terminal every 108 minutes to prevent the end of the world!

The above is a picture I started drawing, and features Evangeline Lilly as Kate Austen and Jorge Garcia as Hugo "Hurley" Reyes.  I plan to do more of these character drawings later, and I especially want to do one of Michael Emerson as Benjamin Linus (I still think of "Hello Zepp" from Saw when I see him).

A long time has passed since the last post, so I thought I'd briefly summarise what has been going on —

• 23-May: Bangalore Trip — Varun got admission into K J Somaiya Institute of Management and Research.  So he resigned from his job in Wipro Technologies and completed all the separation formalities on 22-May.  I left from Hyderabad that evening and reached Bangalore the next morning, to help him bring his stuff back to Hyderabad.  Check out this post on Varun's blog for more information.  We travelled by bus.  On the return trip, they played a crappy camera print of Billa (the 2009 Telugu film) twice.  Oh and not the whole movie — only the first 45 minutes.  The next day, we (my parents, Varun, me) watched 99, which was an excellent movie.  The next couple of weeks, Varun would be in Hyderabad, preparing for his eventual joining at SIMSR in Mumbai.

• 10-Jun: Chennai Trip — On 10-Jun, my parents, Varun and myself left for Chennai.  Varun and myself had our Upanayanam performed on 11-Jun.  This was also a chance to meet many of our relatives in Chennai.  I had to shave my mustache and beard for the ceremony, so it was an opportunity to try out a different look, as you can see in the above photo!  We returned to Hyderabad on 11-Jun itself.

• 13-Jun: Mumbai Trip — Varun's joining date in SIMSR was 15-Jun, so we (my parents, Varun, me) went to Mumbai on 13-Jun.  Got to meet my cousin (and fellow movie fan) Girish, my friend Rajith, and also my boss Vaidehee.  All can be seen in the above picture which was taken at this restaurant called Mainland China.  After that, went to meet Anagha and Rob in the evening.  Varun reported to the SIMSR hostel on 14-Jun and we helped him set up his stuff there.  Attended a small part of Varun's induction program at SIMSR on 15-Jun morning, and then said goodbye to him in the afternoon and left Mumbai.  Reached back Hyderabad that night.
• Hooked on "Lost" — Started watching episodes of the TV show Lost in sequence, over the last few weeks.  By now, I have completed watching two seasons of the show and it is absolutely fantastic.  More on that in the next post.
• 2-Jul: My Engagement — And that brings us to the present, where last Thursday, I got engaged.  So by now, I've changed my "Relationship Status" on social networking sites to reflect that I'm no longer single!  More information on that front will be revealed in due time.

Things have been quite busy over the last couple of months on the personal front, so that's why the lack of updates on the blog.  Anyway, updates should pick up now onwards.

Here are some more photographic experiments that I did, since last time.  All of these were taken with my HP laptop webcam and post-processed in Picasa (hence, only low resolution images are available).  These were/are used as profile pictures on various social networking sites, and I also posted these on my deviantART gallery.

This first image is called Action Movies and is inspired by the old 1980s and early 90s action movies, the kind that we grew up on!  The kind of movies that we were way too young to see, but watched anyway.  The kind that they don't make any more.  Some of them are bonafide classics (like Die Hard) that were influential, others kept the clichés alive, but all were entertaining.  Remember the bullets, shootouts, explosions, extreme violence, hand-to-hand combat, punches to the face, broken limbs, the hero with a mysterious past (mostly an FBI or CIA agent)?  I bet these names will bring back fond memories — Arnold Schwarzenegger's Commando, Predator, Total Recall, Steven Seagal's Marked for Death and Under Siege, the Lethal Weapon series, and many more.  Sure, the final image above may not convey all these things, but that was the inspiration for the picture.  By the way, the shirt I am wearing is the one Varun made for me some months back (a shirt with images of my drawings).  [deviantART entry]

This picture is called Emotional Atyachar and obviously it is inspired by the Anurag Kashyap movie Dev.D.  This got some pretty good comments, and is inspired specifically by the scene where Abhay Deol dunks his head in water and then emerges back out.  I didn't have a bucket of water close by, so this is the "dry version" of Emotional Atyachar.  Music inspiration is the "Emotional Atyachar Rock Version)" from the movie.  [deviantART entry]

The next set of images is interesting — it is from a time towards the end of April when I got my hair cut extremely short.  I'd been intending to do that for some time anyway, and when Varun had come home to visit and said that he was going for a haircut, I decided to go for it.  It was an impulse decision, and I later associated inspirations to the new look — the Space Monkeys from Project Mayhem in Fight Club, the Ghajini look, the skinhead look from American History X or the Jason Statham look from The Transporter or Crank.  At any rate, I've kind of got used to not having to comb my hair for the last month or so now!  [deviantART entry]

Some weeks back, I was doing some random doodling in a notebook at office, and this is what I came up with —

Of course, this is just the one strip with 3 panels, it wasn't actually intended to go anywhere.  Done in ballpoint pen, inspiration is the trashy post-apocalypse SF-action-horror movies from the 1990s.  If I absolutely had to develop this into a full story, then it would be something along the lines of Cybertech Inc creating artificial duststorms containing Smoke (for some mysterious and ominous motive), and a lone defender finding this out.  Of course, I would have to include cyborg kickboxers (or kickboxing cyborgs) in there somewhere.