T is for Turbo Drawing

Recently, a trailer for The ABCs of Death was released, and it looks great.  Related to that is a drawing of mine that I wanted to post.  Keep in mind, that this is a year old, but I never wrote in detail about it, so I’m posting it now.  Explanation will follow.

The ABCs of Death

The ABCs of Death is an interesting project – this is an anthology horror movie consisting of 26 segments (each around 4 minutes long), one per letter of the alphabet.  Each segment is about an instrument of death starting with that respective letter of the alphabet (say, “K is for Knife”).  26 different directors worked on this movie!  More details can be found on the Wikipedia Page or this page on JoBlo, where you can view the trailer.  Warning: Contains Blood & Gore, not for kids!

The people behind this anthology project left one slot free, for which they invited submissions from filmmakers from all around the world.  This was the slot for the letter “T” and there were more than 100 shorts that they received (you can view them at this site).  Out of all these films, “T is for Toilet” by Lee Hardcastle was selected to be in the final film.

T is for Turbo a.k.a. Turbo Kid – The Film

One of the top 3 finalists among the submitted entries was “T is for Turbo” by team RKSS (Roadkill Superstar – consisting of members Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell).  I absolutely LOVED this short film, and in fact I felt that this would be the winning entry that’d make it into the final The ABCs of Death film.

Here, you can watch the short film (contains violence, blood & gore, not for kids!) –

I loved this film since it so very closely matched the look and feel of the 1970s/80s post-apocalyptic movie!  Specifically, I think they were referencing the loads of cheap Italian-made knock offs that came out after bigger-budgeted movies like Mad Max.  The costumes, the make-up/gore effects, the cheesy dialogues, all make for a wonderfully nostalgic experience.

The filmmakers have come up with interesting characters also (the villain Zeus, Shandella, Beardman, the Skeleton mask guy, etc).  The Turbo Kid himself reminds me of an older version of Commander Keen.

I liked the cinematography in the film (by Jean-Philippe Bernier).  The film was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, but using an anamorphic adapter.  The camera shoots video in 1920 x 1080 resolution, which results in an aspect ratio of 16:9 or 1.78:1.  However, a lot of productions use a wider aspect ratio like 2.35:1, which gives a more cinematic look (since that is the ratio many films are presented in theatrically).  One way to achieve this would be to film in 16:9 and then crop off bits from the top and bottom.  This means that we’re not effectively using all the information that the camera has captured (the resulting image dimensions might be 1920 x 800).  An anamorphic adapter optically distorts the image horizontally, so it squishes a wider image into the 16:9 frame.  Later on, the image can be un-squished in post-production, so what this achieves is an image width of roughly 2500 pixels and a height of 1080.

I believe this is the source of the slight blur/distortions at the edges of the frames, which for some reason I find aesthetically very good looking, and it goes even further to enhance the feel of an old movie.

The submissions for The ABCs of Death were supposed to be kept to 4 minutes in length.  The longer (by few minutes) ‘director’s cut’ version of this film is called Turbo Kid.  I don’t think that version is online anywhere – I suppose you have to attend a film festival where it is screened, to be able to see it.

T is for Turbo – My Drawing

As is the case with things that I am deeply inspired by, I made a drawing based on this film.  I did this based on screenshots grabbed from the actual film, and the shot of the Turbo Kid was referenced from a behind-the-scenes still.

The drawing was done with pencil on an A5 size paper.  I scanned it and added the paper texture in the background and the subtle colours in Photoshop.  The fonts used are Helvetica for the credits, and the title of the film is in a font called Headline HPLHS (this font is designed to mimic the look of old woodcut headlines – I got it from the HP Lovecraft Historical Society site).  Perhaps not the most appropriate for a retro-futuristic film like this, but I think it looks good.  Cthulhu fhtagn!

Want to see a few in-progress / behind-the-scenes photos as I was making this poster?  Here is an album on Facebook which you can check out: T is for Turbo Drawing – Behind the Scenes [9 photos].

By the way, I posted this drawing on the RKSS Facebook page and even sent a message to them.  They liked it – and that made me really happy.

The Music – “58 minutes pour vivre” by Le Matos

Apart from everything else I loved about T is for Turbo, a standout aspect for me was the music in it.  It’s simply brilliant – the synthesizer-type music is exactly what you might find in a 1980s movie.

The track is called “58 minutes pour vivre” (translates to “58 minutes to live”) by the band Le Matos.  A little bit of trivia – “58 Minutes” by Walter Wager is the novel that Die Hard 2 was adapted from.

Here is a music video for the track, also edited by RKSS.  This video is called “58 Minutes dans le wasteland” which is very apt, as it is entirely edited together using footage from the very films that inspired Turbo Kid.

A full list of films featured in the video is there in the video description (if you view it on the Vimeo page).  Should be a nice list to pick movies from and watch.  And during the song, there is a bit of dialogue that comes up – that’s the voice of Bruce Willis and that’s a sample of dialogue from 12 Monkeys.

If you want to purchase the track, you can do so here (I did – I legally bought “58 minutes pour vivre”).

On a related note – you can also watch the grindhouse-inspired pulp horror fake trailer Demonitron: The Sixth Dimension by RKSS (it’s very good, and the look is again spot-on, though in some bits where they intentionally tried to emulate “unintentionally funny” – especially the ‘demon cake’ bit – I felt they went a little overboard, which kind of detracted from the experience).  The music used in that trailer is called “Sarah” also by Le Matos.  you can listen to the track and buy it here.

Other Notes

If you are on Facebook, you can view the “Making of T is for Turbo” album here (photos shot by Marie Raymond).  In that album, this photo is the one I used as the reference for the Turbo Kid in my drawing.  I think you have to “Like” the RKSS page to be able to see these photos.

There is an album with posters of their short movies.  In that one, you can see the digitally-created official poster for the film.  I love the look of the poster – I can almost imagine seeing this artwork on a VHS videotape and renting it immediately (back in the days when we used to rent videotapes).  I love the caption – “This is the future, this is the year 1997”.  Since Turbo Kid is inspired by those science fiction films made in the 70s and 80s, it makes sense that 1997 would be ‘the future’.  (For that matter, even John Carpenter’s classic Escape from New York, released in 1981, was set in ‘the future’ of 1997.)

The latest update about Turbo Kid is that it is going to be adapted into a full-length feature film!  This article has info about that.  Count me in as a fan!  I’m sure it’ll be a unique, quirky film that I will love.  I look forward to seeing it, reviewing it and drawing something based on it, in the future… in the year 1997.  “So what the fuck is your super power?”

Browsing Through Time – The Last Few Months

As I’d mentioned in an earlier post, I thought I would do a quick recap of what I’ve been up to, in the last few months.  This is presented roughly in reverse chronological order, and I’ve used photos to illustrate what I am talking about.  (NOTE: I wrote this post in the mid of October, so it doesn’t cover absolutely everything right up to the present time.)

150+ Days at the Gym

Looks good, no?  I’m quite proud of that photo!  I started going to the gym at office in mid-December 2011.  For whatever reason, I kept count of the number of days I was actually working out, and that count has crossed 150 by now.  I go to the gym on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday (since on Thursdays I attend Guitar class), so typically the count gets incremented by 4 every week, less than that if there are office holidays or I am travelling.

You could say this is a new hobby of mine and just like posting my drawings or photos, I’m uploading pictures taken at the gym to mark milestones.  I posted the below one to mark Day 100, and that got a lot of Likes and comments on Facebook.

I was going to post one more when I hit Day 150, but towards that date, I knew there were going to be a few breaks since I was travelling for campus recruitment.  Therefore, I posted the below photo when I reached Day 146.

I’d have left it at that but the Day 148 picture just kind of happened… and it looked good so that’s my current Facebook and Twitter profile picture.

On a related note, here is a very useful link with a workout that you can do even if you don’t have access to a Gym: Beginner Body Weight Workout from Nerd Fitness.

Covering events at office

Over the last few months I seem to have become an ‘unofficial official’ photographer for several events at work.  It’s been a great experience for me and a lot of fun.

Covering these events teaches you a lot – how to get better at not missing important moments, how to plan in advance about what kind of shots you want to get, the importance of getting the photos right in the camera, and the importance of selecting the shots that you want to show to others.

For no particular reason, while I was working on the photos from one particular event, I decided to tweet about the process of selection (read the tweets from bottom to top) –

As you can make out from the tweets, I shot more than 1300 images during the four hour event, and made a selection of around 250 images to show to others.  However, out of that set, I further filtered images and only uploaded the 180 best ones to Facebook.

At one of the events, apart from being the photographer, I also played a small bit of music on guitar.

I later recorded a video of what I played that day.  Here it is –

This was recorded at home with my Nokia 808 PureView phone, and as you can make out, the audio quality is really great!  I edited the video on kdenlive and Windows Live Movie Maker.  The old videotape-type font is called “Camcorder” and you can get it here.

Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad

I attended Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad Volumes 8, 9 and 10 in the recent past.  I took photos at each one of them.  I believe I may have put links to a couple of the albums in earlier posts, but for easy reference, here are the links (all are albums on Facebook) –

Two of the photos I took at PKN Hyd Vol 9 got printed in The Hans India newspaper.

(Both photos in that article are mine – you can see them on the Facebook album.)

Speaking of this, earlier (in May 2012), my Pecha Kucha presentation from November 2011 got mentioned on the Pecha Kucha Daily blog.  My presentation is also there on the global site.

Blue Moon and Hard Disk

I took a photo of the Blue Moon from 1-Sep-12 – this is probably my best Moon shot yet.

At around that time, I also welcomed a new 1 TB hard disk to the family –

Mumbai Trip

In the beginning of August, I went on a short trip during a long weekend to Mumbai.  I stayed at my cousin’s place, visited TCS Gateway Park office, met my friend Rajith there, watched Gangs of Wasseypur II, and participated in the TCS Fit4Life – 5 km Run with the CEO.

Here are the two Facebook albums that show photos from this all-important trip –

Two notable pictures – the below one shows me, Girish and Vrushodh – the crew behind the Gods of Galactica podcast (earlier known as Galacticast)…

…and here is a photo from the 5 km Run.  This was the second 5 km Run I’ve ever participated in.

Secret Lake Photo

From earlier in August, here is a photo of Durgam Cheruvu, the “Secret Lake”.  This was shot from Inorbit Mall one afternoon when I went there for lunch, on my PureView phone.

My post mentioned by Nokia

After I wrote that long post about the Nokia 808 PureView, I tweeted it to the official Nokia account (@nokia).  It was really nice of them to retweet it – and they mentioned they liked the post.  I felt very happy about that.

Han Shot First Drawing

I did the below drawing as a gift for my cousin on his birthday.  I also got it printed on a t-shirt (that’s what Girish and I are wearing, in the Galactica crew photo above).

Star Wars fans will know the background of this.  For the uninitiated, here’s the explanation in short.  In the original Star Wars movie released in 1977, there is a scene in which the character Han Solo played by Harrison Ford, is confronted by the gangster Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina.  Greedo points a weapon at Han and says that Han owes money to the ruthless Jabba the Hutt.  Han then shoots Greedo and exits the cantina.

In the 1997 “Special Edition” re-release of Star Wars, this scene was slightly altered, to show Greedo shooting first and missing Han (at very close range), and Han shoots Greedo after that.  This alteration (though made by the movie’s creator, George Lucas) was not looked at favourably by fans.

My cousin has a long post on this here.  This is why I made this t-shirt for him!

On the topic of the alterations made for the Special Edition of Star Wars, it is to be noted that a fan called Harmy has created high-definition “despecialized” versions of all the movies in the Star Wars original trilogy.  This is an assembled edit from various sources, since LucasFilm had not released the unaltered versions on Bluray.

More details at the below links –

Blue Sky at Hyderabad

Early in the month of June, there were a couple of days when the sky was a wonderful blue colour.  A great opportunity for photography –

Here is the Facebook album with some more photos – Blue Sky.

Electric Guitar

For my birthday on May 15, I was lucky to get a great gift from my family – an electric guitar!  I uploaded some photos of it on this Facebook album, and posted a short video of me playing it.

Rooftop Shooting Challenge

I had earlier written about a photo shooting challenge I’d done, of taking only B&W photos in my room at home.  I tried a different challenge sometime later, of shooting with just one lens on the rooftop of my house.

Here is the link to the album on Facebook: Rooftop Shooting Challenge.

I believe I have covered most of the important events from the recent past in this post!  More to come later.