Category Archives: Drawing

Two Drawings from a year ago (Natalie Portman, Lord Sheldon)

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Thanks to this neat application called Timehop, I’m reminded of tweets and Facebook updates that I posted a year ago.

On this day (6 March), one year ago, I completed and posted this drawing of mine – a stippled portrait of Natalie Portman.

I drew a rough sketch of her in pencil, and then placed dots all over the paper with a pen, and erased the pencil lines.  No cheating, I really did make this with dots.  You can watch the below “behind-the-scenes” video to see how this was made –

That drawing seems to be the one that got me the most likes and comments on Facebook.  I’d also uploaded the image to deviantART, and that was my 100th deviation there.  The inspiration for this picture came from a fellow deviant, Angelina Benedetti who is a big Natalie Portman fan.

The keen-eyed among you will notice that the image in this post is of better quality than the one I originally uploaded a year ago.  That’s because, the original image was an edited photo taken with my Nokia N8 phone (I didn’t have my scanner at the time).  The image in this post is an edited photo taken with my Canon EOS 550D camera.  For some reason I never uploaded this improved image anywhere else, so thought I’d post it for the one-year anniversary!

The other drawing is this one, which I call Lord Sheldon –

This one was made later in March, but the quote in this image came from a conversation I had with my cousin in early March 2011.

When I ‘confessed’ to him that I’d watched an inferior quality print of a movie, he told me this.  I loved the quote so much, that I’d posted it on Facebook, and later, when I did this drawing of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, I put this quote on it, and subsequently turned this into a t-shirt.

This stippled drawing was done at Lamakaan, during a sketching outing.  I had my laptop with me and looked up a couple of reference images of Jim Parsons as Sheldon, and drew this.  This time, no pencil was used, I directly placed the dots on the paper.

The hand image on Sheldon’s t-shirt is a reference to Fringe.  The symbol is the glyph for “S” (“S” for Sheldon).

Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad

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The next volume of Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad – Volume 8 – is happening at Lamakaan, Banjara Hills on 31 March 2012.  The event starts from 7 PM onwards.

When I tell people about this, they always ask me what this event is all about, and so I thought I would write a post about it.

“Pecha Kucha” is the Japanese term for “chit-chat”.  A Pecha Kucha Night (PKN) is a gathering where a group of speakers talk about their work, hobby or passion, in a presentation format known as 20 x 20.  This means that each speaker’s presentation must consist of 20 images or slides, each of them being shown for 20 seconds.  Therefore, each presentation at a Pecha Kucha Night runs for approximately 7 minutes.  (more info: Pecha Kucha Website, Pecha Kucha Article on Wikipedia)

The time limit avoids the “death by PowerPoint” effect – and since each presenter is speaking on something they are really passionate about, the talks are always interesting.

Pecha Kucha Nights happen all around the world.  Hyderabad has played host to 7 successful volumes of PKN so far, all of them organised at Lamakaan, the open cultural space at Banjara Hills. (Google Maps page)

I was one of the speakers at Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad Vol 6, and I attended Vol 7.  Here are a few glimpses from those events.  Since it’s my blog after all, I fully intend to use this opportunity to highlight my seven minutes of fame all over again!

Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad Vol 6 – 5-Nov-11

PKN Hyderabad Vol 6 featured 9 speakers, talking about a variety of very interesting subjects.  This was my first time at a PKN, and I had earlier expressed my interest to participate.  As it turned out, mine was the first presentation that evening.  I spoke about “My Movie Fan Artwork”.  The organisers had two Canon EOS 5D Mark II cameras set up to film all the talks.  Here is the official video of my presentation on YouTube –

I’ve made a PDF of my presentation – you can download it here: Karthik Abhirama Krishna – “My Movie Fan Artwork” [3.14 MB]

I had my camera with me, and I took a bunch of photos at the event.  Above is a picture featuring the other speakers at PKN Hyd Vol 6 (photos by me).  These are the talks (all YouTube links) –

I had a wonderful time at the event – and I was totally hooked.  Therefore, I eagerly awaited the announcement of the next volume.

Pecha Kucha Night Hyderabad Vol 7 – 4-Feb-12

Volume 7 was held last month, again at Lamakaan.  I was present this time as an audience member, and an ‘unofficial official photographer’ (I took photos at the event and sent them to the organisers, who uploaded some of them on their album on Facebook, with due credit to me).  Above is a look at the speakers who presented at this volume.

There were seven speakers (so the first image in the collage above is of Harish Krishnan, one of the organisers, introducing PKN Hyd Vol 7) and another interesting set of talks.  Here are the YouTube links to the talks –

Here are a few more glimpses from the two events I attended so far –

One section of the audience at Vol 6.  If you’re taking photos at this event, it’s in low light, so you’ll either need a flash or a good and fast lens.  That’s the reason why I took many of my pics with my 50mm f1.8 II lens.

This is an interesting moment that I managed to capture at Vol 6.  Anwar Ahmed is speaking, while Viswaprasad Raju draws a sketch of him!  See the full size photo to see more detail.

The presenters at Vol 7 got a copy of Viswaprasad Raju’s Travel Sketches calendar.

Apart from the presenters at PKN Hyd, the MCs are also important contributors to the event.  Srinidhi Dasaka was the MC for Vol 6, and Dixith PNP was the MC for Vol 7.

If you want to see still more photos, take a look at these two albums on Facebook (my photos) –

Are you interested in participating?

I would recommend you “Like” the official Pecha Kucha Hyderabad Facebook Page.  That’s the easiest way to get updates on upcoming events.  You can also follow @pknhyd on Twitter.  This is their YouTube channel where videos of talks and promos of events are uploaded (apart from the videos I have linked above, one of the most popular uploads there is Joseph Radhik presenting at PKNHyd 3).

If you are interested in participating (either as a presenter, or as an MC), you can send the organisers an email to hydpkn@gmail.com, indicating what you would like to present on.  They would then send you further details and a PPT template using which you can create your presentation.

If you’d just like to attend the event as an audience member, all you have to do is come over to Lamakaan – there is no entry fee.  It’s advised that one arrives early, since the seating space is limited and these events tend to attract large attendance.

A few concluding notes

The Hyderabad Editions of Pecha Kucha Nights are organised by the people who run Hands Media and 17d North and a few other helping hands.  These passionate people must be appreciated, since it’s not an easy task pulling off events like this when you have day jobs.

I didn’t know till I saw the 17d North website that this firm did the branding for the Rubaiyat and Nautanki Gali restaurants!  If you’ve been to these places, you know how creative the ambience is.  Also, I find the name of the firm interesting – it’s a reference to the latitude at which Hyderabad is located.

Finally, I have to mention and say thanks to Pratyusha J, since it was she who told me about Pecha Kucha to begin with, several months ago!

The Raid: Redemption

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In the previous post, I mentioned that I did a new drawing.  Well, this is it – it’s a drawing based on a movie called The Raid.  You can click on any of the images in this post to see a larger version.

The Raid is an Indonesian martial arts / action movie, written and directed by Gareth Evans.  It is about a SWAT Team that enters a building to capture a drug lord.  But once inside, the team find themselves trapped – and the crime boss has given free reign to all the thugs and gangsters inside the building to kill the cops.  The cops must fight to survive.

The movie stars Iko Uwais, the lead from Gareth Evans’ earlier film Merantau, and for the US release of the movie, it has a music score by Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park and Joe Trapanese.

Everything I have seen (trailers) and read about the movie indicate that it is going to be an amazing 100 minutes full of violent action and incredible fight choreography.

That is what inspired me to make a drawing of this movie.  As with many of my other drawings, it is based on screenshots from the trailers.  It was done in pencil on my A5-size sketchbook (pencil mostly, the blood splats were done with a red gel pen), scanned and then coloured in Photoshop Elements.

Below are a couple of “behind the scenes” images of the drawing.  First is the original scan without the digital edits –

And here is a photo of the sketchbook along with the pencils and the pen used to draw it –

The drawing didn’t take me all that long to do – probably around 30-45 minutes to draw, and editing may be another half an hour.

Those of you who are following me on Facebook and Twitter would have seen me sharing links about this movie for the past two or three months.

It all started with this incredible (red-band US) trailer –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWlmhMSnVdM

I was hooked the moment I saw this.  Fast, furious violent action, awesome music track by Mike Shinoda and Joe Trapanese (I downloaded the clip from YouTube, converted it into an MP3 file and have it on my phone for listening whenever I want).

This is what led me to follow articles about it.  Reviewers who have seen this movie screened at film festivals have written that it really does live up to the hype and that the action scenes are really as good as they seem to be, from the trailers.

A couple of days back, the US trailer showed up (the movie will be released on March 23 in the US, with the title of The Raid: Redemption).  This one has some new footage and a different music track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0hSL3a_kaw

There is also an Indonesian Trailer (which is basically the same as the US version, but with a different music score and a few extra seconds at the end).

Apparently, there is a sequel to The Raid being made, and that will be called Berandal (Indonesian word for thug).  However, that will be released in the US as The Raid: Retaliation, and there will be a third film too in the future (what will that be called, I wonder – The Raid: Retribution?).

All this is well and good, but after seeing all this awesome stuff from the movie, I was wondering whether we in India will get to see it on a big screen.  After all, the powers that be DID release the following films in theatres in India – Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, Josh Trank’s Chronicle, J J Abrams’ Super 8.  But on the other hand, David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was denied a release due to censorship issues.

Martial arts / action movies shouldn’t be tough to sell in India, and The Raid does not seem to have nudity in it (which is a problem for our censors).  Violence is OK – I remember that scenes of throat slashing were cut out from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but martial arts stuff should pass through I guess.

Rather than just take a guess, I tweeted Sony Classics about it –

One person retweeted this, mentioning Gareth Evans and Merantau Films as well –

And then imagine my surprise, when I actually got a reply on that tweet from Merantau Films –

That’s pretty awesome isn’t it?  Another person on Twitter tells me about the Indian distributor for The Raid – 

If they do in fact release the movie here, it’ll be great.  I just hope they don’t make too many cuts, and that they don’t dub the voices in an Indianised English accent (like what has been done in the past for TV versions of Asian movies).

If the film doesn’t get released here then we have to purchase it on DVD – the Indonesian DVD it seems will have both the Mike Shinoda music score as well as the original music track from the Indonesian release.

There are a couple of articles I read yesterday about the title.  First is an article from TwitchFilm, and the second is a post from the horse’s mouth – from Gareth Evans’ blog.

It seems that the title The Raid wasn’t available for them to use in the US, so that’s why they tacked on the Redemption at the end.  I guess it makes sense also, since it’d set up a franchise nicely.

(The same could be said for the Vin Diesel movie Pitch Black – which was subsequently marketed as The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black after the release of the sequel.)

As Evans says, perhaps it’s wise not to focus too much on the title, which would appear on screen for maybe five seconds, and better to enjoy the 100 minutes of ass-kicking in the rest of the film!

But the film, it is still the same film we screened at festivals and all I hope is that you all read whatever part of that 5 second titlecard you want to when it pops up on screen, forget the rest and enjoy seeing my good friends beat the shit out of each other for 100 mins.

Here’s the movie’s page on IMDb.  The Indonesian title appears to be Serbuan Maut – I wonder what ‘maut’ means – does it mean ‘death’ as it does in Hindi?

So there you have it – I hope I will be posting a review of the movie on my blog at some point of time not too far in the future!

Resident Evil: Retribution Drawing – Original Scan

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A couple of days back, I was showing my drawing of Resident Evil: Retribution to some people and they were asking me what elements of the final image was done traditionally, and what was added digitally.

So, I thought I’d post the original scan of this drawing to show this.  You can click the below image to see an even larger version –

My scanner is a Canon CanoScan LiDE 110, which produces very nice images.  It doesn’t require a power source – just connect through USB and you are good to go.  The software that comes with the scanner has an “Auto Adjust Colours” option, which automatically boosts the contrast in the image (unlike other scanners, where the scanned image would be very light).

The drawing was done on a sketchbook that has A5 size paper.  So it’s quite small.  And the orange/brown area at the bottom of the image is my hand – I normally press down the book onto the bed of the scanner so that it picks up as much detail as possible.

I scan images at the highest resolution that the software will allow.  Editing is also done at that big size.  This scan for example, was 4865 x 6984 pixels in dimension.  After doing edits in Photoshop Elements, I make an 800 or 1000 pixel-wide image which I post online (Facebook, etc), but I always keep the huge PSD file, so that I can take a large size print if I want.  I follow a similar procedure for photos as well.

Items of Interest (Jan 2012 Recap)

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Apart from the collection of tweets in the earlier post, here are some more interesting things that I posted online this month.  Archived for posterity.

First off, this is my official 2012 New Year Card:

2012 New Year Card by KarthikEven if the world is going to end on 21-Dec-12, we’ll still get to see these movies before that: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which unfortunately may not get released in India after all), Prometheus (8-Jun-12), The Dark Knight Rises (20-Jul-12) and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (14-Dec-12).

As I’d mentioned in my collection of tweets post, I bought a Canon Speedlite 580 EX II flash for my camera.  This is, as I later found out, one of Canon’s top-of-the-line external flashes.  I still have to learn to use it to its full potential.

Canon Speedlite FlashI’d remarked that when attached to my camera, it’s quite bulky and makes my Canon EOS 550D look positively small!  In fact, if one was to add a bigger telephoto lens to it, it would be heavy enough to do bicep exercises with.  So I took a photo of that.

I later posted larger resolution versions of two of the drawings in the New Year Card above.  Here they are:

The Dark Knight Rises - Drawing by Karthik AbhiramThat’s a stippled drawing of Batman holding what appears to be an EMP Gun from The Dark Knight Rises.  The drawing was done based on a screenshot from the HD trailer.  The text is the chant you hear in the trailer.

And here’s Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander from David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander - Drawing by Karthik AbhiramI decided to use the original Swedish title instead of the English one.  I love the posters and the artwork for the movie.  From what I read, the publicity materials are designed by Kellerhouse Design and the photography is by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.

Another interesting thing:

Businessman - CBFC CertificateThese days, I’ve observed that at Prasad’s Multiplex, for Hindi and Telugu movies, they post the censor certificate for the movie as approved by the Central Board of Film Certification.  The front part of the certificate is what you see attached to the film itself, but they’re even putting up the reverse side of the certificate these days.  Apparently, if there’s a triangle stamped on the certificate, it means that there are cuts made (these things I found out thanks to a friend).

Above is a quick photo I took of the certificate for the Mahesh Babu movie Businessman.  The list of cuts is pretty interesting.  If you want to know what all dirty stuff you are missing, all you have to do is read the list of cuts!

I found this description very funny (“Delete the visuals: close exposure of cleavage”, “finger of hero moving on the chest and hip of heroine”, “Mute the words: …, lanja kodaka, fucking, …”), that’s why I took a photo of it to preserve the memory!  One friend commented that this description is actually more sleazy than what it would have been if this stuff ended up in the movie.

While there may be a rationale to certifying movies, I still can’t understand why cuts are required in a movie that’s anyway rated “A” or “Adults Only”.

Some other videos and trailers of interest:

  • i2 (i square) Promo – i2 is an upcoming short film from Nakama Creations and Planet Green Pictures (the filmmakers behind the massively popular short film Shadow).  The trailer totally wowed me, the music (Prakash Anantha) and cinematography (Surya Vinay) are awesome.  It looks like a movie made for the big screen.
  • Theme from A Fistful of Dollars by Ennio Morricone – Watch the video and then tell me, does that tune sound familiar?  If you recently saw the Mahesh Babu movie Businessman, then it will.  That’s the theme music associated with Kajal Agarwal’s character.  I’ve not seen A Fistful of Dollars, but when watching Businessman, I recognised the theme right away as being from a Clint Eastwood movie – because I had a desktop theme (remember those things from several years ago?) with these sounds.
  • Comparison Video from the Manos in HD Project – Manos: The Hands of Fate is a 1966 movie directed by Hal Warren.  This is known as one of the worst movies ever made.  Someone has discovered a pristine print of this movie and are painstakingly restoring it by scanning the film at 2k resolution.  I’ve actually seen this movie and would love to watch it in that beautiful HD transfer at some point of time.  The page that I followed to get to this video link rightly says: “The Manos In HD film restoration project is one of the most important things going on in the world today. Never before has such a fucking disaster looked so beautiful!”
  • Talaash Trailer – A psychological thriller starring Aamir Khan.  Looking forward to it!  Releases in June.
  • Kahaani Trailer – Another thriller starring Vidya Balan.  Looks good.  The trailer kind of reminded me of Anurag Kashyap’s That Girl in Yellow Boots.  This movie releases in March.
  • Agent Vinod Trailer – Action / spy movie starring Saif Ali Khan.  It’s written and directed by Sriram Raghavan who made Johnny Gaddaar, so should be good.  Also a March release.
  • Jeremy Keith – All our Yesterdays – This is a 45-minute video but an interesting talk on preserving our memories, comparing the longevity of digital data to analog (info engraved on a stone tablet can last, and can be read after hundreds or thousands of years, can the same be said of digital data on a DVD?).

This month, we had a few events at office, for which I acted as a photographer.  For two of the events, you can see the photos I took on these Facebook albums:

The first album consists of photos entirely shot with my Nokia N8 phone camera – which does surprisingly well in good light.  The second one though was taken with my Canon EOS 550D camera (I got permission to bring the camera and two additional lenses).  I got a lot of good feedback on these photos.

Flower among Leaves - Photo by Karthik AbhiramThis is one of the photos that resulted from that set.  Taken with my 550D with the 50mm f1.8 II lens.  You can download the full-size image and peek into the EXIF info if you wish.

Collection of Tweets – end Dec-11 till today

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This is a collection of tweets from me and others that I retweeted, between 30-Dec-11 and today.  I thought I’d post these on a regular basis to archive these links.  The below set essentially recaps the important stuff that I posted or shared this month.

  • 28-Jan-12: #NowDownloading Romero’s Night of the Living Dead 1968 in 720p HD – http://t.co/UTyI9Qn6 – MP4 file is 1 GB in size. 1080p is also there.
  • 28-Jan-12: Twitter’s Awful But Amazing Recruitment Video [Video] http://t.co/gg42Ad4b
  • 28-Jan-12: If you run a self-hosted WordPress blog, search for and install the Jetpack plugin – http://jetpack.me – it enables advanced plugins.
  • 28-Jan-12: MOVIE REVIEW: Josh Trank’s Chronicle (2012) http://t.co/rcCQRMig
  • 27-Jan-12: Agneepath – Acting was good, especially Hrithik’s. But I felt it was too long and had too much exaggerated drama. 6/10
  • 26-Jan-12: Famous Photographers With Their Even More Famous Photographs [Photography] http://t.co/Jj6HClur
  • 26-Jan-12: Is This the Canon 5D Mark III? [Cameras] http://t.co/C8ZZD9yl
  • 26-Jan-12: RT @Galactica_gk The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo not releasing in India as David Fincher isn’t willing to cut 3 scenes in the movie.
  • 24-Jan-12: You should get married soon. Or else.. http://t.co/AnEZEzj1
  • 22-Jan-12: Underworld: Awakening 3D – Decent & good looking movie with stylish action scenes. Fun while it lasts but you won’t remember it later. 7/10
  • 22-Jan-12: Drawing face-off between @justkalpana and her son: the results: http://pic.twitter.com/oWzIbGDU (mommy) and http://pic.twitter.com/ngziMePf (son)
  • 21-Jan-12: “‘The Raid’ features some of the bloodiest, impressive, and most inventive action sequences in recent memory” – http://www.movieline.com/2012/01/20/sundance-everything-youve-heard-about-indonesion-actioner-the-raid-is-true/
  • 21-Jan-12: RT @OfficialBrookeT Life is too short to be sitting around talking about how short life is. (:
  • 20-Jan-12: Just bought “The Illuminator: Access To Universal Intelligence by Rajith Rajappan” from @flipkart http://t.co/HqvibO7Q
  • 19-Jan-12: RT @Galactica_gk Really America?? Really? RT @denofgeek CBS orders contemporary Sherlock Holmes show http://t.co/pOrydLzU
  • 19-Jan-12: Sad news if this is so… AICN: Are We Getting A PG-13 EXPENDABLES 2? http://bit.ly/xFBc6C
  • 18-Jan-12: RT @mihirfadnavis I like Len Wiseman – Die Hard 4 was great. But the Total Recall remake looks like it won’t last.. *puts on sunglasses* #TwoWeeks. *YEAAAAA*
  • 17-Jan-12: Five directors and their questionable filmmaking techniques http://t.co/BM4DSkjb
  • 17-Jan-12: What makes Prince Of Persia so enduringly popular? http://bit.ly/xoO43g Pls note @psam @rajturl
  • 17-Jan-12: Businessman – Loved it! Mahesh Babu carried the movie with his tremendous attitude, storyline kept one interested & music was good. 8/10
  • 14-Jan-12: Lee Bermejo – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo http://t.co/BgWq1irg
  • 14-Jan-12: RT @GDBALA Exclusive: Quentin Tarantino’s favorite films of 2011 & more! http://t.co/2nAn9Wbs
  • 13-Jan-12: Journey – Two love stories told as flashbacks, in the context of an accident. Very nicely done. I watched the Telugu dubbed version. 8/10
  • 12-Jan-12: RT @RGVzoomin Extreme heights of craze for Business man..Mahesh babu himself is not getting tickets!
  • 12-Jan-12: Attn @rajturl @psam RT @mihirfadnavis If you used to dig Baba Sehgal and are feeling nostalgic, here – http://t.co/rR5dOiW5
  • 11-Jan-12: Extended cut? RT @FarOutAkhtar Off to the gym now and then to do background music for Don 2 additional scenes to be incorporated in the DVD.
  • 10-Jan-12: RT @gurpreet_bhatia @AshuMittal Photographers are violent people. First they frame you, then they shoot you, then they hang you on the wall.
  • 10-Jan-12: RT @krishashok Me: have you heard this new Harris Jeyaraj song? @hariflute: No. Me: yes, you have heard it before
  • 10-Jan-12: RT @krishashok The @hariflute – “Tamil physicist to waiter: There’s an MC-squared in my soup”
  • 8-Jan-12: If I attach my new flash on my camera, and put a telephoto lens on it, I can do bicep exercises with it.
  • 8-Jan-12: I bought a Canon Speedlite 580 EX II flash today. The flash looks big compared to my diminutive EOS 550D 🙂
  • 7-Jan-12: RT @mihirfadnavis I didn’t dig ‘Tinker Tailor’ because it was a cool old fashioned spy tale. I dug it cos it had Sherlock Holmes punching Bane in the face.
  • 7-Jan-12: IMO – The Darkest Hour > Skyline > AVP: R 🙂
  • 7-Jan-12: The Darkest Hour – An effortless watch if you switch off your brain. To it’s credit was never boring. Dialogues unintentionally funny! 7/10
  • 7-Jan-12: RT @mihirfadnavis #IamSoMiddleClass I go to Landmark but avoid the DVD/BluRay section, so I can buy the Moserbaer 40 rupees 3-in-one VCDs.
  • 7-Jan-12: “Hello Amanda. Tum mujhe nahin jaanti ho. Par main tumhe acchi tarah se jaanta hoon. Main ek game khelna chaahtha hoon.” – SAW Hindi dub 🙂
  • 6-Jan-12: RT @io9 An Exclusive Look at the Making of Dragon Tattoo’s Stunning Titles http://io9.com/5873372/
  • 5-Jan-12: RT @Violent_Gandhi_ @Chiken_chameli ‘SHERLOCK HOLMES’ is a Poor Mans ‘ACP PRADYUMAN’… . 🙂
  • 5-Jan-12: Great poem in the beginning… Geekolinks: 1/4 http://t.co/YKyUUcju
  • 4-Jan-12: RT @purisubzi A tome, if there ever was one, on Roboto – the font used in Android 4. http://bit.ly/y8Mdum #TypeNerdsOnly
  • 4-Jan-12: 70 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies to Watch Out for in 2012 [Io9 2012 Preview] http://bit.ly/A7cWOu
  • 3-Jan-12: RT @zombeaner If youre havin girl problems i feel bad for you son/It took me under 12 parsecs to make the Kessel Run – Han Goin’ Solo
  • 1-Jan-12: Mihir Fadnavis – The 35 Most Anticipated Movies of 2012 http://t.co/3D9l8xwQ
  • 1-Jan-12: What do colorblind people see? [Biology] http://t.co/KfM03x2Q
  • 1-Jan-12: RT @clientsfh “How many SEO experts do you need to change a lightbulb lightbulbs buy light bulbs neon lights sex porn” http://t.co/DwaaxtwA
  • 31-Dec-11: Alien trailer, Prometheus style http://t.co/Vm4gOHAD
  • 30-Dec-11: RT @josephradhik RT @sickipediabot: What do you get if you cross a left leg with a right leg? A squashed bollock.

M (1931)

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M is a 1931 film directed by Fritz Lang.  The movie is set in a Berlin terrorized by a child murderer.  It has been months since the cops have been on the hunt for this man, but they have failed to find him.  As a result, people in the city are constantly afraid for the safety of their children.  Not only that, the police’s crackdown is so extreme that organised crime in the city is unable to operate properly.  So, the criminals decide to take matters into their own hands and start a search for the killer.

The killer is revealed early on in the film to us, the audience.  It is Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre.  Are his killings premeditated, or does he act out of compulsion?  If so, what is justice for such a man?

M 1931 - A drawing by Karthik Abhiram

For the most part, I found M a very nicely done movie.  Peter Lorre’s acting was very good as Beckert.  The story kept one’s attention, and some of the elements (the killer writing to the press, how the crime syndicate actually implements their search) reminded me of later movies.  The scene with the cops deciding to intensify their search and the crime syndicate discussing their plans to apprehend the killer is intercut in an interesting way.

The movie has some nicely designed, very artistic shots.  As is common for older movies, most of the shots are deep focus ones (I think the practice of using shots with a shallow depth of field started much, much later).

There were certain parts in the film that tended to drag and some of it was over-dramatized (one scene in the beginning where the crowd panics and almost lynches an old man).  Does every lawman in Berlin smoke cigars constantly?  The ending I thought was a bit abrupt.

I guess when one watches an older movie in the present day, one tends to approach it with a jaded mind, having already seen elements from it in later movies.  I couldn’t avoid this bias.  Still, the movie holds up very well and does pose some interesting questions.

The aforementioned scene in which the killer sends a note to the press reminded me of David Fincher’s Zodiac.  Also, Hans Beckert whistles the tune of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg, which Fincher used in The Social Network.  This made me think, what would it be like if there was a remake of M directed by David Fincher, with music by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross?  Or a moody remake by Nicolas Winding Refn.  If there was an Indian remake, I guess Anurag Kashyap would be a good fit to the material, and he’d do it in a gritty style like his That Girl in Yellow Boots.

Rating: 7/10

More info on the IMDb page and the Wikipedia article.

I drew the above image with black and red gel pens and a black marker.  You can click that to see a larger image.

You can watch the film below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jewTfVC7XD4

The above video is available in HD (720p) and a great way to enjoy the movie.  It appears to be ripped from a BluRay source (I guess the uploader could do this, since the movie is in the Public Domain).  It’s a 110 min restored version in German with English subtitles.

If you use Mozilla Firefox, you can download the video if you have a plugin called DownloadHelper.  Apparently, on Google Chrome there’s a YouTube downloader in built.  Alternatively, you can use an online downloader like SaveYouTube (where you copy the YouTube URL and just replace the youtube.com part with saveyoutube.com).  That’ll give you some other options, like downloading the WebM encoded version (which at 1.69 GB is smaller in size than the MP4 file).

While you may be able to get the video using any of the above methods, you’ll still need to download the subtitles.  You can search online for subtitles that match this video, or you could use a program called Google2SRT to get the subtitles.  This is a very handy program to have, since it’ll allow you to rip subtitles from any YouTube video.

Resident Evil: Retribution

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A few days ago, a trailer for the upcoming fifth Resident Evil movie, Resident Evil: Retribution appeared online.  The trailer is a clever piece of work, it’s put together really well, and the movie seems like it’ll be a lot of fun.  Say what you will about Paul W S Anderson’s movies, the man can put together a slick and stylish film.

This movie’s going to be in IMAX 3D, and if the 3D is as good as it was in Resident Evil: Afterlife, this certainly should be a movie worth watching out for.

So, very impressed by the trailer, I drew this.  Click for a larger image.

Resident Evil: Retribution - Drawing by Karthik AbhiramThis is just a quick sketch done with black, blue and red gel pen (and I also used a thick marker), colours, texture and text were added with Photoshop Elements.

Oh, and the trailer is embedded below:

Looks cool, no?

UPDATE 24-Feb-12: I’ve posted the original scan of the drawing, so you can see it without the digital edits.