In theme with Syfy to bring old classics to life with either sequels or prequals, yesterday they showed that there is still interests in classics being retold.  In Neverland we get the beginnings of the Peter Pan saga.  What Neverland is, what Peter and Hook's relationship is and how they became apart.

The visuals is a nice contrast.  It's not the full blown brights colors that we saw in Disney's Peter Pan or the movie Hook.  Here we get a blend of both dark and light.   The doesn't have a big budget since it is a TV miniseries on a cable network.  Set designs are great, the CG is great for a television show and way better then what we usually get from Syfy's movies.

I'm looking forward to see what happens in the 2nd episode of this miniseries tonight on SyFy.

Sometimes it's not all about visuals, just about the story.  Here we get short that minimal in visuals, but great in concept.  The short starts with a blocky character that is pretty in a cubical room and draws a rectangle on a piece of paper.  He does until the stack of paper is finished.  When the clock is at 12:00, they all stop and you see that the last piece of paper has it's rectangular shape fading.  Everything is timed perfectly at a single beat.  The strokes, the opening of the marker, everything.  For some reason the main character drops his marker.  This total out of his and everybody's character.

In the mean time we get cuts of a person playing the drums.  We don't know what's going on.  Later we find out it's his heart.  I'm not sure what the short was saying, but from what I'm guessing it's that we're not robots.  Our souls/"heart" is what makes us different and alive.  Well, that my gist of it.  I guess the meaning of the story is open to interpetation.

So did you check out that Batman costume that someone made?  It's looks exactly like the one in the Batman Arkham Asylum video game.  The creators made sure to stay very true to the source with have the right colors, minute details, and just overall coolness.  Even the cowl moves when your head turns.  Maybe they should use this in Batman Begins.  This suit is much better looking than the movie ones.  Check out more at the TheEffectsLab forums.

So did anyone see this show last night?  The premise seems really good.  If you haven't seen or heard of  it, it's all about our childhood fairytale characters.  The only difference is it takes place in present day.  Long story short, the Queen wants to ruin everyone in fairy tale land.  Her most biggest evil?  Basically everyone is moved to the "real world" and all the characters live in this one city called Storybrook.  The problem is that everyone doesn't remember who they are.  Another thing,  they're all humans (maybe/maybe not, I'm not sure).

The first episode or what everyone calls the pilot, I thought it was pretty engaging.  The boy for some reason knows the whole truth from this one book his teacher gave him who is actually the Princess.  The evil queen is the boy's adopted mother who seems like the one of the few who still knows what's she done.  The boy sets out to find his real mom who is actually the Princess's daughter (Emma).

I know I know, it does get kind of confusing, but you'll get it when you watch the show.  Anyways the adopted mother is very mean to Emma who you can tell already know something is already going off.  All the while this is happening, we get a lot of flashback/interdimensional shot to fairy tale land of what aspired to the current event.

As far as production, the fairytale sets look great.  The studio in charge did a great job.   Then take the special effects and you can tell they put a bigger budget compare to Terra Nova.  With One Upon A Time, it looked like it could have been a movie.  It felt pretty grand.

I'm looking forward to next week's episode.  I'm also looking forward to see Grimm as well.  I'm such a sucker for fantasy type shows.   Hopefully the executives don't pull the plug on them with out first finishing a story.  I hate it when they do it (Terminator, The Event, V, etc).  If you want just a sample of what you see check out the video below.  From what I've heard, this show isn't for the little one's.

 

 

Adobe Max conference is taking place this week.  Slowly, but surely, there are things that are trickling out.  There are a lot of things that would make a lot of motion graphics designers happy.  The video below shows something that is new, but isn't really new at all.  What you're about to see is image mapping, but in this case it's video mapping.

What the program does it takes the environment of the video and makes it into 3D.  Once calculated, a virtual camera can be set and you can change the view point.  You can zoom in out , pan etc.  Just like image 3D mapping, you can't go to the extremes.  Just subtles only.  In addition you can have people (who have been rotoscoped) be placed behind objects and other things.  Also you can change focus areas and what not.

The great thing about this is it's pretty automatic.  The user doesn't have to use a 3D program and texture objects in 3D space.  It's all calculated by the program.  We're sure this will be implemented in a couple of years though.

Also did any notice how the video below the screen is like floating in the air.  They look like their using projection mapping on the stage there.  Pretty neat.

So what do we have here? Looks like we'll be getting some kind of new Batman every year until 2013. So you're saying what the hell is he thinking. Well, for starters, there's going to be a new straight to dvd release of the animated Batman: Year One coming out at the end of October. Then next year we'll have the final installment to Nolan's Batman saga. Then in 2013 Cartoon Network will be getting a new Batman.

So what sets the Cartoon Network's Batman from the rest of the other animated Batman? Well, this will be the first CGI animated Batman series. We'll be able to see batman in the CG world. Think of it ala Transformers Prime animated series. Let's just hope it will be a very dark Batman and not a lot of bright colors.

Check out this promotion art for the series called Beware the Batman airing sometime in 2013 on Cartoon Network. I'm not sure about the design, but I'm sure it'll grow on me if the story is good. Now if only Cartoon Network could start airing new Thundercats episodes.