JLA Weblog (page 3)

Fan Film Friday: Five Fan Trailers

Anybody like fan films? The increasing distribution of cheap video cameras and the availability of digital production techniques has created a renaissance in the number and quality of fan-films. And video sites like Youtube have allowed producers to share their work with an audience vastly larger than their predecessors would have dared to dream of. Personally I think that fan films work best when they’re short – the longer a film, any film, is the more likely it is to show its budgetary and technical constraints. This is why some of the most eye-catching and well received fan films of recent years have been in the format of shorts or extended-trailers.

There is, however, another phenomena that has appeared – the fan trailer. This is distinct from a true fan-film or a fan-film made to look like a trailer, as a fan-trailer doesn’t usually contain any new footage. It’s creator takes existing footage from a TV show, movie or cartoon and re-edits it to create their own brand new cinema-style trailer for that show. Sometimes fans will even take footage from multiple movies and blend them together with their own captions to create a fantasy trailer for a project that never actually existed. These are 5 of my favourites.

1. Justice League

Youtube user facoloco11 put together a fan trailer for a Justice League trailer for a course in Entertainment Marketing that he was taking at university. He and his class took the characters outlined for the George Miller’s Justice League: Mortal film, recast them, and then used clips from a range of different movies to create a trailer for a story where 7 retired heroes reunite to save from the world from a robot invasion. What interested me was the use of Common as Green Lantern, he had been cast in that role in Miller’s film and this trailer shows how good he could have been. The Superman Return and Batman Begins shots are easily enough to spot and I believe the robots are from I Robot.

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Joe Casey’s Justice League Academy Pitch

Joe Casey had once proposed a Justice League Academy series to DC Comics. Casey discusses his proposal in an interview with Tim Callahan @ CBR in relation to the “glacier-like” pace of getting anything approved at DC Comics.

About two years ago, at San Diego, I pitched an idea to the editor of the “Justice League” books…something called “Justice League Academy.” Maybe the most fan-friendly idea I’d ever had for either of the Big Two. The kids of the Justice League in a top secret “superhero training school” that not even their parents knew about (which solved all the inter-book continuity problems in one stroke). It had kind of a Starman-meets-X-Men vibe to it. Superhero legacy meets four-color melodrama. It was Wally West’s kids, it was Metamorpho’s son (who I gave powers to and renamed Megamorpho, the Energy Kid), it was Adam Strange’s daughter, it was Animal Man’s kids (the daughter also given powers and assuming the great, unused name, Changeling…while Cliff was the surly, Guy Gardner-type of the cast). Great characters that no one — outside of Geoff’s Flash stuff — was doing jack-shit with. There was also Offspring, Plastic Man’s kid…as well as a new character who was the son of DC’s Hercules. Originally, it was a Batman-initiated program, but Damian Wayne (who I knew ahead of time was going to be the new Robin) was to quickly take it over and run it like Batman used to run the Justice League in the early Giffen issues (in other words, through insults and intimidation).

The grouping is interesting as these are the kids are a different “generation” than the current Teen Titans, they are all closer to 10-11 than the Teen Titans who are at least 16+. Everybody at the creator level loved the pitch, but it never proceeded very quickly up the DC foot chain and Marvel scooped them with the Avenger’s Academy series.

Mister Miracle Finger Board

I found this oddity whilst clearing some stuff out of my parent’s attic. It’s a fingerboard with a florescent coloured Mister Miracle on one side and a pencil sharpener on the other.

I remember it from the 1980s, but I must’ve realised at the time that the figure on it was Kirby’s Mister Miracle. No copy right mark and the colours are off so its obviously bootleg. It hasn’t faded – it really is that garish. Nevertheless, its one of the stranger pieces of merchandise I’ve run across.

Rapid Fire Theatre’s Improv on Infinite Earths

Take one improv team, add costumes, and a healthy knowledge of DC comics and you get the Rapid Fire Theatre‘s 2009 Halloween improv slot: Improv on Infinite Earths…

Halloween 2009 edition of Rapid Fire Theatre’s “Theatresports”, featuring the Justice League (Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Zatanna, Green Lantern, Flash) versus The Legion of Doom (Lex Luthor, Bizarro, Penguin, Scarecrow, Cheetah, Gorilla Grodd) in a epic battle of improv skills – with the fate of the world hanging in the balance!

Oh, that Bizarro’s such a naughty fellow.

[Via: Topless Robot]

Some purely practical thoughts on the Apple’s new tablet cloud-client

So people are jabbering about this new iPad from Apple Computers. I can’t help feel totally underwhelmed by it. It’s a netbook (whatever Apple may claim – it even has a pathetic 1Ghz processor). A touch netbook without a keyboard and without a proper operating system. It’s a crippled, DRM infested, misfire.

Some practical thoughts with regard to reading comics on it.

  • The standard preview images that DC releases are 700×1000 pixels – a third of the print resolution. This is also the approximate resolution of the Apple tablet.
  • The average US comic book is 12 inches diagonally. The tablet’s screen size is 9.7 inches, two inches smaller than a standard comic book.
  • I just tried printing out a page at the tablet’s 132 dpi resolution and it wasn’t too bad. A full-page should be okay. The speech was readable, however, it is about the limit of what I’d want to read.
  • The graphics (size, dpi) are broadly equivalent to a Kindle DX. Of course the Apple tablet is in colour and has better screen update, but the experience in terms of static reading on the screen will be equivalent. A downside of the tablet is that it constantly requires power to display the image whereas the Kindle and equivalent devices only use power when changing the image.
  • The Apple-tablet will probably, just about, be okay for reading a standard comic a single page at a time, but in no way whatsoever is it a game changer.
  • The screen needs to be at least twice the resolution it currently is to even begin to do justice to comic book art or to even display text at anything approaching a pitch equivalent to the normal printed page.

Nice try Apple, but no cigar. These devices are okay for reading the equivalent of a newspaper, but they just aren’t good enough to replicate the comic book print experience. The technology just isn’t here yet.

Villains Day Off fan-film

This great fan film was the 2009 Award Winner at the Superman Celebration in Metropolis, IL. It was written and directed by George Doerr VI and features Thomas Hayes as Lex Luthor and Doerr as the Joker. I particularly liked the “Villains Just Want A Day Off Song” sung by Poison Ivy (Jenny Garofalo) to the tune of “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”.

Frank Miller and Steve Gerber’s Metropolis.

Earth One isn’t the first time that DC have launched entirely new reboots of their main characters. The following is from a 1986 issue of Amazing Heroes and leads into a piece about Frank Miller’s then “upcoming” Batman: Year One…

Actually, “Batman: Year One” has its origins in Miller’s concept for the original Dark Knight series some years ago. It was then that Miller and Steve Gerber proposed to DC their idea for the “Metropolis” line of comics, which would revamp DC’s three principal characters and start their continuity over again from the beginning. The new Wonder Woman series would have been titled Amazon, the new Superman series The Man of Steel (which, of course, would not have been the same as John Byrne’s series of the same name), and the new Batman series would have been called Dark Knight. “I plotted the first four issues of the Batman title,” Miller says, but the Metropolis line was never launched, and he later used some of the ideas he had worked up for the Batman in his recent graphic novel series.

Peter Sanderson, “A Talk with Frank Miller” in Amazing Heroes #102 (1986 Sept 15)

I remember reading references to Miller and Gerber working on a pitch for Superman at the time of DC’s first Crisis, but I hadn’t realised they had something so comprehensive in mind. Even now, I don’t think the world is ready for Frank Miller’s Wonder Woman.

Legends of the Superfriends

I’ve heard that Legends of the Superfriends was bad, but I never realised how bad. I just stumbled across some clips of it on Youtube:

That was comedian Brad Saunders as “Ghetto Man.” If its the same Brad Saunders, he’s still in the comedy business with his Babysitter Productions outfit.

As cringeworthy as that was, and yes that was actually Adam West as Batman, remarks like,

A few years ago the NAACP asked you guys to integrate, but I’m sorry, we don’t feel that the Green Lantern qualifies as coloured people. — Ghetto Man

don’t seem too far off the mark nowadays — and this was made thirty years ago!