thedriveintheatre

Those of you who follow my blog would’ve read my previous post on my spoof of The Incredibles in my magazine company’s publication. Now I’m proud to present to you my take on John Carter, which I successfully pitched to my boss as a new theme for that district.

As the movie was directed by Andrew Stanton, I couldn’t resist to throw in a few Wall-E references, which you can see below.

Also, I made a flash animation on the site where Rainbow does her epic Sonic Rainboom. You can see it in the link I’ve given below.

Cover - http://i44.tinypic.com/htfaxy.jpg

Rainbow Dash Closeup - http://i42.tinypic.com/mj1w8g.jpg

Eve Closeup - http://i39.tinypic.com/vrzmm0.jpg

Wall-E Closeup - http://i40.tinypic.com/npl4ps.jpg

Centrespread - http://i40.tinypic.com/144h1e.jpg

Axiom Closeup - http://i44.tinypic.com/rhtzcw.jpg

Web animation - http://www.nmags.com/fn/index.php

Equestria Daily Nightly Roundup #271

Halfway there, guys! Also, do check out my review of the movie itself!

Equestria Daily: Nightly Roundup #182

Surprise!!! Today I made the headelines for the ‘Nightly Roundup’ on Equestria Daily. I’ll let my email to ED from Monday explain it all:

“Dear Equestria Daily,

I’m a recent university graduate from Down Under and a self-professed Brony. Two months ago, I started my first job as a graphic designer at a Sydney-based coupon magazine company. Its Unique Selling Point is that its issues are thematic parodies of movie and TV show titles. Last week, I assembled my first magazine (the theme is the recent movie ‘Arthur Christmas’, which I successfully pitched), and I was in charge of the cover and centrespread of the clients as well as the spoof synopsis on the content page.

I was creatng the centrespread when I realised that there was some negative space between two of the clients. I had already used a reindeer, so just for the heck of it, I decided to insert a live-action version of one of the Mane SIx. I chose Twilight (although my favourite is Fluttershy) and rewrote the synopsis to reflect her impromptu introduction. I haven’t watched Arthur Christmas yet, but to my knowledge, there’s no magical teleporting unicorn in the film. Coincidentally, one of the main characters was conveniently named Bryony, which just begged the removal of one letter for her spoof name.

To my surprise (and utter delight), Twilight’s cameo in the content page synopsis and centrespread somehow passed the two editorial checks and the issue went to print! So right now, there’s 50,000 copies of this advertising magazine being distributed in the Fairfield district in Sydney with T. Sparkle waiting to surprise any observant Aussie Bronies! I’ve included a few links to pictures I’ve taken of the printed copy; I think I can safely avoid copyright issues as I didn’t actually refer to her by name, and I’ve made my version of the stars on Twilight’s cutie mark have five spokes, while the canon version has six.

Oh, and the magazine is also available for download online, where I also created a brief animation of Twilight at the end of the banner clip which plays on the homepage. The print and online versions will be available till the end of January, in case any Fairfield Bronies ask.

Do send me a link if you post this on ED, so I can share it with my fellow Bronies here and overseas. Thanks for reading this, and bringing such a great community fan site to life every day.

Your faithful reader,
Andre”

ED replied:

“Haha nice! Sneaky Twi. To the roundup.”

So I eagerly came back from work the next day to see if my story made the roundup, but it wasn’t there. Two more days passed before I decided to send them a reminder on Friday.

“Greetings Equestria Daily,

It’s been three roundups, did I miss it somewhere or are you saving this for the weekend? ;)

Yours derpfully,
Andre”

And they responded:

“Looks like it just got.lost! Added again..”

So I checked in a few hours later and there was a heading there, but no images or description.

http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/12/nightly-roundup-181.html

ED said that “for some odd reason none of these links work anymore”, but it was still working on my end. Eventually though, after a reupload to my Flickr account, it finally showed up in the Saturday edition as you see above. Unfortunately, they didn’t link to a spoof synopsis I wrote that referenced Twilight in the contents page, but you can read it on the online version of the mag in the ilnk they provided, Or you can check it out below.

(references in 3rd and 6th paragraph)

Cover - http://flic.kr/p/aSLX5n (no Twilight in here, just to show y’all the magazine title)

Contents page - http://flic.kr/p/aSLXz8

Spoof synopsis closeup - http://flic.kr/p/aSLYaa (references in 3rd and 6th paragraph)

Centrespread - http://flic.kr/p/aSLYDK

Page of centrespread - http://flic.kr/p/aSLZbr

Twilight closeup - http://flic.kr/p/aSM3EF

Twilight closeup 2 - http://flic.kr/p/aSLZzk

Online version with web animation - http://www.nmags.com/fn/index.php (watch the animated banner till the end, after the speech bubble fades away)

If you live in Fairfield, Sydney, you can find copies of the magazine right now in shopping malls, local businesses, and maybe even your mailbox! Just follow the web animation link above and there’s an ‘Out of Mags’ button you can click to check out distribution points. And thanks to ED for publishing my story! ;)

This is a continuation of the last post, where I share a couple of interesting articles in this month’s issue of Empire.

Here’s a rave review of Kung Fu Panda 2, which I wholeheartedly agree with. 4 stars, no doubt. I would’ve given the same too. Not a perfect Dreamworks film, but still up there with its best (the first Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek). Nary a pop-culture reference in sight, great storyline, powerful themes, lovable characters (yes, even the villainous Lord Shen)… I can’t highly recommend this film enough, especially knowing that people are going to doubt Dreamworks’ capability to pull of a great sequel in lieu of going with the safe bet of Pixar.

Harry Potter being the main focus of this issue, a whopping number of pages have been devoted to covering this worldwide movie event (I can’t be bothered to count the pages, just know that it’s a ‘whopping’).

Here’s the first two pages of a preview of the final battle and how it will be translated to screen (I won’t be reading it until I see the movie because I haven’t read the book):

To conclude this look-through, here’s the final article I want to show you. It is an ‘Empire Celebration’ of the Harry Potter film series, another retrospective. There’s first-hand interviews with all the key players throughout the series, never-before-seen images (I especially love the one of Helena giving Daniel a friendly kiss), and some pretty cool cover shoots with the stars (Emma Watson, my how you’ve grown!).

Here are a couple of pages for y’all to see. You can view more on my Flickr blog.

The page contents belong to Empire Magazine, I only have ownership over the photographs, which are used for non-profit purposes. You can get the June issue of Empire at all good newsstands everywhere. Thanks for reading, and here’s to the success of Kung Fu Panda 2, Cars 2, and Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows!

So I was at my favourite haunt (an underground newsstand in Queen Victoria’s Building near Town Hall Station) when I spotted Empire’s June issue. I had a flip-through and decided to buy it because of a few articles that caught my attention, which I’ll share below:

To celebrate the release of Cars 2, Empire ran two articles in its ‘News etc’ section. The first is ‘5 Things Cars 2’:

You can view an enlarged option of the text box on my Flickr site, but if you’ve been regularly keeping up with Cars 2-related news, you would know most of the points already. Just a couple things to take note:

- The full-name of the film John Lasseter was referring to is C’etait un rendezvous, a cult car chase classic that has no plot, only a car racing through the streets of Paris at breakneck speeds. You can easily watch it on Youtube (it’s the first video when you search the title), and I highly recommend it. I consider myself something of a car chase connoisseur (I’m even a member on Varaces, a forum devoted entirely to car chases), so the fact that the Pixarians knew of this cult short film and are using it as inspiration fills me with a little hope somewhat.

- If you’re a Pixar fan, you’d probably know the story behind the inspiration of Finn McMissile’s character, but I ‘d just like to say that it pleases me immensely that they had the idea of him being screened at a drive-in theatre (notwithstanding the connection with my username), and I would dearly love to see the deleted scene, if it could be included as an extra on the Cars 2 DVD.

- British surf music? This would certainly be an interesting take. Personally I was hoping for something more David Arnold or Brian Tyler, but hey, I’ll be open-minded about this. Fingers crossed Michael Giacchino can pull this off.

The article on the following pages is ‘Pixar 3D’, and it’s a retrospective of the company’s 11 films to date, in the words of JL himself. Again, you can view enlarged ~ versions of the text boxes on my Flickr site.

Personally, I really dislike the image used of the Pixar characters sitting in a dark theatre wearing those annoying 3D glasses. It feels like a plug for 3D technology, with a bad comp of official poster images of the characters. Although I have to give points to the compositor for keeping them to scale.

Disappointingly, they haven’t written a review for Cars 2 yet before the magazine went to print (perfectly understandable with Cars 2 late-June release date, and besides, they’ll publish it on the site and probably in the next issue). The preview blurb might annoy a couple of the Cars fanboys (and girls) though:

Oh well, at least they were consolatory about it.

They did, though, feature a review for rival Dreamwork Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 2. Read the next post for more… :)