Tim Simmons

Blog Move-- of sorts.

2010-07-13T12:58:00.001-07:00

Just wanted to throw out a quick FYI: I'm rarely (re: ever) here--
My new project, Spy6teen, an ongoing webcomic can be found here:
www.spy6teen.com

Stop on by, we'd love to hear what you think!!

2009's BEST Poster of the Year Award!

2009-12-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

I recently handed out my award for Worst Film Poster of 2009, and despite the snark and razziness, don't be mistaken, I do love film posters-- So, yes: I hit ya because I love ya.
Early in my Hollywood career, I worked on the studio production side of Key Art-- so I know the amount of time, effort and weekends that go into them.

It goes without saying it isn't really fair to highlight the worst of the year without showcasing the best...and with that, I give you:

2009's Best Film Poster of the Year:

No question about it, this was the poster of the year. Film of the year? No. Poster? Yes.

The image tells you everything you need to know walking into the movie: The world has gone to shit. There are Terminators. Conceptually, it even plays Google Maps off Skynet-- Pretty ingenious in all honesty.

The big thing I was taught while working in the biz (and something that is constantly in my head for comic book cover design) is readability. You want the person standing 20 feet away to be able to see your image and visually process it-- this poster succeeds on that level, but the real fun is getting up close to it: When your inches away, you'll pick out the details of buildings and even cars on those freeways.

A big thumbs up to the gang at Art Machine for a technically stunning and jaw dropping image. Your No-Prize is in the mail!

HONORABLE MENTIONS

There was some really great Keyart this year and I feel bad if I didn't call attention to a few of them:

Coraline did some really cool Edward Gorey-esque stuff with the alphabet:

The ENTIRE District 9 campaign was flawless:

I know you're going to think I'm kidding, but Orphan was just so surreal you had to look at it:

Star Trek, which had the challenge of reinventing without alienating, straddled the line perfectly with the sleek "Enterprise in motion" posters:

And finally, Where The Wild Things Are-- which, what can I say, just worked for me:

Big hand and a kick ass year! Seeya in '10!

2009's WORST POSTER OF THE YEAR AWARD!

2009-12-15T17:08:00.000-08:00

Close call this year, but in the final moments of 2009, a dark horse snuck in to claim the title of WORST FILM POSTER OF THE YEAR!

Let's have a look, shall we?

RUNNER UP:

Wow. This is bad.

I can't find a record of the creative house that did this, and that's probably intentional. I mean, was it "intern day" when they delivered?

First off, there's the skewed composition of, who I presume to be, Darren. Hey, I'm all for pushing the Rule of Thirds too, but this is just wrong.

My favorite part of this poster is the dude standing there on the right. Could you look a little less excited to be on a movie poster? Oh, you could? Perfect, we'll use that shot!

Then there's the guy (I think it's a guy) on the far left hand side of the poster...y'know, the silhouette just standing there. I think he's meant to be threatening-- but, it's sort of hard to feel frightened of someone STANDING ON THE HORIZON!!
"I'm coming to get you!.........I'm still on my way!.............Should be there shortly!"

Awful, just awful...

So, that would have been my pick for Worst poster of the year...oh, but look what came along, just in time...

WORST POSTER OF THE YEAR:

After seeing the Vampire's Assistant eyesore, you might think I'm being a little too hard on Extraordinary Measures-- I mean, it's clear this is a bad poster: Harrison's face has been soft-brushed to restore him to Witness-era Ford...And could we find a less flattering angle on Brendan "Cheesesteak" Fraser? I mean, I'll admit, I've gained a few pounds over the years, but I still have a jawline.

And that's not a dig at Brendan, either. It's just a bad picture and the poster designer should have known better.

Now, naturally, I might be totally wrong about this poster. But therein is what kicks it over to top to win this award. See: I know nothing about this movie.
Say what you will about the Vampire's Assistant, but at least I have some idea of what the movie is about. With Extraordinary Measures, I know the following:

1) Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford are in it.
2) It is "Inspired by a True Story."
3) It involves miracles of some kind happening.

Taking what I have observed and applying it to this fact pattern: I believe this movie is about Harrison Ford inspiring Brendan Fraser to get a jawline transplant.

Congrats on the award, gang!

By the way- a quick honorable mention to the Jennifer's Body gang-- who earlier released their "total rip off of True Blood" teaser poster. Seriously? Did you guys really think no one was going to notice?

Heavy Rain: 2010's Uncharted 2?

2009-12-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

Man, was it really 2006 when we first caught a glance of Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain?

Granted, that little piece was just the tech demo, but like a lot of you out there, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor after seeing it. Kind of amazing to think that a tech demo from just under four years ago would look as dated as it does, but in that time it's clear that Quantic Dream has been busy ramping up their engine, as you can witness in this '09 trailer:

There's no question that it looks stunning, but is it going to be effective as a game?

I called Uncharted 2 as my 2009 "Game of the Year", noting it was "the best movie I ever played" (write-up coming soon.) Is Heavy Rain going to top that experience?

G4 has posted up their "hands on" review of the first eleven "scenes" of Heavy Rain, which you can read here. Note: "Scenes," not "Levels." Begging the question: Will there be director's slateboards at respawn points?

Between games like Heavy Rain and the long delayed Alan Wake, interactive narrative is taking a pretty bold step forward . I'm not going to say anything sweeping/bold/ignorant like: "This is going to change the way you play games," but it does feel like a true hybrid of the cinematic experience and gaming is looming on the horizon.

So is Heavy Rain going to be a landmark interactive experience or a failed experiment in gaming narrative?
I'm hoping for the former and can't wait to try it out next year.

LA Comics Scene: Golden Apple Turns 30!

2009-12-13T00:42:00.000-08:00

Legendary Los Angeles Comic Shop, Golden Apple turned 30 years old today and held a birthday bash at the store. The event was co-hosted by CBR and featured a showcase of LA publishers, including Archaia, Aspen, Boom, Radical, and Top Cow. A great party that even a rare case of torrential Southern California rain couldn't keep down.

My morning started fairly lazy and unproductive. As those who live in LA can attest: nothing kills weekend productivity like a rainy day. The whole town shuts down and things become blissfully silent.
I started mustering up the inertia to head over to Apple (located, mind you, less than a mile from my house-- but, eff you, I told you I was being lazy) when my buddy "Supreme Convoy" Alex Chung showed up at my front door. Apparently, at some point the previous night, I responded to an email chain that told him I'd head over around one.

Quick apologizes to Alex, I set him up in the office to hang with the dogs and review new pages for my upcoming comic, while I dashed upstairs for a quick shower/change.

We hit Golden Apple around 2pm, just as the rain really started coming down.

I do love the Apple. There are great comic shops all over LA (at some point, I'll be doing an LA comic shop "tour",) but what can I say, Golden Apple was my "first" LA shop and you always love your first.

In the door, the first person I spot is Jim Krueger. We swing over and say our Hellos. Jim talks a bit about a screenplay that he's currently working on, but doesn't reveal much about it. By this point he's eyeing some stuff in the back-issue bin, so I leave him to do his hunting.

We roll out back for a bit and chat up Top Cow Editorial Assistant Bryan Rountree. Good guy, I always see him around but we've never gotten the chance to talk. I invite him out to the Comic Book Sunday gangup, so it shouldn't be long before we're hanging with beers in hand.
Swinging back in, Alex points out "Tumor/Elk's Run" writer, Josh Fialkov chatting up Letterer Extraordinaire Troy Peteri. So we stroll up and hang for a bit.

Josh shows me Tumor on his Kindle, which looks pretty cool...and once again, if you haven't read Tumor, what the hell is wrong with you? I'm certainly calling it one of the best books of the year, and you can read the whole damn thing for free here. GO!
Done?
See, awesome, right?

Troy and I catch up on the freelancing life. It's always cool talking to Troy, as he'll point out these little lettering things that I'm not even aware of on a conscious level. If you ever want to know "tricks of the trade", talk to Troy-- he knows 'em all. And, check out some of his masterwork lettering in Archaia's Days Missing #1.

Hung for awhile with "Berserker" writer Rick Loverd, really charming and nice guy. I pitched him on The Comic Book Script Archive, so hopefully we'll soon be seeing a Berserker script up there. Amazingly, Berserker #0 was the first comic script he'd ever written, so maybe we can nab that for you fledgling comic writers to study.
Rick gave me the backstory on the book: how it was a film treatment to start, then picked up by Milo Ventimiglia and eventually the Top Cow comic came to be. He also mentioned that his scripts are (amazingly) more violent than what's laid to page-- Can't wait to check it out!

Quick break and I swing over Steve Niles and David Wohl, EIC at Radical Comics. I've been wanting to chat with David for awhile, as way back in my "other life" as a DVD Content producer, I worked on the bonus features for the Witchblade DVD- but sadly ran into some extenuating circumstances the day we shot the interview with David and Michael Turner.
So, it was cool to finally meet David. He asked what I've been working on lately and I told him that I'm perusing comics full time at this point, to which he was kind enough to give me his card with an offer to look at my stuff for Radical. Super nice of him.

Niles moved off and was hanging by the comic racks, so I swung over to chat him up a bit. Another one of the "great nice guys", Niles reminded me to hit him up for the remaining 30 Days of Night scripts for the Archive. I asked about Dark Days, and he told me that they wrapped shooting a few days ago and so the editoral process will begin pretty soon. Also, he's headed over to Paramount to check out a new draft of the Cal McDonald screenplay in the next few days. Fingers crossed-- I friggin' love me some Criminal Macabre.

Around that time, my buddy Tom Pinchuk started signing over at the Archaia area for his book Hybrid Bastards. By the way, have you seen Tom's insane video? Well, it gets better: There's a sequel on the way and from what I hear, it's gonna blow the roof off the first one.
Hybrid Bastards is an crazy book, and I mean that in a very good way. Seriously, it'll break your brain just a little bit.
Yammered with Tom for a bit, finally met Mel Caylo, Archaia's Marketing Director, and chatted up with Archaia's DOD, Stephen Christy for a bit-- FYI, Stephen promises Phil Hester's Days Missing issue #5 for the Archive as well.

Stephen, being an awesome man of action who smells like french vanilla in a very manly way, hooked up Alex and I with a few books: Days Missing #3 and The Devil's Handshake. Really looking forward to reading them--

Finally got in line for my "main event"--
Longtime fans of my work (hi mom!) know that I grew up in Hawaii and attended the same high school as Whilce Portacio. Yup, me and Whilce had the same art teacher-- although, obviously, Whilce did better in that class than I did.

Flashforward to my Zuda comic Spy6teen where I've teamed up with a Hilo artist named DJ Keawekane. Both of us are talking about our mutual influences, and obviously Whilce is named-- I'm telling you, around Hawaii: Whilce is hometown pride.

Cut to today, and I roll up to Whilce with nothing to sign, but I think it might be cool to get a shot of one of DJ's pages:

Just a quick printout from a WIP doc for an upcoming super-secret project. Whilce and I chat about Radford High and the Hawaii comic scene for a bit-- he offers us to look over the artwork and help out in any way that he can-- because, he's a superhero nice guy.

I gotta admit, for DJ and I, this is one of those surreal moments: I mean, Whilce is an artist that we grew up reading-- and here he is holding something that we created. I mean, Fo' reals?
(fyi: that's Hawaii talk)

After that, we pretty much wrap up, hang for a little bit longer with Pinchuk and the Archaia crew as everyone heads out. We're offered to hang around for the after-party, but both Alex and I are beat, so we ditch out and hit McDonalds on the way home.
Overall, a great day, hanging with friends and fellow nerds! Happy Birthday Golden Apple!!

Winter Wonderland

2009-12-08T18:49:00.000-08:00

That's the scene less than 30 miles from downtown LA.
It's currently 70.1 degrees in my office-- and I'm cold.

Two weeks and one day from now I will be on the East Coast and crying like a little girl. It will be so cold that my tear ducts will freeze and I will resort to snotting my sorrow.

Fuck you, winter. I hate you.

Carousel

2009-12-08T15:14:00.000-08:00

Watch:

Took a bit of doing to figure out how they accomplished this, turns out it was simpler than I thought it was.

Obviously they're working with a motion controlled camera system, which is a trick Michel Gondry is quite fond of. The basic pricipal of a motion control system is that your camera runs along a track (think a roller coaster) that is computer controlled-- thus, you get the exact same camera movement every. single. time.

When you think about the 'old' days, you begin to see how remarkable an advancement motion control is.

Using Motion Control you can then import all your footage and "line it up" in fancy computer post software, the result of which is a bunch of takes where the background is exactly the same. Think: Layers in Photoshop.

I'd presumed that they'd composted in the various clowns and cops- possibly having upwards of a hundred or more "layers"-- turns out, as is often the case in these complex shots, the truth was a lot simpler than I'd imagined:
The actors just stood realllllly still.

Sure, there's a little more to it, there were some wire rigs to keep mid-flight actors in place and some digital broken glass/bullets, but the bulk of the work was a practical effect.

Still, what really makes this little piece sing is the little "ah-ha!" moment at the end, that little twist that turns a single "frame" into a story--that's narrative element which I applaud.

Hanging the hat here

2009-12-01T12:50:00.001-08:00

Setting up camp on Blogger. I played around with Tumblr, but there seems to be more of a community on this particular platform.

The lack of comments on the Tumblr side of things kind of killed me a bit on the inside-- not that I expect rousing 300 comment discussions, but it's nice to get a comment here and there.

Tumblr allowed for Twitter/Social Networking integration, but since I have my broadcast set to ping all over to place, I was actually spending time deleting redundant postings.

So, here we are. Same set up as before:

I’m not 100% sure what the focus of this particular blog is going to be— but, if my former blogs are any indication, it’ll be akin to a big grab-bag of random shit.

Professionally, there are some projects coming up that I’ll likely pimp— a few pitches floating out there that may or may not come to fruition…I’ll inform on those as they do or don’t.

Personally, there’s a ton of stuff coming up in the next year, including a wedding (namely, mine)— so, I’ll probably be posting up stuff about that. No emo-whiny bullshit though, I promise you that.

I’ll probably bring back “A load of crap”, which was a small series of micro-review shoutouts that I did back in the day—

And finally I promise you that there will be no quiz results on this page. I am anti-quiz result. You do not care that I am 85% likely to end up a vampire zombie that lives in Toronto and I know a shitload of Star Wars trivia.

So, there’s the ground rules…

So, we'll see.

Incidently, Blogger is apparently set up through Google, therefore, Google has managed to claim just a tad more of my internet soul.
...I'm a total google slut.

I might figure out something to do with the Tumblr later, but for now, it's dead.