Today I wrote my End Term Exam in ERP in the morning (9 AM - 11 AM).  And then, I had my usual black coffee...  After lunch, I spent a lot of time in the Systems Lab.  Firstly, I downloaded (and watched, without sound) the latest video footage released of Sin City.  I found it absolutely amazing.  Not just because it was in glorious 640x480 resolution and had great clarity (it was a 50 MB .MP4 file), but because of the stunning images within.

Sin City is an upcoming project of Robert Rodriguez (director of Desperado, Spy Kids, etc.), who is adapting the dark and violent comic series by Frank Miller.  Miller is co-directing the movie, and I read that Quentin Tarantino is also directing a part of it.  It has a big-name cast, including Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Jessica Alba, Elijah Wood, Michael Clarke Duncan, etc.  The movie also represents a new trend in filmmaking, called a digital backlot — here the actors are filmed entirely against a blue/green screen, and then all backgrounds are inserted in digitally during post-production.

I have not read any of the Sin City graphic novels, I have only had the fortune of seeing scarce few panels from them.  Anyway the video shows the initial footage that Rodriguez shot (featuring Josh Hartnett) to get Miller's approval on the project, and then shows more scenes from the film and compares them to panels from Miller's books.  The visual style of both had me watching in awe, the film is in stark black and white, and Miller's artwork has been adapted practically to perfection (right down to the lighting of each scene)!  Sin City is definitely a movie to look forward to.

And this is the page I got the video from.  I got to this page thanks to Joblo.com.  On a related note, writer/director Kerry Conran's movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is also one made using the digital backlot technique, and it releases in the US on the 17th of this month.  And finally, one more piece of movie news, it seems the third Resident Evil movie is going to be called Resident Evil: Afterlife, which I think is a very cool title!  I think Paul Anderson will be writing this one as well.

Now for some Doom news: I should have mentioned this in the last post — I played some of Rex Claussen's recently released Phobos Revisited, which is a 9-level set for classic Doom.  This is one levelset I had been looking forward to, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it on The /newstuff Chronicles this week.  I played four levels so far and I am really liking it.  It is a faithful remake of the original Doom's "Knee-Deep in the Dead" episode, and it is done very well (of course, that I always expected, since Rex is a very professional mapper).  I really wish I had my computer back (faulty motherboard, not yet fixed), so that I can play all the Doom maps I downloaded in the past few weeks!

I also downloaded several comic-book fonts today, most of them from Blambot.  Now I also edited my Fight Club Coffee Scene drawing (which I mentioned in an earlier post) — I removed the handwritten text and typed in the same thing using one of the comic fonts.  While I was at it, I also removed the lines on the drawing (you see, it was drawn on notebook paper).  The final result is pretty cool!  Now what I want to do is to use these fonts to produce a nicer version of my Dark Tales one-page comics.

EDIT (00:29): In the evening I also downloaded the trailer for Seed of Chucky from here.  I have not watched the trailer yet.