First up, an updated image of my proposed cover art for Where, No One Knows. Still a bit rough around the edges, but I’m liking it so far. It’s a combo of digital art made in Photoshop and 3D models created in 3DS Max. I’m still figuring out what type-face I want to use and text placement, so any input that may be had is appreciated.
Rigel Rinkenbach, Roderick La Pierre, and Klaus Klaudhopper, crew of the Pernicious Platitude
Next up is a group shot of some of the other characters in the novel, featuring some of the art I’m working on for the novel’s trailer. I’m aiming for kind of an art nouveau look for the trailer. Not sure how I landed on it, other than I like it. Can’t really think of a better reason for anything than that. I’m probably completely off base on what art nouveau is (my quick definition: illustrations with really heavy outlines), but whatever. I’ve put too much work into the trailer thus far to change the look of it now. It’s fly or die time, at this point.
“Red wine with fish. Well, that should have told me something.”
TheBond: Sean Connery
The Villains: Rosa Klebb
The Henchmen: Red Grant, Kronsteen, and Morzeny.
The Bond Girls: Tatiana Romanova and Sylvia Trench
The Plan: Get revenge for the death of Dr. No by developing a ruse to lure 007 into a false mission.
The Gadget/Car: A briefcase that will deploy a gas bomb if opened improperly, a bug detector, and I guess a pager? Remember those? Who, besides doctors still uses them?
The Song: “From Russia With Love” by Matt Monro. (instead played during the film and over the credits)
Next up we have 1963’s From Russia With Love. Following Dr. No we are given a film that is slightly different than its predecessor and has a formula more like the rest of the films. This time we get the leader…
Here’s a quick little piece I whipped up using a tutorial on creating pixel art. You can find that tutorial HERE. It was quite fun, and not at all what I’m used to (which is why I cheated on the text by using a layer effect). There’s a minimalistic charm in pixel art that gets overlooked sometimes.
WOOL, the debut novel by Hugh Howey, has a pretty interesting back story. It was first self-published as a series of short novels by Howey, and later picked up by a publisher and collected into the WOOL Omnibus. It is the story of a world so ravaged by a poisonous atmosphere that humanity has been relegated to living in a structure known as the Silo, a bunker that reaches 140 stories underground. Their only knowledge of the outside world comes in the form of images shown on screens transmitted by cameras lining the outside of the silo. These cameras are constantly under threat of being covered by grime, and need to be cleaned often. Cleaning, however, is a death sentence, and a job delegated to those to break the Silo’s laws, the most heinous of which is expressing a desire to leave and go outside.
I haven’t seen The Great Gatsby (read it high school, understood what Fitzgerald was going for, didn’t particularly care) but this video might be enough to get me to pick up the Blu-Ray, for nothing more than to study their use of set extensions and matte paintings.
Prime Time television, and network television in particular, relies heavily on formula. Person of Interest has a simply one: every week, John Reese and Harold Finch get a number from a machine and have to figure out who they need to help and how. It’s a formula that could easily grow old, but after the better part of two seasons, Person of Interest still remains fresh.
Part of this comes from the fact that the show has built an intriguing mythology in the time it’s been on. In some ways, it’s the closest thing we have to a Batman T.V. show, complete with its own Rogues Gallery of recurring characters. The other part stems from the creative ways they continue to subvert the basic premise.
This week sees the most interesting variation on the concept so far, with Reese arriving too late to save his mark. By the time he is able to figure out what is wrong, the doctor he’s been sent to help is already doomed from polonium poisoning. He then teams up with the dying doctor to find his killer. The answer is less than earth shattering, but the plot is well told, if a little by the numbers. It resolves well, and in the mean time we get a couple of great scenes, one involving Warehouse 13’s Allison Scagliotti, who plays the doctor’s estranged daughter. It’s a short scene that plays out much like you’d expect it to, but it’s well acted and believable. The writers of the show had the decency to put doctor’s final face to face with his daughter near the beginning of the story, rather than subjecting the audience to a long, drawn out and unnecessarily sentimental good bye. Even the short phone call he makes near the end is played straight, with him never telling her that there’s something wrong. The other great scene involves the climax of the story, which I won’t spoil. I’ll just say that it’s low key and opens up a moral can of worms with viewed against the other half of the episode. Speaking of which…
Paralleling the doctor’s tale of personal comeuppance is the tale of Lionel Fusco, one of the detectives in Finch’s pocket. We’ve known from the beginning that he was, once upon a time, a dirty cop, and his arc on the series has largely been about his search for some kind of self reconciliation. This week, we are given his origin story, a cop who begins by covering up for a fellow detective and quickly spirals out of control as he starts offing drug dealers.
This story is told in flashbacks against the story in the present involving an IAD investigation into Fusco’s past. It comes down to his partner, Carter (the other detective working with Finch and Reese), to help him out, despite her better judgment. This also causes a rift between Carter and the rest of the team, and it was pretty fun to see her extort help from Finch before following up on his lead.
The episode closes with a huge game changer where the meta-plot is concerned. Finch realizes that their being too late to help the people the machine gives them is becoming a too common occurrence, and it is revealed that a virus has infected the machine. What this means and how they deal with it will be an interesting arc to see as this season draws to a close.
Overall, ‘In Extremis’ was a solid, if largely uneventful episode. I should point out that Reese is largely in the periphery of the Doctor’s story, stepping in occasionally to do something badass, and I think it’s a testament to the show’s quality and the writers’ confidence that they don’t feel the need to constantly have the main character of the show doing something. That they regularly pull it off only makes it better.
So, as I said a couple of days ago, I am a story-teller. Then I left a website with a bunch of pages and nothing on them. Then I got hits and started thinking…hmm. I better start telling some stories!
Today I bring you a small helping, one of the main anti-protagonists from a series of stories and, hopefully, videos, I plan to write, produce, and release here through YouTube.
I’m also considering ideas for a Vlog. Since I’m wrapping up a degree in Visual Effects and Motion Graphics, it would probably be conducive for this theoretical vlog to showcase an effect and go into detail the inspiration for the effect and how it was produced. Many of these effects will be obvious, but I think I will try to integrate some of them into the video, and leave the audience to figure out where the effect is, thus giving me some much-needed practice on my compositing skills while also giving the viewer something fun to do other than look at my ugly mug.
Without further ado, I give you Captain Roderick Beauchamp La Pierre, main anti-protagonist of “Blackwood Empire”!
“I’m teh King uth the Norf!”
Captain Roderick Beauchamp la Pierre: Former Admiral of the Crowndon aerial navy. Now a disgraced pirate. Lost almost his entire fleet of 42 ships in a desperate gamble that didn’t quite pan out during the Battle of the Divide. He was stripped of his command and exiled from the Northern Empire. He is now the captain of the Pernicious Platitude, a pirate vessel salvaged from the ship he went down on during the war.
Hello and welcome to R.B. Pierce Online! I’m a story teller, and as a story teller I just want to bring a little bit of entertainment to your life. Here, you’ll find a wide spectrum of content and styles, from chilling and exciting tales of sci-fi and horror, to more low key, literary endeavors to make you pause and think. I have stories written and filmed, long and short. Even a comic strip or two.
So feel free to poke around. I’m sure you’ll find something in here that will catch your eye!
Let’s start off with a short video that tells the pulpy story of a man who gets into deep water in…IAN PRINCE, PARANORMAL INVESTIGATOR!
First up, an updated image of my proposed cover art for Where, No One Knows. Still a bit rough around the edges, but I’m liking it so far. It’s a combo of digital art made in Photoshop and 3D models created in 3DS Max. I’m still figuring out what type-face I want to use and text placement, so any input that may be had is appreciated.
Blackwood Empire 
