Eye Candy – VFX Of The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug Featurette

Weta Digital, the masterminds behind the stunning virtual cinematography in The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, have posted a quick featurette about their work. It’s a neat little package that shows the process from soup to nuts on a small portion of the film. For those of you who were convinced the effects of the movie were the work of digital dark elves on a never ending quest to kill creeps and grind up through levels while leaving magical pixie dust pixels behind in their terrible wake, here is a peek behind the curtain. Also, please stop huffing your keyboard cleaner. It’s becoming a real problem.

Via Bleeding Cool.

Bruce Timm. Kevin Conroy. Batman. Animated. What Else Do You Want?

It is Batman’s 75th anniversary, which means that DC and Warner Bros. are gonna spend the next several months dumping out a bunch of promotional stuff that nobody really cares about – expect a collection of “essential” Batman stories that are all one-shots that nobody needs when affordable trade paperback editions of Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns are available in every place in the world where the printed word is sold.

But the one division that gets these kind of things right is Warner Bros. Animation. For Superman’s 75th anniversary last year, they put together a killer montage showing the character as he progressed through the decades. For Batman, however, they did no such thing. They did something better.

When it comes to Batman and animation, all any discerning geek really cares about is Batman: The Animated Series and the work of animator / producer Bruce Timm. That cartoon kept Batman as The Dark Knight even as directors who will remain unnamed and unloved were facing Batman off with a punny Schwarzenegger with nothing but hard plastic molded nipples.

So it was kinda heartbreaking when word came out last year that Timm was leaving his supervisory position at Warner Bros. Animation… but he is back to supervise Batman’s animation one last time with a new short.

This one feature’s Timm’s style from the cartoon, only with a distinct feel and look of Batman from the 1930s, including short gloves, big ears, prop planes, and machine guns… and you can check out out after the jump

Getting Housed: San Diego Comic-Con Hotel Lottery Finished

Registration for hotels with the reduced rate negotiated by San Diego Comic-Con for the 2014 convention opened at noon Eastern Time today. It is now closed, after being inundated with requests from God knows how many thousands of people looking to sleep someplace more comfortable than a park bench across from the Hall of Justice, emblazoned with an advertisement for a bail bonds service you will soon desperately need.

And just like that, the long and arduous process to arrange a trip to SDCC 2014, which started in February with pre-registration, continued for some into standard registration in March, moved into procuring transportation to San Diego, and climaxed with today’s registration, is over.

Kinda. Because now the 36 to 48 hour wait to see if today’s hotel registration actually led to, you know, getting a hotel room.

Does Whatever A Spider Can, Possibly Including Horrifying People: Amazing Spider-Man 2 Video Game Trailer Released

So The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the next major superhero flick to come out after last week’s awesome Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but unlike that movie, Spidey is gonna be getting a video game adaptation to go with the new movie.

This, depending on your point of view, is either good, or terrible news.

If you are an optimist, it is good news. Because Activision’s Spider-Man 2, released in 2004, was, at the time, arguably not only the best movie adaptation video game since Tron, but the best superhero video game released until Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009. Spider-Man 2 was the first superhero video game to not only allow a true open world for Spider-Man to explore, but it was the first to force the player to web-sling from actual buildings (Spider-Man on the Dreamcast was the first Spider-Man game in 3D with reasonable web-slinging, but it allowed the player to swing about 3/4s of a mile above Central Park, forcing the player to assume he was webbing off of helicopters, or perhaps The Watcher’s gonads). It had a reasonable and playable main storyline to go with the more realistic web-slinging mechanic, and it was a joy to play.

If you are a pessimist, you will remember that Spider-Man 2 for the original XBox was followed by Spider-Man 3 for the XBox 360, which I returned to Gamespot in disgust after spending nearly two full calendar days trying to get past Sandman in the subway level (I apparently did better than some people). And, while Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was nominally better, it lost its attraction for me about halfway through, when I realized I was web-slinging through what amounted to the zombie apocalypse. I am okay with the zombie apocalypse, but I would really prefer a shotgun to a web shooter. Or to almost anything else.

But with less than a month to go before The Amazing Spider-Man 2 video game is released, publisher Activision and Beenox have released a trailer for the game, which you can check out after the jump, along with my impressions.

Fighting Until The Big Sleep: SDCC 2104 Hotel Reservations This Tuesday

San Diego Comic-Con has a weird system of guaranteeing admittance, if you think about it.

First it puts you through up to two different nervewracking and emotionally draining online sales just to obtain passes to be able to walk in the door. If you get those passes, then you need to obtain yourself transportation from wherever you’re at to San Diego, which really requires you to strike as soon as you know you have said passes. For example, if you’re heading to San Diego from Boston as we are, you have the choice of pre-booking one of exactly two non-stop flights ASAP while they’re not sold out, or you can try your luck at, say, Travelocity, to battle with strangers for a cut-rate seat with layovers in three different cities, one of which will be Baltimore, where, if you leave the airport, you will be killed. Which you will be okay with, because once you see that “pan pizza” in the gate area, you would rather risk violent death than eat it.

None of this sounds weird at face value. The weird part, however, is that you need to spend all that time and money just to get to Comic-Con, all without a place to, you know, sleep. Because the last thing that SDCC provides is hotel room sales, meaning that you could dump literally $1,500 to attend Comic-Con, all to arrive in San Diego and spend your first hours battling the local homeless for one of the park benches outside the train station.

We won’t be fighting for pine slats close to the Amtrak ticket booth, because we booked an emergency backup room about 10 days after we arrived home from last year’s SDCC. But we will be fighting with the rest of you on Tuesday, because that’s when the convention puts its reduced rate hotel rooms on sale.

Kinda. In the sense that you (and we) can battle for a certain spot on the waiting list for rooms to be sold once the sorting algorithm decides if you can have one or not.

Hugh Jackman Sings!…About Wolverine

I’d like to make a couple things clear before I go any further in this post:

• Hugh Jackman was invited on BBC 1 Radio’s Matt Edmondson Show to plug X-Men: Days Of Future Past.
• Hugh Jackman was handed a set of lyrics to a parody of Les Miserables power ballad “Who Am I?”, which Jackman sang when he took a turn as Jean Valjean in the movie version, scripted as though sung by Wolverine.
• Hugh Jackman gets through the experience nicely and is a very good sport about the whole thing.

Watch.

That being said, Parker The Kitten, Official Office Mascot for Crisis On Infinite Midlives, reacted poorly to this video. Like, nosed my laptop closed, climbed on top of it (on my lap), and then scratched at the cover like he was trying to cover his own deuce in the cat box. To be fair, he also has that reaction to videos of howling puppies, Animal Planet footage of hyenas in the wild, and Bruce Springsteen. I don’t pretend to understand it, but, he’s got enough other adorable things going on that I’m willing to let it slide. Rob hid upstairs the entire time I screened Les Miz here at the home office, shrieking “Who am I? I not fucking drunk enough for this; that’s who I am! Why is Wolverine yelling at me? Where are my pants? Hey, do you smelling burning toast?” But, that’s just Monday around here. Your mileage may vary.

Via ComicBookMovie.com.

Attention, True Believers And Lovers Of Free Merch – Stan Lee Promotes Free Comic Book Day!

Free Comic Book Day is officially the first Saturday of May. This year, in an effort to promote the day, the organizers of the event have tapped the legendary Stan Lee to get the word out. Check it out below!

And he’s not the only one helping with the promotion. Brian Michael Bendis also has a promotional video. Last year, the event attracted the assistance of Hugh Jackman, Steven T. Seagle, and Joe Kelly, so perhaps we can expect to see other videos as we count down to the day. But even, if we don’t, damn – they got Stan The Man this year! How do you top that?

So, head on over to your local comic book store on May 3, 2014 and check out what they have to offer. Not sure where your LCS is? Log on to FreeComicBookDay.com to search for stores near you. Perhaps you too can begin to develop the kind of relationship that Rob has now with our store, where they know him by name and continue to ask him to stop asking the other patrons if they’d like to check out what’s else is free in his pants. And it all begins with free merch! Yay!

Superman Saves Children And Drunks

Look, I’m not gonna blow sunshine up your ass: it’s St. Patrick’s Day, we live in Boston, and I am Irish. I have my second pint of Guinness sitting in front of me, and we are foregoing the traditional corned beef and cabbage gut bomb in favor of a light salmon supper. These circumstances, when combined, mean that my command of the written English language has about 45 minutes to live.

So let’s all give thanks that the good folks at CorridorDigital have access to a Superman suit, some actors, a green screen, and a jacked-up camera drone. Because they have combined those circumstances to create a three-minute video of what it might look like if Superman strapped a Go-Pro camera to his head and flew around saving people and stomping bad guys.

It’s actually a really cool first-person view of what it might be like to be Superman flying around the landscape, and I am going to post it now. Because if I wait about an hour to post and view it, it is good enough that I will become motion sick, and dark ale will erupt from places that it should not. At least not before closing time. And you can check it out after the jump.

It’s All Over Bar The Shouting: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Registration Over; Sold Out

So public registration for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con occurred today, and luckily, we did not need to be a part of it. As attendees last year, we were eligible for the pre-registration that took place in early February, and were fortunate enough to be able to score tickets for the full convention in fairly short order.

So today I was able to watch the madness, desperation, excessive glee and futile cursing happen by way of watching the #SDCC hashtag feed on Twitter, and it looked like a very similar experience to the one we went through for the pre-registration, albeit this time, the entire free fucking world could be involved. I saw a healthy number of tweets from people in Australia and New Zealand complaining that they needed to be up at 4 a.m. local time… and yet no complaints that they needed to Raid away swarms of hairy poisonous spiders to get to their computers to try to register. You will see me dead before you see me in Australia wearing less than a beekeeper’s suit and a Ghostbuster’s proton pack is what I’m saying, but that’s not the point right now.

The point is that we saw the normal complaints that one sees on Twitter during SDCC registration:

• The Web site told me not to refresh, but I did, and now I’m at the end of the line! SDCC sucks!
• The Web site told me not to refresh and I didn’t, but I think if I did, I’d be at the front of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I tried to register from an iPad at Starbucks and my Internet quit! SDCC sucks!
• I forgot about registration until 9:02 Pacific Time and when I logged in I was at the back of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I’ve never tried to register for Comic-Con before, have made no plans on how to succeed at this task, and can’t understand why I can’t just do this in ten seconds even though there are thousands and thousands of other people trying to buy the same ticket as me! I should receive preferential treatment! SDCC sucks!

The fact of the matter is that attending SDCC is, and has been since at least 2009, serious fucking business. I have written before that my co-Editor Amanda and I book backup hotel rooms in August of the year preceding SDCC. When we need to register, we do it from two separate locations, both with independent power supplies and wired Internet connections, and maintain constant communication to increase our odds of success. And we have made the pact that, so long as we can obtain at least Thursday and Sunday passes, we will attend SDCC, if only to make us eligible for whatever pre-registration is available the following year, so we get two bites at the registration apple. And I have said before that this might sound obsessive, but there are two types of people in this world: people who scoff at making paranoid, obsessive and redundant plans regarding SDCC registration, housing and transportation, and people who actually attend Comic-Con.

Zachary Levi Wants You To Pay Him $5 – An Alternative For When You, Inevitably, Can’t Get Into Comic-Con

Well, folks. It’s that magical time of year again. Open registration for tickets to the 2014 San Diego International Comic-Con will be this Saturday. The waiting room opens at 7am Pacific Time; that’s 10am for those of you on the non-earthquake and wildfire prone coast. You can check out their official blog for more detail. As with the preregistration sale, the EPIC Web site will begin organizing those waiting into random groups for ticket sales, so, in theory you can log in at 7am or 8:59am and supposedly have the same shot at getting through to tickets. We look forward to reading your digital tales of woe beginning around 10am PT, if last time was any kind of guide, on Twitter.

Meanwhile, there continue to be tons of free events taking place that week to attend as a supplement…or to soothe your heartbreak when you don’t get SDCC tickets. One of these is Nerd HQ, an event that will be taking place at Petco Park at the same time as the convention. Nerd HQ is produced by Nerd Machine, which is run by Zachary Levi. Here, let him tell you about it:

You can find more details about it over on his Indiegogo page. But, essentially, contribute $5 or $1000 and get your name on the Nerd HQ Wall Of Honor. All things are equal in the great Nerd Machine and lead to a great fund raising opportunity for Operation Smile.