He’s one of Star Trek’s greatest contributors to the look of science fiction aliens in 21st century entertainment. He’s creature designer Neville Page. Showcasing his entire Star Trek career so far, a new visual retrospective is coming your way to celebrate the creativity of Neville Page’s designs. Star Trek: The Art of Neville Page is now available for pre-order here at Amazon. In this deluxe, full-color hardcover account, readers will examine the visionary creature designs from two decades for some of Star Trek’s most innovative aliens. We discussed previously at borg some of Page’s greatest works in our review of The Art of Star Trek: The Kelvin Timeline here and more can be found in The Art of Star Trek here. The new book comes from writer Joe Nazzaro, who interviewed Page extensively for his book Star Trek Beyond: The Makeup Artistry of Joel Harlow, reviewed here.
Tag Archive: art design
Review by C.J. Bunce
If you’ve read his book James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction (reviewed here) or watched his accompanying series, you can tell that James Cameron is first and foremost an artist. With an artist’s eye he has created some of the biggest science fiction movies ever made, from The Terminator to Aliens to The Abyss and Avatar. For the first time Cameron is revealing the contents of his sketchbooks and personal art archives and discussing his creative process and inspiration. Insight Editions’ giant chronicle Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron, arrives in bookstores next week and available for pre-order here. Fans will find a collection of rare and never-before-published art that reveals how this award-winning director has translated his ideas to film, often employing advanced film-making technologies to realize his unique vision. But as readers will find, it all begins with pen, pencil, and paint.
WELCOME TO EARTH-4
A Column by J. Torrey McClain
Around this time last year, my good friend Steve suggested that we check out A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) at the Silent Movie Theater here in Los Angeles and I had no clue what it was. I briefly checked the description, saw a positive Metacritic score and thought to myself, “Why the heck not?” I ended up seeing a fantastic slow-burning film that made the vampire genre fresh. I also saw one of the best images to portray a character in a long time.
Early in the film, the co-protagonist girl vampire decides to go home with a drug dealer who had previously threatened the other protagonist as well as a local streetwalker. As he bursts into his lair, he walks by a large fish tank and gives it a smack. Seconds later he’s doing lines of cocaine on a glass table, a mounted deer head and a mounted antelope head on the wall behind him, before turning on the annoying techno. He sits on a couch draped with a blanket of what looks like tigers that would jump out under black light. In the corner there is a hookah. As the girl vampire explores the rest of the pad, she finds a set of drums just below a large marijuana leaf poster. I laughed to myself as I immediately realized I had in those brief seconds already characterized this asshole in my mind with no redeeming qualities. Sure, the actions earlier helped, but that apartment spoke to me clearly and it screamed into my brain “HE IS A DOUCHEBRO.”
Those items and that music might not mean the same thing to every person. Maybe to others they see a seedy drug-dealing criminal. Some may see a guy that is definitely more current in his musical taste than I (as Clem Snide and The Replacements play as I write.) Others may see an advocate for marijuana besides business reasons that has been stigmatized due to its frequent use by hippies and non-WASPs. (I put myself in the advocate camp, by the way, as the criminalization and the imprisonment of many people in jail due to marijuana related offenses seems to be one of the many effects of the inherent racism in our justice system. But, that’s for another discussion at another time by others much more qualified than I. Check out Deray McKesson on Twitter to start your journey on that front or some of the great essays in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the soon-to-be author of the Marvel comic Black Panther). I just know that for my viewpoint, the more the scene unfolded, the more it verified my judgment.
Such is the magic of great set design. As a background actor, I get to see lots of set design up close. Items might not show up distinctly on camera, but choices get made in the costume, prop and set departments that impact the feel of a scene. The care that the professionals take in these aspects of filmed entertainment mesmerizes me more than most things.