Thenessgroup

I was only able to attend one out of the six days of Horror-On-Sea this year so I made the most of it, taking in 6 feature films and several well-chosen short films. I picked up some... unusual DVDs on the second hand tables, so more on that story later when I've watched them. I ended the day in the casino beneath the venue for a drink and a chat with some of the festival organizers and filmmakers - as I found last year, this is a friendly, down to earth festival where the Underworld can meet the elite. After a brief flutter I left the casino up by £4 and a free pen, so can't complain about that either. I have added screening one of my films at Horror-On-Sea to my bucket list. In order to achieve this item I may need to actually make some films. Themes for this year, at least for the day I attended, included vampires, mediums, cats, hipsters, curses, parallel worlds, international film, great memorable characters, and bonkers. Bonkers is the new jump scares. Overall I was bowle...

Update - dashboard with some optional extras [produced in Blender 2.76]

Modelling a dashboard in Blender: Also starting to consider render style for this project: (produced in Blender 2.76)

Score: 3 out of 5 stars All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars The second Fantastic Beasts movies takes place in 1927. An Obscurius transforming-rage-monster (it's no coincidence, by the way, that Obscurius rhymes with Mr. Furious) from the first movie is missing presumed alive. It seems everybody wants a piece of him - the Ministry of Magic, the American and French Ministries, Albus Dumbledore, and the naughty wizard Grindelwald, who has inconveniently escaped his US captors. Everybody, that is, except Newt Scamander who refuses to take sides as he is perfectly happy overworking his devoted assistant Bunty and playing with his seaweed-dragon. I know, right? Hufflepuffs... In order to prevent this being a very short trilogy, the Fates, in the form of US wizard Queenie and No-Maj Jacob Kowalski, conspire to send Newt and his family of baby Nifflers after the Obscurius. The trail leads to Paris, where Grindelwald is quite possibly up to some...

Two creative music videos for you to enjoy. Both have been added to The Sci-Fi Gene Music Video Choice playlist . I'm always pleasantly surprised by just how geeky Ariana Grande is. I did not expect the video for One Last Time to be a Cloverfield-style found footage survival movie set during a meteorite strike - but I am grateful that it is. Thank you Ariana. Nerina Pallot's classic anti-war anthem from 2009 demands a war movie for its' video - and gets one. I would argue this is the best war movie ever made, its' gritty realism really bringing home the grim horror that is a trip to the supermarket. I wouldn't necessarily win the argument, but winning isn't everything, is it? At least I participated.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars A small Bavarian mining village is minding its' own business when suddenly a predator city appears on the horizon. The town packs up its' houses, shops and streets and makes a dash for it but it's too small to outrun the caterpillar tracks of London, and its' fate is sealed. However as the village is pillaged and torn apart to feed the furnaces of London, amongst the villagers being "welcomed" into London's immigration system, there is a certain young lady with a desperate agenda. Mortal Engines is a Peter Jackson-directed movie based on the Philip Reeve novel for children, young adults and old adults, set in a post-apocalyptic Earth a thousand years into the future, where cities have been uprooted and mobilized on wheels, legs or tracks, and where "municipal Darwinism" rules - the bigger cities prey on the smaller ones, and it seems London h...

As regular visitors to the Sci-Fi Gene blog will know, as a rule I have tended to post movie reviews without a score. This has always been a deliberate decision. I have always felt that giving a movie a score diminishes the review, and indeed the movie, the cinema industry, the general public, Life, The Universe and Everything and by logical extension the reviewer. Can we even assign a meaningful number to a movie? Or a restaurant, a car, a hotel stay, the amount of goals scored by each team in a football game, or the attractiveness of a random stranger? Is this not just the human fashion of attempting to impose order where there is none? Is it meaningful to compare two numbers, for example (and this is plucked purely at random from the many, many possible examples I could have chosen) the speed of a car and the applicable speed limit for that particular stretch of the A127? Do numbers such as the number 5 even mean anything? How do I know that the number I know as 7 doesn't appear...