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I’ve loved “Transformers” as far back as I can remember. At least since 1986, because I went to see the animated movie for my 8th birthday.

It was… well, “traumatic” would be too strong a word, but I was up out of my seat within the first 15 minutes. As soon as Autobots started killed (like, REALLY, smoking ruin killed), all bets were off. Optimus Prime gets a classic theme song and heroic dialoge before he’s dead too. There’s actually a voiceover at the end of the UK versions promising the return of Optimus Prime.

Image comics just published an omnibus edition of the Marvel UK comics (and annuals) from around the same time, all 1,000+ pages of it. I’ve only leafed through it so far, but there are panels that are still burned into my memory. Will be good to actually have story context for them.

I’m not a huge fan of the live-action movies. The first is pretty good, but “Revenge of the Fallen” is a slog. I only watched “Dark of the Moon” recently, which turned out to be pretty good. If nothing else Michael Bay knows actions scenes and how to make CGI shots stand up.

The real surprise was “Transformers One”, the animated prequel. The Optimus and Megatron origin story was handled really well.

I picked up a couple of figures to build based on the “Bumblebee” movie (which I still need to actually watch). They were an absolute faff to put together, especially compared to the Gundam figures I’ve done so far. Also did a quick paint-and-spray job on them. Will likely give them to my nieces. One of them like robots and they’ll have to have one each like with Gundam. As long as I can keep finding pink robots, it’s all good.

The title of this movie was a random joke on a Hammor horror podcast I listen to. Just couldn’t let it go. I spent the first 90 minutes of a Saturday morning doing this instead…

I’ve been using DaVinci Resolve to make black-and-white versions of movies for a while now. It span out of my photography, trying to see more in that way for composition and lighting. I started with “The Shadow” (1994) and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (2004), partially because they were also more period-appropriate that way. They also look look better than the original versions.
There’ve been a few official black-and-white releases in the last few years; “Mad Mad: Fury Road”, “Logan Noir” and even a new version of “Johnny Mnemonic”. That last one never got a release in the UK, so I took the extended Japanese cut that was uploaded onto the Internet Archive and converted that.
I found that even if black-and-white didn’t change a movie much visually, it made a difference in… I hate to use this word… the “vibe”. “The Faculty” becomes a real 50’s throwback, “The Usual Suspects” noir leanings even more pronounced.
I’m a (low-key) defender of “Alien Vs Predator” (2004) on this basis. As a main entry in either series, it’s a bad movie. If you see it as a throwback to the old monster mash-ups of the 40’s and 50’s, it’s a fun time. It’s not an accident an on-screen TV is showing “Frankenstein meets the Wolfman”. I took the conversion a couple of steps further than usual in Resolve. Not just monochrome, but film grain throughout and dirt during the prologue. I changer the sound to mono and even swapped in the 50’s version of the Fox fanfare (with a “Presented in Cinemascope” title). Since it was shot on film, it looks really good in a way I never appreciated in colour. There’s great use of shadow to give a haunted house quality to the setting.
A few days after I finished it, I started thinking about what the poster for a vintage release would have looked like… so I ended up watching a bunch of YouTube videos and started up Photoshop. I took the cover of the origin AvP comic for the main art and grabbed a couple of stills of the main characters from IMDB. It’s not perfect, but a fun way to learn some new stuff in Photoshop (and I’ve still got a lot left to learn).

Well, looks like I have a blog now.