After creating “The Last Son or Krypton,” I decided to do a little more experimentation in Poser. This time I ventured into the realm of the fantasy genre with a piece titled, “The Enchantress.” Here it was in the post-rendering phase that I had the most fun. Texture effects, my famous “light ribbons” and dragon fire were all added to bring realism to the scene using Adobe Photoshop. Be sure to click the link to the larger image to see the finished effect. Oh yeah, by the way… any resemblance to specific individuals is, well, more than a coincidence;)

My daughters and I have started experimenting with stop-motion clay animation. I thought it would be fun to share a couple of the characters we have created so far. None of these guys has actually gone all motional on us yet, we’re still toying with the story concept and who we need to fit the part!

GRAYSTALKS

SANTA CLOPS

I’ll keep you posted as this little family project unfolds and as soon as we have our little “creature feature” I’ll post it here for all to see.

From the Wikipedia… A gremlin is an English folkloric creature, commonly depicted as mischievous and mechanically oriented with a specific interest in Aircraft. Although their origin is found in myths among airmen, claiming that the gremlins were responsible for sabotaging aircraft, one authority in folklore states that “some people” derive the name from the Old_English word gremian, “to vex”. In later times, different fantastical creatures have been referred to as gremlins, bearing varying degrees of resemblance to the original gremlins.

The word “gremlin” originated in oral use amongst Royal Air Force (RAF) aviators’ slang in Malta, the Middle East and India, with the earliest recorded printed use being a poem published in the journal Aeroplane, in Malta on April 10, 1929. The concept of gremlins as responsible for sabotaging aircraft was popularised during World War II among airmen of the UK’s RAF, in particular the men of the high altitude Photographic Reconnaissance Units (PRU) of RAF Benson, RAF Wick and RAF St Eval. The story attempted to explain the otherwise inexplicable accidents which sometimes occurred during their flights. Gremlins were also thought at one point to have enemy sympathies, but investigations revealed that enemy planes had similar and equally inexplicable mechanical problems. As such, gremlins were portrayed as being equal opportunity tricksters, taking no sides in the conflict, and acting out their mischief out of their own self-interests. In reality, the gremlins were a form of “buck passing” or deflecting blame. This led the folklorist John Hazen to note, “Heretofore, the gremlin has been looked on as new phenomenon, a product of the machine age — the age of air.”

An early reference to the Gremlin is in an article by Hubert Griffith in the servicemen’s fortnightly Royal Air Force Journal dated April 18, 1942 although that article states the stories had been in existence for several years, and there are later recollections of it having been told by Battle of Britain Spitfire pilots as early as 1940. Later sources have sometimes claimed that the concept goes back to World War I, but there is no print evidence of this.

Author Roald Dahl is credited with getting the gremlins known outside of the air force. He would have been familiar with the myth, having carried out his military service in the 80th squadron of the Royal Air Force in the Middle East. Dahl had his own experience in an accidental crash-landing in the Libyan Desert. In January, 1942 he was transferred to Washington, D.C. as Assistant Air attaché. There he eventually authored his novel The Gremlins, in which he described male gremlins as “widgets” and females as “fifinellas”. Dahl showed the finished manuscript to Sidney Bernstein, the head of the British Information Service. Sidney reportedly came up with the idea to send it to Walt Disney.

The manuscript arrived in Disney’s hands in July, 1942 and he considered using it as material for a film. The film project never materialized but Disney managed to have the story published in the December, 1942 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. About half a year later a revised version of the story was published in a picture book published by Random House (later republished in 2006 by Dark Horse Comics.) Thanks mainly to Disney, the story had its share of publicity which helped in introducing the concept to a wider audience. Issues #33-#41 of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories published between June, 1943 and February, 1944 contained a nine-episode series of short silent stories featuring a Gremlin Gus as their star. The first was drawn by Vivie Risto and the rest of them by Walt Kelly. This served as their introduction to the comic book audience.

While Roald Dahl was famous for making gremlins known world wide, many returning Air Servicemen swear they saw creatures tinkering with their equipment. One crewman swore he saw one before an engine malfunction that caused his B-25 Mitchell bomber to rapidly lose altitude, forcing the aircraft to return to base. Folklorist Hazen likewise offers his own alleged eye-witness testimony of these creatures, which appeared in an academically praised and peer-reviewed publication, which describes an occasion he found “a parted cable which bore obvious tooth marks in spite of the fact that the break occurred in a most inaccessible part of the plane.” At this point, Hazen states he heard “a gruff voice” demand, “How many times must you be told to obey orders and not tackle jobs you aren’t qualified for? — This is how it should be done.” Upon which Hazen heard a “musical twang” and another cable was parted.

Critics of this idea state that the stress of combat and the dizzying heights caused such hallucinations, often believed to be a coping mechanism of the mind to help explain the many problems aircraft faced whilst in combat.

Airplane gremlins in film

Falling Hare (1943), in which a gremlin torments Bugs Bunny.

In 1943, Bob Clampett directed Falling Hare, a Merrie Melodies cartoon featuring Bugs Bunny. With Roald Dahl’s book and Walt Disney’s proposed film being the inspiration, this short has been one of the early Gremlin stories shown to cinema audiences.[8] It features Bugs Bunny in conflict with a gremlin at an airfield. The Bugs Bunny cartoon was followed in 1944 by Russian Rhapsody, another Merrie Melodies short showing Russian gremlins sabotaging an aircraft piloted by Adolf Hitler.

William Shatner in the The Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” (1963).

A 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” directed by Richard Donner, featured a gremlin attacking a plane.[9] This episode was remade as a segment of 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie.[10] In the original television episode, the gremlin appears as an almost ape-like creature which inspects the aircraft’s wing with the curiosity of an animal and then proceeds to damage the wing. William Shatner plays the passenger who sees the Gremlin on the plane’s wing. No one else sees the Gremlin and Shatner’s character is removed from the plane on a stretcher with symptoms of psychosis. In the movie segment, the gremlin more resembles a troll or a goblin, with green skin and a frightening grin. This incarnation of the gremlin appears to be more intellectual and menacing, and is also shown to be capable of flying. The episode was famous enough to inspire at least two parodies:

o A gremlin makes an appearance in a Halloween special of The Simpsons paralleling The Twilight Zone’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”, (the segment is even named “Terror at 5½ Feet”) in which the gremlin attempts to destroy the wheel of Bart’s school bus.

o A Tiny Toon special titled Night Ghoulery (a spoof of Night Gallery, with Babs presenting in Rod Serling’s style) has a segment named “Gremlin on a Wing”, which parodies “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” as well, with Plucky in William Shatner’s place, accompanied by Hamton in an airplane, and a gremlin similar to that which appearen in Bugs’ short Falling Hare. In fact, this gremlin is so persistent, he even appears at the end as if he had impersonated the stewardess (who looks remarkably similar to Star Trek character Lt. Uhura. Coincidentally, William Shatner was the star of Star Trek as well.).

* In Madagascar 2: Escape 2 Africa, Alex has a dream where he sees Mort (Alex calls him a gremlin) messing with the engine and falling off the plane.

I’ve been a fan of the Man of Steel for a while now. My first real visit to Metropolis came about three years ago when I had the privilege of working on Superman Returns, the video game counterpart to the movie. I was working for Electronic Arts – Tiburon in the Concept Art Department, and one of the tasks I was assigned for Superman Returns was the creation of billboard signage in and around the famed home of Clark Kent. Looking back I almost feel that I should have added “Metropolis Ad Agency Exec.” to the work experience on my Resume. It was pretty cool to be involved in the rich history of the legendary DC Comics superhero. In this blog post I hope we can share more thoughts and experiences about the last son of the planet Krypton.

A good friend of mine asked me to show him how to recreate a Photoshop technique I use in many of my illustrations that simulates swirling beams of light or, as I have come to call them, light ribbons. This brief tutorial will show the basic steps I take to make these glowing beams of energy. Typically the process is mostly trial and error but I should be able to give you the tools needed to start experimenting. Here’s a closer look at the finished example.

STEP ONE – CREATING ABSTRACTS & SIMPLE SHAPES

Much of the business for creating light ribbons happens in preparation. Here you see a variety of simple lines and shapes that can be some of the building blocks. Thin straight lines clustered together in varying weights and distances apart make very nice arcs and swirls, while wide curving shapes will result in broad strokes like a wide paintbrush. You can opt to use all or some of these shapes for your own creation and by all means try something different as well. Light ribbons are very random and unpredictable so what you use as a starting point is entirely up to you. These are just a few of the parts and pieces that have produced interesting results for me.

Another fantastic resource could be something as simple as a blurred digital photo (i.e. Christmas lights or a cityscape at night), 10 minutes of doodling with the Photoshop paintbrush tool or anything that consists of extremely vibrant colors and high contrast lines. With materials similar to what I’ve described in this step, you’re ready to go to work with one of the most unused filters in the Photoshop library, Polar Coordinates. As an additional reference, check out this example that I created in about ten minutes using each piece of the abstract photo imagery shown above.

STEP TWO – LET’S DO THE TWIST

In many cases, the simple lines are the most difficult to transform. Work as big as possible (high resolution) because a low rez source file will only produce jagged, blurry results. 99% of the time you’re going to use RECTANGULAR TO POLAR. The only exception is the first pass on straight lines. RECTANGULAR TO POLAR applied to these lines first is only going to result in revolving your lines into an oval or circle shape. For starters, use POLAR TO RECTANGULAR. Once you have a nice arc to the line, the rest is experimentation. Here are some bullet points to try:

• Apply POLAR COORDINATES several times to the same line or set of lines. The more times you filter them, the more graceful the wave.

• Apply POLAR COORDINATES, flop the image (horizontally, vertically or both) or rotate it and then apply the filter again. This technique produces beautiful twists and turns.

• Once you’re satisfied with the shape, duplicate it on another layer and GAUSSIAN BLUR this new layer. Set the MODE CONTROL to SCREEN. Now your ribbon has a nice glowing halo.

• Save copies of each version of your lines as you continue filter-effecting the image (on seperate layers). Mixing and matching or piecing together the various flowing lines can make your project wonderfully intricate.

STEP THREE – FOG, PLASMA AND SWIRLING CLOUDS OF COLORED LIGHTS

Once all your well-defined linework is complete, the next phase of experimentation is to add brilliant emissions and glowing plasma to the image. As I stated above, photos that you would most likely have deleted from your camera (blurred or underexposed Christmas lights , city streets at night, etc.) are perfect source material. The one key point you’ll need to know before applying Polar Coordinates to these images is to be sure to increase the CANVAS SIZE of the image beyond the edge of the image itself. The filter needs extra room to spin the edges out. Use whatever background color you desire for your finished work. I used black in both examples shown here but it could just as easily been white or any color inbetween. Use the bullet points from step two for your light effects as well and before you know it, you’ll be spinning some ribbons of light on your own!

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration

“This object, should any of you have lived underground for the better parts of your lives and never had occasion to look toward the sky, is an airplane, its official designation a DC-3. We offer this rather obvious comment because this particular airplane, the one you’re looking at, is a freak. Now, most airplanes take off and land as per scheduled. On rare occasions they crash. But all airplanes can be counted on doing one or the other. Now, yesterday morning this particular airplane ceased to be just a commercial carrier. As of its arrival it became an enigma, a seven-ton puzzle made out of aluminum, steel, wire and a few thousand other component parts, none of which add up to the right thing. In just a moment, we’re going to show you the tail end of its history. We’re going to give you ninety percent of the jigsaw pieces, and you and Mr. Sheckly here of the Federal Aviation Agency, will assume the problem of putting them together along with finding the missing pieces. This we offer as an evening’s hobby, a little extracurricular diversion which is really the national pastime in the Twilight Zone.”

“The Arrival” explores a man’s mental struggle over an airplane mishap. In the episode, it happens to aviation officer Grant Sheckly. The plane comes in, but with no pilots, passengers or luggage. There is some element of mystery in the business but it turns out to be nothing more than a delusion of Sheckly’s over an unresolved case of many years ago… or is it?

I’ve had many discussions with TZ fans about this episode. In all, I’ve come up with 11 possible explainations for what happened to the mysterious Flight 107 out of Buffalo. I’ll share a few of my theories here in the hope that we can get a fairly substantial discussion started. Ghost ship or delusion? Let’s explore the mystery together.

First of all, let’s look at a few little details in the story that might help to dispel the most obvious conclusion, that Mr. Sheckly has suffered a mental breakdown. This article assumes that you’ve seen the episode or perhaps that you have the DVD handy for review.

Point number one. When Flight 107 glides in and touches down in the first act, the plane taxis to a stop and is searched for luggage, passengers and crew by two ground personel with the airline. A fact is a fact, right? Well then, where is Grant Sheckly at this point? He hasn’t even been called in yet to begin his investigation. Interesting that most of the viewers I’ve discussed this with simply take Serling’s closing narration at face value and shelf the episode as “too predictable”, the “clinical answer that they put on the tag as they take him away”. How could the events that prompt the airline to call in an inspector from the FAA unfold before he arrives if they are only in his mind?

Point number two. Throughout the episode, Sheckly works with Bengston and Malloy (executives with the airline) to try to solve the mystery. At the point that Sheckly causes to DC-3 to vanish, all of the airline employees and airport ground crew disappear with it. Never there at all? Sheckly, befuddled by his discovery, runs to the Trans East Airline office and finds Bengston and Malloy calmly going about their business. Oddly, neither of the two men have ever met Sheckly before. Again, if the entire story is simply an elaborate hallucination that Sheckly is having, how did he already know them? The fabric of insanity? I don’t think so. The fabric of space and time? As Rod was fond of quoting from Shakespeare, “ay, there’s the rub…”

Consider this. There has been many a great Sci Fi yarn woven around the possibility that parallel universes exist in the same space and the same time as ours. If by some chance we were to shift between these mulitverses, the subtle variations we observe may be so imperceptible that we couldn’t tell them apart from our own. And if these duplicate worlds are there, it would follow that there would also be duplicates of ourselves, or Doppelgängers, that would inhabit those dimensions, carrying on lives not dissimilar to our own. Rod explored this intriguing possibility in his TZ teleplay, Mirror Image, in which a woman’s Doppelgänger inhabits the same dimension at the same time, requiring that one of them take over. Nothing quite so sinister here. Troubling to Grant Sheckly, of course, but oh how tantalizing for us, especially surprising to those who have written this wonderful piece of Serling’s work off as predictable or as a cop out. Truth is that if you can see your way to read between the lines, The Arrival is a masterpiece of the metaphysical. The more you look at each clue, the more you see that there is a side to this story that is so finitely crafted that you must take a second (or even a third or fourth) look. This episode is like a 30-minute piece of optical art. If you stare at it long enough, you’re sure to see all matter of possibilities to explain that “seven-ton puzzle made out of aluminum, steel, wire and a few thousand other component parts, none of which add up to the right thing”.

The Arrival, as interpreted by Ray Lonsdale
When Flight 107 touches down and taxis in, she does have a pilot named William J. Slocum and a co-pilot named John O’Brian in the cockpit at the controls. I would venture to guess that she was also carrying passengers and their respective belongings. The question we should be asking is not why the plane is abandoned when the ground crew cracks open the hatch, but rather why can’t we see the people on board? I think there are at least three different parallel dimensions already at work at this point. In one of these dimensions (we’ll refer to it as “normal”), all is as it should be. This dimension interacts with the world we see in the episode (call it “the zone”) though we can only speculate as to how the two are intertwined. Perhaps the DC-3 we see land in the zone is so closely connected to the normal dimension that it exists in both places while the crew, passengers and luggage do not. Now jump forward in the story to the point at which Sheckly storms into Bengston’s office. As they discuss the flight, Sheckly sees the article on the front page of the newspaper that Malloy is reading on the couch. The plane landed safely with everyone on board. This is the second time that the normal dimension comes into play. In this case I have the sense that the normal dimension has washed over the zone dimension like a tsunami. Sheckly opens the office door and steps in (permanently, for all we know) to the normal dimension. Problem is, he now has no frame of reference. Hang on now, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back and discuss what I believe is yet a third course of events that is somehow attached to all of this. This third dimension of existence (let’s say, “back there”) is a distortion of space-time. In this dimension we have Sheckly’s 17-year-old conundrum, the missing flight 107. Here’s an idea that sounds like a line right off of Serling’s Underwood… The DC-3 from back there did not crash, it vanished into time… into the future. I think the airplane that landed in the zone dimension was that plane. Feel a shiver running down your spine? Yeah, I did too when it first occured to me.

Now let’s talk about the hanger and the examination of the airplane by Sheckly and company or, perhaps more accurately, the nexus for all three dimensions as they begin to collide and overlap. Are the seats blue, brown or faded red? Is the number on the tail N664753, N67588, or N804758? If you answered “yes” to all three, then you are indeed doing your business in the Twilight Zone. I believe that all three airplanes, the lost ship from Sheckly’s past and the flights that arrived with and without passengers and crew all occupy the the same space and the same time at this particular point in the story. If an airplane can be said to have a Doppelgänger (or two) then we now have all three counterparts from each of the parallel dimensions merging into one. Sheckly’s conclusion from these facts, that “this particular aircraft doesn’t exist” is only half right. Perhaps he could have more accurately stated that “this particular aircraft shouldn’t exist and yet, here it is. And this one. It shouldn’t be here but it is. And as for this one? Well, there goes that funny feeling again… so familiar”.

And so this brings us full circle, to the coup d’etat that either leaves Sheckly a nasty smear on the tarmac or a master of deductive reasoning. If you go with my explaination of events, he is neither. Sticking your arm in a rotating propeller doesn’t seem the safest course of action in any case, though it does make for a wonderfully tense moment in the story. So what, exactly, did Sheckly do to the airplane(s) at that moment? Like an air traffic controller, I think he sent everything back to the proper flight path. It was like he reached in and slammed a door closed that should not have been open. He sent the 17-year-old Gooneybird (that’s the nickname for a DC-3) backwards or forwards to someplace else (though apparently not back to the point where he could have found it and solved the case), he set the “normal” course of events back in motion so the plane did arrive as scheduled and finally, he closed off the paradox of a dimension where airplanes fly by themselves. By doing so, he may very well have “crossed over” into the normal dimension, leaving the “zone” dimension behind. As each of the men vanish one by one, it’s as if the door is swinging shut behind him. This explains how he knew Bengston and Malloy. He had met them and interacted with them in the dimension from which he came.

One last messy bit of business. My explanation does suggest the strong possibility that two Sheckly’s now exist in the normal dimension. Or does it? Maybe there is a dead man crumpled to the ground beneath a rotating prop, somewhere “back there”. Maybe they passed by each other in the open doorway. And for all the optimists reading this blog entry, maybe there is a Grant Sheckly riding first class all the way, content in the knowledge that he is finally getting the chance to see where his airborn Flying Dutchman sailed off to. My guess is that it landed somewhere deep in the heart of the Twilight Zone.

When you’re seven miles up in the heavens,
(That’s a hell of a lonely spot)
And it’s fifty degrees below zero
Which isn’t exactly hot.
When you’re frozen blue like your Spitfire
And you’re scared a Mosquito pink,
When you’re thousands of miles from nowhere
And there’s nothing below but the drink
It’s then you will see the Gremlins,
Green and gamboge and gold,
Male and female and neuter
Gremlins both young and old.
It’s no good trying to dodge them,
The lessons you learned on the Link
Won’t help you evade a Gremlin,
Though you boost and you dive and you fink.
White ones will wiggle your wingtips,
Male ones will muddle your maps,
Green ones will guzzle your Glycol,
Females will flutter your flaps.
Pink ones will perch on your perspex,
And dance pirouettes on your prop;
There’s a spherical, middle-aged Gremlin
who’ll spin on your stick like a top.
They’ll freeze up your camera shutters,
They’ll bite through your aileron wires,
They’ll bend and they’ll break and they’ll batter,
They’ll insert toasting forks in your tyres.
That is the tale of the Gremlins,
Told by the P.R.U.,
(P)retty (R)uddy (U)nlikely to many
But fact, none the less, to the few.”

Here’s a quick trick using Photoshop to create the illusion of a magnifying glass over a block of text. This tutorial will cover the steps needed to add this eye-catching effect to your projects.

STEP ONE – CUT GLASS

Once you’ve located the image of a magnifying glass you like, use the PEN TOOL in Photoshop to isolate the image and then copy it to a new layer. We’ll call this new layer “LOOKING GLASS FRAME”.

STEP TWO – THE LENS

Again using the PEN TOOL, we’ve created a selection around the outside edge of the glass lens. This selection is then CUT away from the frame and PASTED on a new layer. We’ll call this layer “LENS”.

STEP THREE – BY DEFINITION

You can use text from anywhere to create the magnify effect. In this example, I simply went to Merriam-Webster Online and looked up the definition for the word “information”. Once the definition was displayed in the browser window, I did a screen capture of it so the text I needed was on the CLIPBOARD. We’ll need this text block both SCALED and at ACTUAL SIZE in the next step.

STEP FOUR – INTO FOCUS

The first thing I did in this step was to paste a copy of the dictionary definition behind the LOOKING GLASS FRAME layer. This copy of the text was then scaled to a point where it is for all practical purposes unreadable. Next, the LENS layer is MARQUEE SELECTED and a second copy of the definition text is added using PASTE INTO. This version is used at actual size. The desired area for the magnification effect can be framed in the lens simply by moving the pasted text around inside the selection.

STEP FIVE – A FINISHING TOUCH OF GLASS

Once the second copy of the text is positioned inside the lens, several simple adjustments are made to three of the layers to complete the effect. First, the MAGNIFIED TEXT layer is moved below the LOOKING GLASS FRAME layer. Next, a DROP SHADOW is applied to the LOOKING GLASS FRAME layer. Finally, the LENS layer MODE CONTROL is set to MULTIPLY, allowing the original reflective glass effects to show through on the underlying text layer. With a few positioning tweaks, your looking glass effect is now complete!