This past weekend I went to see Detective Pikachu. i was really looking forward to watching the movie as its the first live action Pokemon movie and the trailers have looked very reasonable. I was both happy and disappointed with the full movie.
Does it live up to all the hype? No. The movie has a convoluted plot backed by a script that sounds like it was put through Google translate several times. Much of the acting (outside of some small moments with the main protagonist and Pikachu) is forced and feels ridiculously fake. This isn't helped very much by the script which stresses plot points as many times as possible in order for Pokemon's younger fans to keep up with the needless plot twists that can be seen coming from a mile away. With the unique cast of characters we already know and love in the Pokemon universe, it feels weird that we see none of them in this movie. Sure it's probably a good idea to keep Ash and gang quarantined in the anime world, but there are many evil teams that have cooler (and more understandable) objectives than the villain of this movie did. Additionally it would be cool to see nods to popular characters from the video game franchise. In particular an appearance of the mythical Pokemon trainer Red would be a perfect inclusion as he is rarely talks in the games but holds a special place in many of the series' fans' hearts. Despite all of these setbacks, there are many hidden gems in this movie. Whenever Ryan Reynolds seems to have been given a little more leeway in the script, the resulting jokes are funny and land a lot better. The relationship between the movies' main character and Pikachu is well developed and the scenes where we just get to see them interact are some of the best in the entire movie. Finally the animation is frickin' beautiful. The movie is honestly worth the watch simply for the live action Pokemon world it creates. The few sweeping shots we get of this world are breathtaking. I can feel the young child in me yearning to live in the world of Pokemon. Whenever we see Pokemon in this film they don't disappoint. Their reactions are equally life-like and unique. I simply wish the movie was longer so we could spend less time on the terrible plot and more time on the cool visuals of the world. Overall a terrible movie but an enjoyable experience. -Watching Detective Pikachu -Problems in the movie -Enjoyable parts of the movie -Final thoughts
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This week in game design disaster struck. Steam got updated and when it did our game suddenly stopped working on the new version. To remedy this we had to update Unity and VRTK. While we though this would be a quick fix, it soon became apparent that just attaching the updated assets to our old project wouldn't work. We needed to create a new project and work from the ground up with the new VRTK set up.
This had several annoying repercussions. The lighting in the building had to be rebaked and now looks much worse. We decided to skip fixing this for now as it's still functional and right now we need to finish our game before worrying about aesthetics. We also have to make all of the intractable game items work again. Once we have that done it will be a race to make the game winnable and check up to make sure the menu and credits scenes still work. Next Week I will: -support Ryan in testing and fixing the game Recently for many of my portfolio images, I've been exploring the limits of what I can do in Photoshop to create images that are weird and fun. It has been exciting to explore areas of the program I haven't used much before and see what I can make out of them. This has led me down paths I would be too scared to go down for a normal project. I've used weird brushes to create painting-like images. I've messed around with the blur tool to soften lines and create weird atmospheres. In the future I'm planning to dive even more into these tools. The more I use tools in a creative, experimental manner, the better I can use them when creating an actual piece of artwork for a project. Already I feel excited to put the brush tool to use sprucing up the basic polygons I use to create the main bodies of my Photoshop works.
Continuing to experiment and evolve is one of the things you always need to be doing as an artist. Most of the time we are unmotivated to break outside of our comfort zone. It's hard to start a piece of art that you know isn't going to look great. However, the tools I've used while creating my last line of works in PS have shown me unique ways to make things look good even if the works themselves look less-than perfect. For every great masterpiece in PS there are at least too or three failed abominations and that's beautiful in its own way. In the coming weeks I look forward to finding even more tools in PS and getting to use them in a creative and powerful way. -Exploring creatively in Photoshop -Why it helps me grow |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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