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Post a picture of your most recent purchase....(not poker chips) (7 Viewers)

Happy Birthday to Me!!
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I know… they sexy!! Haha
 
I believe the first step in a twelve-step program is admitting you have a problem.



OK, I have a problem.



The next steps involve reconciling with that, making effort to reject temptation, so on and so forth. But what happens when one is happy with their particular problem and openly and happily welcomes that problem into their life? I suspect the vast majority of us here welcome the chip-specific vice we all share (this isn't "Chipaholics Anonymous after all), but what if there is another collecting vice sitting on our other shoulder?


I've mentioned elsewhere I have a bit of an animation art collecting habit. Despite not (currently) having the wall space to properly frame and display some of the gems I have acquired, they are safely tucked away until I have the ability to do so. In the meantime, I can share this crazy habit with all of you!

So, care of the gallery in Los Angeles who are my "supplier", the newest acquisitions that arrived the day before yesterday via. FedEx priority.

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A production still/transparency from the 1982 movie TRON featuring Bruce Boxleitner as the titular character holding the data-disc that would be used to reprogram the Master Control Computer in the final scenes of the movie. For six-year-old me, this movie blew my mind and is easily the first movie I "remember" from that time. In retrospect, I was into computers at a young age (Commodore 64 anyone?), but am surprised I didn't go into that as a profession. I do recall I taping stripes of blue paper to a shirt in a rather poor attempt to replicate the suit as a Halloween costume that might have been vetoed by wiser adults.

This particular frame was one of several versions of this still that were composited together to make the final frame one sees in the movie. *

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The cartoon "Gargoyles" was one of the first I watched and realized that animation could tell a very complex story, often more complex than could be done with live action, even with effects added. Characters and places that couldn't be recreated (or recreated in a believable manner) can be in animation and be used in a way that doesn't stretch too much beyond reality to make things feel unnatural (OK, living, breathing, crime-fighting gargoyles is a stretch, but it does make for good fantasy! :ROFL: :ROFLMAO: )

The same auction that brought a piece of TRON into my collection also brought two different advertisement placards intended for the interior of a bus (likely L.A., but maybe New York where the show was set):
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(This is only one of the pair as the other is still inside the plastic is was shipped in and I'm not going to unwrap it for a while at least. It features Goliath on the top of a building in a menacing pose, but also goes well with this production used piece that's part of my collection and on my office wall as I type this:
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As I keep adding these pieces, I realize I need a proper game room or better, but never to happen here in the desert, a basement to be able to put these all up. That'll happen, eventually, but in the meantime I'll continue to acknowledge the first step in the program and ignore all the others. I love this specific and rather senseless hobby, but most hobbies are. They serve to make us happy and every time I look at the wall or flip through the unframed art I have, I do so with a big smile on my face.




* - I put this as a bit of a post-script as the production of the movie TRON might be more interesting than the movie itself. It turns out there was very little C.G. used in the movie with most of the effects being created with good 'ol animation skills and roto-scoping from Disney. With the 20th anniversary DVD release of the movie, there was a 90 minute "making of" feature included. The process they used to take black and white 70mm film footage and through compositing, high-contrast blacklit frames and other techiques used from hand-drawn animation, the visuals and effects of the movie were created. The process as desribed in the feature is here and at this time tag:



The frame I managed to get was one of the first layer frames described above. If you look at the bottom of the frame in the photo, you can see the animation registration holes punched into the bottom where they would line up with matching pins in the frame below the camera so everyting would line up and not shake and jitter around from one frame to the next.


(If you've got 90 minutes to kill, remeber the movie and have nothing better to do, the full making of feature is interesting. As is said a couple times, nobody had made a movie this way before and nobody ever will.)
 

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