Samurai Sam!

Last year, writer Michael Leal and I teamed-up on a fun 1-page project called Samurai Sam!  This was slated for a comics anthology of 1 pagers that has unfortunately, since been shelved by the publishers.

Michael and I worked on this old school "Marvel-style" where we discussed the idea and came up with a general concept: a satire on the old "Hostess" cupcake ads which appeared in comics back in the 70s.  So I went about drawing it, and thought I would do it in a somewhat "manga" style for fun; Michael then did the captions and dialogue based on the artwork.  I enjoy working in this fashion since to me, it makes the effort truly collaborative!

And here, for your viewing pleasure is Samurai Sam in "A Demon for Cake!"

Zombies Are a'Comin'

Here's a little preview of a couple panels from an upcoming strip that will be published later this year in Bela Lugosi's Tales From the Grave from Monsterverse Publishing.  The story is by Michael Leal and the art is my first done entirely with the Cintiq tablet!

Click to enlarge...

CURSE of the VESSEL

I'm guessing the best place to start would be with the project that brought me back to working in comics, and that would be the Curse of the Vessel.  Back at the beginning of 2010 I joined Facebook and was delighted to find a great community of comic book artists and writers!

One artist whose work I really enjoyed was Danny Kelly.  I loved his simple yet powerful style, and he was very prolific... posting tons of great material daily.  What caught my attention was Danny's pencils of one of my favorite characters, The Phantom!  He indicated that if anyone wanted to ink the piece, to go ahead -- so I did!

As luck would have it, inking that piece led writer Michael Leal to contact me.  Michael was working with Danny at that time on Curse of the Vessel, to enter into the then annual Small Press Idol Contest from Dimestore Productions.  The big prize of the contest was that the winner would see their book published.  And Michael and Danny had just lost their original inker on the project, so Michael asked if I would be willing to take over the task.  Always one to take calculated risks, I agreed.

Danny would send me hi-res scans of his artwork, which I would then print out and ink on a lightbox (I didn't have my Cintiq tablet yet) using a Gillot steel pen nib, #3 series 7 Windsor-Newton brush and various Pentel markers (mostly for background elements and borders).  I would then scan in the pages and make minor corrections as well as add blacks and then send them along to the 4th member of our team, colorist supreme Michael McElveen.

The good news is we went on to win the contest and see the book published.  And here are a couple examples of Danny's original pencils along with my inked pages.

A Clean Solution

This video was my entry in the WFG 90 Second Film Festival in December 2009..  "A Clean Solution" stars Leslie Lahoda and Sunny Sidhu and involves a housewife\s inclination to deal with salespeople in a rather unique way - if she doesn't like what they have to sell. 

29 shorts were entered into the festival, and although we didn't win the competition it was a great time with many excellent films screened!

"Mad For Lear"

Check out our latest short film about a deranged thespian who finds a unique and macabre way of keeping an audience for his performances of "King Lear".  Featuring Tony Hart, Sunny Sidhu and Laura Mackay!
 

ONLINE & LETHAL - Episode One

Finally we're back at the blog! It's been an extremely busy couple of months work-wise, so a few things had to slide - unfortunately, this blog was one of them. Now we're back with some new stuff!

Presenting the premiere chapter of "Online and Lethal"; it's titled "Dariah has a bad night" and once you see the episode, you'll understand why! Check it out if you have the time, and be entertained! - Nik Poliwko

Password: QUALITY

This cartoon was originally created in 1991 as a sample for a potential series of motivational videos for corporations. We managed to get a video distributor who dealt with the corporate market interested, and then went on to create this sample cartoon.

We enlisted the aid of Larry Theobalds to design the characters; Larry has always had a cool and funky warped cartoon style, and we thought it was a good fit. Master animator Olun Riley did the character animation based on Larry's designs; we were lucky to work with Olun at the time, for he went on to animate for Don Bluth Studios shortly afterward.

Gord Davis and myself translated all of Olun's drawings to computer by retracing his originals on the Easyl drawing tablet. We were using Amiga computers and Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint III to create the finished animation. Gord and I also created the backgrounds and titles.

We had allied with local sound production studio Evolution Sound and James Pirie Productions for the professional soundtrack and voiceover; in fact, it was in talks with James and Diane Pirie that we came up with the idea for this whole project to begin with, and Diane also provided the script.

I can't recall what happened but the project never took off - even though we could create the product cheaply and quickly (about 3 days start to finish - GREAT for 1991!).

We dug it out of our video archives, digitized and cleaned it up and present to you: "Password: QUALITY". Enjoy! :) - Nik Poliwko

A Gentle Touch

"A Gentle Touch" is an experimental video featuring the electronica sounds of Not Half. The sombre meditative music takes you on a fantastic journey through strange 3d-generated landscapes.

The "experimental" aspect comes from the 3d animations that make up the visuals; originally each clip was done to learn and test various things like particle animation, volumetric lighting, fog, water and so forth, and not actually created for the video. The animations were rendered back in 2002 and I did the video edit in 2005.

The edit files went corrupt in a harddrive mishap and the only existing version was a lo-res 352 x 240 animation in mpeg 1 format! We've always liked "A Gentle Touch", so we've cleaned it up and present it to you here! We hope you like it too! - Nik Poliwko

INTRODUCING: The 'OIDS

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Click Comic to Enlarge...

ONLINE and LETHAL Web Series TRAILER

Fresh off the edit bay - here's the latest trailer for the upcoming web series "Online and Lethal" - featuring sexy webcan girl assassin Dariah! "Online and Lethal" stars Ida Sawabe as Dariah and Melissa Hallett as Vanessa; also featuring Adam Zachar as Jimmy / Clark and Nelson Nillson as Nelson.

The series will begin end of September!

Check out the action!

For more Online and Lethal trailers, click here!

ZBC's UNDEADline Friday!

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Presenting "UNDEADline Friday", the short film we recently shot. We've finished with the final touches and got this baby wrapped up and ready to go! "UNDEADline Friday" stars Bobby Stahr, Tony Hart and Anastasia Waly - along with a few zombie minions! Enjoy the flick and let us know what you think! - Nik Poliwko

* For more information on "UNDEADline", see:
Part One - Getting Started
Part Two - The Shoot

Making "UNDEADline" - 2. The Shoot

In part one of this series we looked at getting the "UNDEADline" project off the ground; we got together our script, locations and cast. Being a "no-budget" film, getting cast and crew together on the same day, at the same time - is not always the simplest scheduling task. So we were elated when we found a day that worked for everyone... we could now have a Production Meeting and then proceed with the Shoot.

The Production Meeting

Our gathering point for the Production Meeting was a local cafe called the Fyxx, which was also just a few blocks from our location.

In this case our meeting was very short and simple. The script for "UNDEADline" is pretty straight-forward and I expected the shoot to be as well, so our meeting was more to get everyone in the same place and make introductions for any new faces.

Our cast includes a couple of our NeuralNet regulars: actors Tony Hart (as Chris Dedman) and Laura MacKay (as a Zombie Minion). Tony and Laura have both appeared in the Neuralnet short: "Reflections", and will also be featured in an upcoming thriller we're doing!

New people to our production were Anastasia Waly (as Angelica) and Bobby Stahr (as Larry). Rounding off the cast were Robert Olver (who has also appeared in our short film "Twice Removed") and Brandon Ackerman, both cast as part of the Zombie Minions. Also new to this production was local make-up wizard Max Wilson.

After introductions and a quick review of the script and what was expected, we headed off to the location to begin...

The Shoot

It was about 7pm when we arrived at the location. I was looking at completing the entire shoot that evening, expecting that we would be wrapping by 12 to 1 am. We had 5 people that needed zombie make-up. Fortunately, the zombies appear sequentially in the film, so I decided to shoot the exterior scenes that featured Bobby (our only non-zombie) first, while Max was applying make-up to Anastasia (our 1st appearing zombie)... then, when we were shooting scenes with Anastasia, Tony was getting make-up and so forth. This proved to be a very efficient system.

Having been a comic-book artist and computer animator in my past; I have a very strong sense of sequence and visuals, so I always have the entire script storyboarded in my mind, along with alternative shots and even new shots or scenes as they may crop up. As a result, shooting usually progresses quickly... and so it did.

We were actually amazed that we wrapped up the shoot by 9:30 pm! 2 hours!! And that's with reshoots too! I'll have to say that this was one of the smoother shoots - and probably the fastest. Our make-up whiz Max Wilson did an incredible job with the zombie make-up (see photos), and it's hard to find enough good things to say in praise of our actors.

I asked my leads to run with the script - and they did just that - taking what was there and extrapolating and adding some of the finest bravura improv performances ever! The results were fantastic! And of course were included in the cut.

We're in post now - the rough cut is complete, and we're just looking to add music, titles and some blood FX before the final cut. Again I would like to thank our actors and crew for an outstanding job, and a special thanks to Ed Ackerman for providing the location and Brandon Ackerman for stepping in at the last moment when one of our original "zombie minions" had to bow out.

"UNDEADline" will be released on our YouTube Channel (see LINKS) and here on the blog in the next couple of weeks. We're pretty pleased with the film so far and look forward to see what you our viewers, have to say! - Nik Poliwko

And here's more production pix...







* For more on "UNDEADline" see "Zombie Summers" (June), "The Gods of Filmmaking" (July) and "UNDEADline - 1. Starting Off" (July) on this blog.

Making "UNDEADline" - 1. Starting Off

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A few weeks ago we were hoping to shoot our newest short film: "UNDEADline". However, as things often go in this industry - especially in the low/no-budget arena - there were scheduling problems with the actors that prevented us from moving forward with the project.

The good news is that everyone is now on board and we've confirmed a shooting schedule! The Gods of Filmmaking are smiling on us again!

We thought it would be of interest to take you through the unique NeuralNet approach to guerrilla filmmaking and outline the process we go through to actually produce a film.

The film in this case is "UNDEADline"; a roughly 4 minute short involving a TV show and zombies (without giving too much away here)!

Since we're storytellers, we start with the script. Some people just charge in with an idea and start filming, like David Lynch (one of our favorite directors). Lynch has also said that he'll "...never do another film without a script." (yeah, right!)

If you're not familiar with scriptwriting, we can recommend a couple of books that we found to be highly informative and easy to digest: "The Foundations of Screenwriting" by Syd Field (a little old school, but a very productive process) and "Crafty Screenwriting" by Alex Epstein. And for proper script formatting and all that, we find it most efficient to do it manually in Microsoft Word as opposed to a 'scriptwriting program'. As for actually writing the screenplay... well, that's up to you now, isn't it!

Now that we have a script, we start to think in terms of crew and locations. Being a no-budget shoot this time around, our crew is minimal... basically the Director (doing double duty as cameraman), make-up and the actors. Since we're planning to do blood FX in post, we're not too worried about props at this point (although we may colour a head of cauliflower red to stand-in for a brain).

Our location needs for "UNDEADline" were simple: One vacant house, for both exteriors and interiors. And we were fortunate to have a friend with just such a house for our use.


It's taken us about 6 weeks to write the script, cast and set a confirmed shooting date. And 3 of those weeks were used to find a time when we could get the whole cast together at once (no-budget, remember)!

And now we're off to the scheduled PRODUCTION MEETING and SHOOT, which will be the subject of part 2 of this article. - Nik Poliwko

** For more on "UNDEADline" see "Zombie Summers" (June) and "The Gods of Filmmaking" (July) on this blog.

EXCLUSIVE - Online & Lethal's DARIAH

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In another exclusive to the NeuralNet blog, we present the 1st released production still from the feature film "ONLINE & LETHAL".

Pictured is our webcam girl assassin/heroine "Dariah", as portrayed by Ida Sawabe. Aside from being a talented actor, Ida is also the drummer for the hot Canadian band, the Ex-Girlfriends. Web episodes of "Online & Lethal" will premiere in September, 2008 on our YouTube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/nikpoliwko

COMIC BOOKS : The Bruiser!

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An exclusive to the Neuralnet Blog, we present this rare tidbit: An unpublished cover for The Bruiser.

The Bruiser was originally created by Angelo Furlan and published by Catfish Comics in the mid-1990s. This cover features Bruiser in battle with King Solomon (Bruiser's at the bottom of the page, BTW); with artwork by yours truly! (click on the image for larger version) - Nik Poliwko

MUSIC VIDEO - Cadillac Bill and the Creeping Bent

BEING A HUMAN was shot back in the early 1990s for the Toronto band CADILLAC BILL & THE CREEPING BENT.

The video was directed by Culture Shock's John Temou while I provided the art direction and SFX. The interiors were all constructed at the music studio Q.E.D. Media where we shot most of the video.

Funded in part by VideoFact, we also had a run on MuchMusic at the time. It's a catchy tune! And a Fun video! And is that Neil Young? Enjoy! - Nik Poliwko

SHORT FILM - REFLECTIONS

"Reflections" is a 5-minute short that was filmed in 2007 for entry into the Winnipeg Cinematheque 48hr Film Festival. The rules were simply that all shooting and post-production had to be done within 48 hours. The film stars Leslie Lahoda and Tony Hart. Also featured are Laura MacKay and Adam Zachar.