EFFECTive - Boo Cook

Next up to the plate is Book Cook artist extraordinair, producing stunning work on the likes of "Judge Anderson" in the Megazine and lovely stuff for the highly recommended "Elephantmen."
Boo's come up trumps here and i agree with everything he's said and i'm SO pleased he's finally gone with what he has. I was going to go with the final scene to illustrate his choice, but this is a new keyboard and i don't want to blub all over it. Over to you Boo:



"I'm gonna leave Star Wars out of the equation as it is clearly one of the all-time best examples of fx work from start to finish, but i'd prefer to talk about something slightly more obscure.
With the ancient and continuing evolution of humankind being one of my favourite subjects i would have to mention the incredible 2001 a Space Odyssey. it is laden with some of the most believable and un-dated special fx of all time. from the incredible proto-human acting at the start, through the desperate silences of deep space to my favourite section, the mind blowing coup de grace end sequence. stylistically and technically, the psychedelic ending of 2001 would be pretty hard to recreate even with today's cgi methods, and as a child who had just sat through 2 hours of cold hard space, seeing this for the first time was a real head flipper! of course it took me a few years to even begin to understand what the heck was going on. it's worth noting at this point, that equally as impressive is Jack Kirby's giant sized Marvel treasury edition adaptation of the film where Kirby uses 5 splash pages in a row to re-enact the the final trip sequence of the film. truly mind blowing. i can also recommend Kirby's 10 issue run of 2001 Tales which followed, where he takes the idea of the monolith and runs with it big time - among my favourite all-time comic runs. fans of psychedelic special effects would do well to watch recent film Enter the Void - like taking an intensely strong hallucinogenic drug with none of the law breaking issues...
Back to sci-fi; as a child i was always heavily into space and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had a massive impact on me at that 'crawling out the catflap' age. the incredible special effects involved lead me into a lifelong passion for extra terrestrial life and the world of U.F.O's. there was however a film that had even more emotional impact on me as a child, and still brings a tear to my eye to this very day: the Silent Running. sniff....obviously, the film has an amazing script and some choice acting from Bruce Dern, but the real stars of the show are 3 very special effects - Huey, Louie, and Dewey, the 3 small robots that aid Dern on his quest to save the last remnants of Mother Earth. the robots themselves went on to influence George Lucas who having seen the Silent Running realised that model making and special effects were at a standard that could support his ideas for Star Wars. the 3 small robots, although without faces were capable of conveying heaps of emotion, and aside from the very end of the film, the bit that always gets me is in the med-lab where Huey gives Bruce Dern a mournful squeeze with his robo pincer - a scene echoed in Duncan Jones' recent film Moon.
Sso there we have it - i could bang on about sci-fi special effects and their effect on me all day, but i'll settle for the robots of Silent Running as my favourite example. weep...."