Graham Edwards's Blog, page 15

Cinefex Diaries – The Shape of Water

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Sally Hawkins in “The Shape of Water.” Photo by Kerry Hayes. © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved.

We’re exactly a month away from the December 8 theatrical release of The Shape of Water, the latest offering from filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Billed as an ‘adult fairy tale,’ this R-rated fantasy tells the story of mute janitor Elisa (Sally Hawkins), who encounters a mysterious amphibian man (Doug Jones) in the secret government facility where she works.

The first...

Humble Bundle With Added Horror

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Humble Bundle is selling a great selection of ebooks from Night Shade Books. For just $1.00, you get to download six digital titles including Best Horror of the Year Volume 1, edited by Ellen Datlow, which includes my Nebula Award-nominated novelette Girl in Pieces. Pay $8.00 to boost your booty to 13 books, and for $15 you can round it up to a massive haul of 20 books! All the books are DRM-free and available in multiple e-reader formats.

Those prices are minimum amounts, by the way. If you...

Cinefex Diaries – A Little Homage to Blade Runner 2049

Each time we publish a new issue of Cinefex, I produce a short promo video showcasing the magazine’s cover story, and share it on Facebook, Twitter and whatnot. The videos are frequently (sometimes deliberately) homespun. For issue 148, I got my daughter to paint her hand green and swipe her way through our Star Trek Beyond article. A few issues later, I donned a pair of rubber gorilla hands and pawed at the Kong: Skull Island issue. For other editions, I messed about with some simple animat...

New Novel Coming Soon

The title of this post says it all. But do I hear you ask, “How soon is soon?” I’ll just leave this here:

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Cinefex Diaries – The Dark Tower

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Cinefex Diaries – Thor: Ragnarok

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Writing Star Trek for Cinefex with Scrivener

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I write for Cinefex, a bimonthly magazine devoted to motion picture visual effects. In 2016, one of the many films I covered was Star Trek Beyond. Want to know how I tackled it? I’ll tell you.

First up, a few facts and figures. My Star Trek Beyond article was 8,300 words long – about average for the magazine. With photos, that equated to 21 printed pages. While researching the story I interviewed 13 people, generating roughly 45,000 words of interview transcript. From first interview to fina...

Cinefex 153 – High Octane Aliens

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Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror flick Alien is probably my favourite film of all time. So imagine how thrilled I was to get the gig covering Alien: Covenant for the new issue of Cinefex. Since the average Cinefex article runs to about 26 pages (yes, we really do dig deep with our stories), that’s a big gig.

As I discovered during my interviews, Sir Ridley likes to capture as much as possible in camera – even when he knows it will ultimately be digitally replaced. So the creature team led b...

Animated Insanity With “Mad God (Part 3)”

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If you’re a fan of stop-motion animation, icky underworlds and slavering monsters, you’ll want to jump on board the Mad God express.

Mad God (Part 3), the third instalment in a series of nightmarish short films by legendary animator and visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett, is now looking for backers on Kickstarter. Not that it’s likely to have any trouble hitting its funding target – less than two days into the campaign it’s already over the halfway mark.

The Mad God series takes its audi...

“Alien: Covenant” Crew Remembers “Alien”

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While researching my upcoming Cinefex article on Alien: Covenant, I spoke at length with supervisors in the visual effects, creature effects, and special effects departments. At the end of each interview, I asked everyone the same question:

“What are your memories of seeing the original Alien for the first time?”

As a long-time fan of the film, I had a hunch that most people just can’t shake off the effects of early exposure to Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi horror movie. We never forget what...