that was quite a twisty pop.

there were good and bad, but the good kind of bad. meaning the kind of bad you learn from and not the kind that just scars you.

it all started what is now a long time ago, comic con. you can check out pics of that from my camera on my facebook here.

after comic con, literally the day after comic con, i flew to scotland. Saint Andrews to be exact. There i taught a film course to some students for 3 weeks. that was fun.

then i was homeless in scotland, literally a bum, for a few days, but a good old friend let me stay over at his house for a week before the NG london meet in Reading, a town outside london.

then i went to the London Meet. Which you can see pictures of here that luis put together nicely, as usual.

after the london meet, dim was nice enough (again) to let me stay with him at his flat in Surbiton, a town just outside of london. I hung out with him for a week, and being that i only have a Nintendo 64, and he's obviously heavily supplied in game-ity, it was nice to catch up in the gaming world, but mainly of course, catch up with him as well, and meet his fantastic flat mates.

it was an incredible adventure, in fact, many adventures. and although the expensive U.K. sucked me dry of all my money, every single pence was worth it. I would write down in full detail my complete experience, but that would surpass the 31,233 character space i have left.

all i can say is i'm glad to be back and finally have a computer to get back and cracking on my flash.

hey everyone!

i made it here to NG London Meetup number 3. just wanted to give a shout out that we're on live web cam now, and will be off and on throughout the whole weekend. you can check it out here fags

*EDIT* we changed from tom fulps stick cam account to luis'. you can catch us on the cam on this following link:

http://www.stickam.com/luis_ng

the reason why we haveto change is because tom fulpneeds his account for PAX. but we are obviousely cooler and more interesting to watch than PAX. people are too busy to pay attention to the web cam durring PAX anyways.

SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THE CHANGE.

have fun possting nonsensical freezeframes ofus being jackasses.

-HVH

Just want to post about this,

I might not be having interweb access many times, so might as well take advantage to keep myself breifly updated...

I'm here, hanging out with Tom and Dim of the super flash bros at a hotel. Dan comes in tommorrow, so these two brothers were kind enough to let me spend a night here with them until tommorrow at the last minute (almost literally)... or today... it's like 3 am or something here. But yeah, glad to see them, great start meeting up with them first, good to see familiar faces (being that we met for the NG London meet in January). So yeah, tommorrow i meet with dan and start off the Geek fest here at the con. I'm glad i saved up for coming here. I feel good things rising from this experience. They showed me their business cards and boy are they fancy. Tom nearly slobbered over their precious shiny coating the printers gave them as he proudly showed the ingenius concept of having both their cards printed in one. Each side of the same card being for each brother. So yeah, they are bad ass. Of course though, similar to the london meet. I kind of started talking about a few (which in my case is a lot) ideas of some games and such i have in mind. which branched out into big discussions of gameplay for long periods of time... most of that time being occipied by my rambling i can't seem to control, that i only realise i'm rambling when it's too late. i guess that's how rambling goes... and i've just realised i rambled now, being that this paragraph is way to long and already jumped through 12 topics or so of things that are mostly pointless...

i'll shut up now.

Comic Con is approaching and i'm excited. I will be leaving this Tuesday to comic con and meet up with mah buddy danomano where we will stay at a hotel together during our stay. I am very sure that i'll have more than a blast, most likely a mushroom cloud...

but, not only will i be going to "the con" but the day after i come back i will be flying to Saint Andrews in Scotland where i got a job teaching a film course to some students by Saint Andrews University. I am as excited for this opportunity as well. I love films, making them, watching them, but now i get to teach of it. Just to throw it out there (in case you didn't know) i'm not mentally unprepared when it comes to film knowledge. when i was living in spain i got a degree in film.

I'll be in Scotland for 4 or 5 weeks, and after that i fly to london and meet up with more (some already seen at comic con) NGers (also pronounced 'n***as'). This will be my second time attending the NG london meet, but i believe it's the 3rd official London meet. and again, i'm as excited to go to the london meet as i am for comic con and scotland... So basically i'm going to have this constant stream of awesomeness these next two months, which i find very cool, in fact... too cool.

I've been saving up loads for all this. So i'm sorta broke now. but this teaching gig is surely paying off well (thank you expensive English currency) so it's not that bad. In the end, all this spending is more than worth it. Because, without sounding too gay or pathetic, your 'n***as' are the best friends i've got right now. hanging out can cost whatever it wants but the experience is just as pricey as a master card commercial (as in priceless). and i mean this from the bottom of my very heart. I appreciate all of you. yes, even you rtil, because you all have built a great community (ignoring numerous users, i'm talking about the artists) with lots of different people and creations, and things to look up to, things to worry about, things to be pissed about, and all of these things are the cogs in our giant machine of creative work, exchange, collaboration, and hate flashes. And coming together in person periodically only humanizes our already fantastical portal of art.

so, to the big newgrounds family, i bid thee farewell (but hello to some soon in person) until September 16th.

-HVH

P.S. I got some great stuff in store for the site when i come back... GREAT stuff.

P.P.S. also, isn't this caterpillar cute as fuck!?

Hans Van Harken (3:49:02 AM): i'm news posting this
ZekeySpaceLizard(3:49:25 AM): !

peoples brains lately work like a 3 part addition problem

this+this+this=good

i also noticed it in watching "Hancock" and i see why people don't seem to mind this excessively shaky cam lately After seeing somethign like hancock i know why it's so important to hold a shot and frame a shot right, because each shot of any movie needs to tell the viewer something, and if the director isn't clearly displaying what's going on he/she is telling me that he/she doesn't have a clear idea what to tell.

Within this massive super power fight i just pick up on:

-kick
-punch
-launch
-fly punch.

i only pick up on those things but i don't see HOW he kicks him, HOW he punches him, HOW everything is happening. i literall tried just zoning out in the theatre. there were many times, even outside of action sequences where i was just giving up and loosing my breath from the exhaustion, because of keeping my eyes in focus on these mammoth shaky close ups. So i felt experimental and just let the light flow through my eyeballs and i could actually pick up on things more. even though it was just a BUNCH of colors and blurrs telling me "kick punch kick kick fly" in a way, just zoning out and not analyzing made it easier to watch.

i'm mainly talking about the action sequences of course, although the normal sequences were just about as tiresome for me. i concluded with the fact that most people don't watch movies, they see movies.

watch: look at or observe attentively.

see: perceive with eyes.

i think there is a CAMERA MAN STRIKE or something but they just wont tell us and they're highering any average joe to pick up a camera. Seriously, i mean, what's with the constant close ups, handheld close ups that aren't even framed correctly. Close ups are used for moments of intense emotion that a director wants the actor to transmit his/her feeling directly into the souls of the audience. I don't think that 99.72% of the time during "Hancock" Hancock was experiencing some kind of extreme intense emotion at that moment relating to what's going on with his surroundings that we really needed to feel ourselves.

also, i adore handheld, but i think the nickname for it "shaky cam" gave directors the inspiration to actually intentionally shake the camera to make it obvious something is handheld. the only reason one does handheld is to have the freedom to move within the actors and place the audience almost like another character in there in the movie. but that doesn't mean you should avoid keeping the camera steady and setting clear focus points and stuff.

I've heard somewhere someone pointing out that "handheld gives movies a more realistic look because the camera acts like a human eye" I've thought about that and i actually think that a handheld (like the abusively unsteady ones lately) actually makes it more obvious that the presence of a camera man is there between the actors. simply because the fact that someone is constantly focusing, and stepping around the actors, and zooming in on unimportant things to what's going on... basically looking for you, makes it more obvious that you're looking through a camera.

I think people are mislead by the "realism" factor that a handheld camera brings, it's not because it's like a human eye, it's because documentaries mainly are shot handheld because of production values or because they might be pissing someone off by filming them so they have to run. and because documentaries are about printing truth and facts onto film, when you see a fiction shot in the same way, it gives the illusion of a documentary.

in a way, the viewers are wrapping their lips around these film maker's ass while they take a dump into their mouths, and wash down the taste with popcorn and soda. maybe twislers, too.

anyways, that's my pointless rant. I mean no offenses... yada yada :D

oh and, hancock wasn't a terrible movie. i thought it touched some interesting subjects, but the way it was filmed just didn't allow me to enjoy it. and i think at this point, it's not even a matter of taste, it's just filmed very bad. and of course, in the end this is only my opinion :)

-HVH

p.s. ZekeySpaceLizard(3:44:02 AM): hancock - charlize theron = decent

I am now Officially a member of the RWD, I just made my first submission for it as well. I hope you like it, it's cute and has lots and lots of kitties :3

Christopher John Dell'Isola II has interviewed me, Hans Van Harken. Of course though, it's not technically an interview in the way where it's not question/answer, question/answer etc. It's just basically a conversation where i make an ass of myself constantly. So enjoy ripping this shit apart in criticism.

watch it HERE

Also, I am now an official member of the RWD. And I am very happy.

Mr. Hans has much to show!

1. Mario Math

2. Ultra Vision

3. Buzzwerm

4. Love of Rats

5. Rosser

6. Rossie

7. Tomosexual

-to me, this is where they start getting a bit better-

8. "Say Good-bye"

9. Robots

10. Frozen Landscapes of the Future

11. Gabe

12. Brother?

13. Mr. Pinker

There you are! 13 shitty things for a recently passed Friday the 13th. Now comment and go fuck yourself.

:3

Hey everyone,

all the Awesome movie fans can finally rest in peace because a "Grand Theft Awesome" movie has finally been made! Only not by Egoraptor, but by Chris O'Neill, and I was chosen to do the voices! So check it out and enjoy.

SPOILER ALERT!! SPOILER ALERT!!

M. Night Shyamalan's new movie "The Happening" has too many similarities with this short film I made in Scotland during the summer of 2007. It won 'best picture' and 'best cinematography' in the course that summer. You can see it here on my site.

The happening is a horror/thriller/disaster movie, and it's about people killing themselves for some reason all over the world. Now here's the spoiler: apparently (get it? a parent) these people killing themselves is a chemical or spore in a plant that spreads throughout people and that's what makes them kill themselves.

In my movie instead of a plant, it's a parasite that grows in your brain and at full growth takes over your brain and makes you kill yourself.

one thing that struck me was when i made my movie, a goal i had was to give it a sort of traditional kind of feeling like "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)".

Mr. M. Night mentioned a similar thing, that he wanted to make this a more traditional horror and used "The Invasion Of the Body Snatchers" example.

I guess it just kinda surprised me, and saddened me at the same time, because i tend to hate M. Night's movies, there are a few good or okay one's. But i hope he doesn't make a ridicule out of an idea i made and thought had potential. The thing about M. Night is that he has potential ideas, but they aren't at all engaging or captivating, and the conclusions of his movies are just like a 180 degree twist that when you are presented with it you find yourself facing back at the rest of the movie and realize how pointless all that build up was.

anyways. watch my movie so that you can understand the similarities between this and the Happening when you watch it.