Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote that Star Trek: Phase II’s James Cawley got the rights to do a Buck Rogers web series? Turns out he was inadvertently beaten to the punch by , a student-made CGI feast by Patrick deLeon.
The five-minute short pays tribute to the style of the 1930s serials, where Rogers first graced the silver screen. That means it’s chock full of purposefully stilted acting, wacky costumes and enormous phallic spaceships, but it also gives a nod to 2004’s vastly underrated bomb, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which also referenced the classic serial clichés.
Director and star deLeon created the short for his Intermediate Editing class at the Art Institute of Colorado, where he’s majoring in Visual Effects. In all, he spent four weeks making the film, doing green screen work in his living room and everything else in his computer, where he used 3d Studio Max for models and animation, and Adobe After Effects for compositing. Turns out that he’s quite the fan of old-school sci-fi; if you check out deLeon’s personal site, Atomic Rayguns, he has photos of cool goodies he’s either built or created, like Sky Captain guns, Robby the Robot toys and more.
I have to say that he has got talent.
Yeah, good stuff, no question. I was also impressed by the old-school rayguns he built that are displayed on his website. Pretty neat.
This is so cool. This is like of course I think he jus meant it as a short and nothing more, but it’s still cool.
That was a cool little flick–thanks for the suggestion, Amanda!