Power Twins Comics

Announcement

by D. on 20 August, 2017 at 03:26

Pretty much ever since I appeared on 4 Guys and a Comic, we’ve been working on Flying Pirate Ships! It wasn’t our intention to announce much else about it until we had more of it done, because we know that talking about something we’re going to do is the fastest way to not get it done.

That was until last night…

Flying Pirate Ships! is the most ambitious project I’ve ever planned (for publication). Working on a bit of math no one will ever see, I realized that the adventure of writing an adventure might make for some worthwhile blog fodder.

So, we announce that Flying Pirate Ships! is – will be – a thing, and it has a facebook fan site.

Goldilocks Zone – This Bag of Cocaine is Just Right

by D. on 4 March, 2023 at 04:00

Though inspired by a thing that happened, Cocaine Bear is really a fictional monster movie where you hope the monster wins. Some of the human characters are just there to get eaten by the creature and others you really really want to get their [select piece of human anatomy] ripped off by a thoroughly ripped black bear.

The movie itself is almost a B-Movie script with a really good cast and an appropriate budget. It is hilarious. The characters are a bit cartoony in composition but their actions are organic and reasonable for the situations they find themselves in. Faced with the bear, the ambulance driver shoves her patient in the “bus” gets in and leaves — her teammate behind. Two kids find a brick of cocaine and know what it is, because — set in the eighties — we used to actually teach kids what drugs looked like.

Some scenes are hyperviolent and overtly bloody, but it is to a darkly comical level. Hands and heads are ripped off without being stomach turning. At the same time, proper moulage is used on an almost survivor’s backside. I mean: we don’t really want the bear to eat the kids or hurt the fancy show dog in her rather expensively groomed “show coat”, but you are rooting for the bear. (Spoiler: the dog does not get hurt.)

Director Elizabeth Banks does an excellent job assembling a weird mix of monster movie, slasher film, family acceptance story and makes it just silly fun. The music is disjointed in a way that amps up the silliness.

As Ray Liotta’s last completed film project, it serves as a great bookend for his career. We came to know him in Goodfellas where he played a basically decent but bad guy whose world comes apart because he gets involved in dealing cocaine. He goes out with an hilarious bang in Cocaine Bear as a basically decent bad guy whose world comes apart because he’s in the cocaine trade — and there’s a bear.

└ Tags: Movies, Reviews

STOL – Trying Out Stuff

by D. on 26 September, 2022 at 17:25

We’ve been playing with a new free mod for DCS World, and just love the performance envelope of the OV-10A Bronco. This aircraft was designed to operate from short, unimproved fields, so it’s slow, can land just about anywhere, and take off again.

As for the filmmaking, this was a different sort of experience. Normally, DCS World allows us to use (what’s called) a “track file” so we can re-watch a flight from any angle we choose. They are a little buggy, but when they work, we only have to fly a stunt once, then we can go back and film it as though we had a thousand cameras all filming a live event. The track files for the OV-10A are completely “horked,” so we couldn’t use one to film a short takeoff and landing. Instead we flew multiple takes (in 3rd-person point of view), filming as though we only had one camera – just like a real movie. Not every take was the same action. We edited is all together to make it look like we did the thing. There are a few points where we (knowingly) have “continuity errors” (like having the external fuel tank attached after the shot where we dropped it), but the point was using different materials and practicing different tools.

In fairness, the “after-credits scene” is a raw cockpit recording of our pilot flying into and out of 1300 feet of “hole in the jungle,” so we could demonstrate that we did, in fact, do the thing.

Introducing Monongahela Airways

by D. on 4 June, 2022 at 01:56

So this isn’t the thing we’ve been promising forever when we started being more active on YouTube, but this is a thing we did.

It’s a fully scripted and planned bit of satire. Like, we actually wrote a thing with the intent of making a video, and this is the video.

Learning Premiere … uh, XXIX?

by D. on 14 May, 2022 at 02:50

We’ve been posting more videos than other content over the last year. Most of it has been sim-aviation related, though we did recut a video of D. playing Rockband 2.

Yesterday we put up something of an “out takes” reel that we’re pretty happy with.

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Learning Premiere II

by D. on 4 March, 2021 at 13:37

We put together another video in Adobe Premiere last night. This one was a technical challenge. The source material had a displayed timestamp, and I wanted it to be sync’d throughout.

It’s how “we” crushed a nosewheel on landing.