Sunday 23 March 2014

Film Poster

Here's the final... I hope. Coming to a theatre near you... if you live in Winnipeg, Toronto, or Vancouver. 


My vote was to have the tagline be: "A Fantasy Role Playing Film"

Saturday 8 March 2014

Two in One Day!?

Back in May, 2013 I was in Winnipeg to help with shooting my friend's short film, Advanced Wizards & Warriors, a comedy splitting between the real world lives of a group of 30-something year old men and their roleplaying game, and occasionally blending the two into one. Here's a poster (in progress), as well as a bunch of photos I took on the shoot. Those of you familiar with Barrowmaze will recognize a few things. I designed and illustrated all of the RPG material, my friend Aaron was the writer, director, editor, special effects producer, make-up guy, etc. (you get the picture).



I'll be reworking this into a new design. Still have to tidy up the photos a bit, as well as place the background in. A group of great comedic improv actors.



Some props for the gaming table, including "official" Wizards & Warriors character sheets. The "advanced" was added later for copyright reasons.




We got to shoot on location at the Manitoba Museum of Man & Nature's "Nonsuch" set, a little medieval village with full-size (but still scaled-down) ship. This was a bit of a childhood fantasy come to life. As a kid, whenever I visited the museum, this spot was always the highlight for me, especially as a nine year old D&D nut.



The gaming table in Aaron's parents' basement, naturally.




This was the best part of the shoot that I attended. Watching the four of them (and Aaron's fiancee Lauren—another very funny improv comedian, not shown) just "do their thing" over and over in different takes. There were a few shots that were interrupted with the crew laughing.

What the Hell is This? A New Post!?

Not dead yet. Thought I'd try to get back into this "blogging thing" again. As many of you know, Barrowmaze Complete is funded, and work is under way. I've been very busy with several projects (strangely, all are nerd-related in nature). First up, my Cry Havoc inspired board game is well underway, I've been drawing quite a bit. I wanted to have a miniatures feel to they game, so I've based many of the character sketches off of old Citadel miniatures to add to the feel. The rules move fairly fast, relying on a simple d20 mechanic (or 2d6 mechanic, haven't decided yet) that handles both hits and injuries with a single roll.  One problem with Cry Havoc, I felt, was distinguishing sides on the board. My game, as you can see, uses colour coding, and the tint of that colour determines the character's class (either peasant class, soldier class, or veteran class). Here's where the chits are at:


The human army, under the working name "Errador" are the mid-range, vanilla army. Decent offensively, but with a bit more defensive ability, and a good number of bows and crossbows. You may notice two of the friar-type guys have an icon on their chit. More on that below. 



Here we have the orcs, much more fun to illustrate. Can you spot the Braveheart inspired orc?


A bunch of "Stun" markers and siege weapons.

Icons that will be on some chits, designating special skills/rules that apply, such as healer, pikeman, engineer and leader.