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We’re one day shy of DC rolling out their first phase of Convergence titles along with the rest of tomorrow’s new comic book day lineup, in the mean-time, here are a few of the entertainment headlines catching notice this week:

– The Marvel Studios films have become synonymous with post-credit stingers. At this point, audiences have become trained to not walk out of a Marvel film until the final credit has rolled, which I’d say is a good thing given the hard work that’s put into these blockbuster entertainments. Even non-Marvel films have attendees wondering if they should stay after the credits. No joke, I once heard some guys behind me at an Interstellar screening last year sticking around for a post-credits tag.

With Marvel’s upcoming Avengers: Age of Ultron though, Joss Whedon tells Entertainment Weekly that you won’t have to stick around too long after the final scene:

There is nothing at the very end. And that’s not a fake-out. We want people to know so they don’t sit there for 10 minutes and then go: ‘Son of a bitch! I’ll kill them!’

He’s probably referencing the reactions to the final post credits scenes of Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, both of which elicited some groans from audiences that I attended with. To be fair, I found both of those examples to be the most germane scenes to the films that preceded them, but clearly, audiences are in it for the big surprises.

Kevin Feige quickly stepped in and clarified that there would be a mid-credits stinger, just not a second one. So, feel free to make your plans accordingly.

– We’ve got another character confirmation for 2016’s Deadpool, as Ed Skrein (Game of Thrones) has revealed on Twitter that he will be playing Ajax in the upcoming Ryan Reynolds-starring X-Men spin-off (that’s a lot of hyphens).

#deadpool#ajaxpic.twitter.com/wfyRU9i9fV

— Ed Skrein (@edskrein) April 7, 2015

Ajax is a mentally unstable member of the Weapon X program that crosses Deadpool’s path during their time there. Later on, he goes on a killing spree, attempting to take out anyone involved in the top-secret project, including Deadpool himself.

– In only tangentially news, the third Tron film continues to gear up at Disney, as both Garret Hedlund (one of the stars of the upcoming Pan) and Olivia Wilde (The Lazarus Effect) are set to reprise their roles from 2012’s Tron Legacy, itself a sequel to 1982’s cult classic Tron.

While the film is still untitled and the plot remains under wraps, the new sequel will also see the return of Tron Legacy helmer Joseph Kosinski.

Tron Legacy accumulated around $400 million at the box office, sparking off a new franchise hit for the House of Mouse. This new outing will begin shooting sometime this fall. Wilde is repped by WME, Untitled and Ziffren Brittenham, Hedlund by WME, Brillstein Entertainment and Sloane Offer.

Walt Disney Productions changed forever when two guys named Mike and Frank showed up.

I’ve come across people who believe that Max Headroom, the Channel 4 character from the Eighties, was a genuine piece of computer animation. But although he was conceived by the animators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (of Cucumber Films fame) Max himself was portrayed by actor Matt Frewer, placed into latex makeup and a shiny costume and set amidst a strange of technological tricks.

Half of the frames from the footage used in Max Headroom were removed in production, resulting in a juddery look to suggest animation shot on twos, and Frewer was bluescreened in front of a basic digital backdrop. The crew even added deliberate faults to the “animation” – such as the stammer which became Max’s trademark – to complete the effect.

This process seems somewhat surreal today, in our brave new world of Maya, Xtranormal and Blender. Max Headroom was created at a time when 3D CGI animation was desirable, but not always affordable; if the budget did not allow it, then the crew had to fake computer animation in front of the camera.

Another good example of this can be found in the 1981 film Escape from New York. Early on in the movie we see what appears to be a wireframe model of Manhattan; in actual fact, a physical model was built for this sequence, with reflective tape placed along the edges of the buildings. Shot under ultraviolet light, this recreated the luminescent green-on-black effect of primitive CGI.

There has even been an incident in which a budget imitation of CGI itself received a budget imitation. In 1987 an unidentified signal hacker managed to replace two television broadcasts with a mildly disturbing video of a home-made Max Headroom show. In this improvised effort Max was portrayed by a man in a shop-bought mask, while the moving backdrops – in the original series, an example of genuine digital animation amongst the pseudo-CGI – were replaced with somebody offscreen wiggling a bit of corrugated metal about.

These are all extreme examples; during this period, it was more common for digital animation to be emulated using hand-drawn techniques. Often used as a visual motif in kids’ science fiction-themed cartoons (witness the cel animated wireframes in the opening sequence to Transformers) this approach was put to good use by Rod Lord‘s animation work on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy television series from 1981. Created using litho film and coloured gels, these sequences suggested digital graphics simply by combining glowing primarily-coloured images with a black background. An added plus was that the animation could get away with being a little bit jerky…

One sequence in Hitchhiker’s Guide portrayed an intergalactic war as an early video game, a theme drawn upon by other animators: for example, in 1982 a British public information film used Space Invaders-like imagery to advise audiences on safe driving [see image below]. The biggest example of this, however, came when Disney produced an entire feature film based around the look of eighties arcade games: Tron.

Tron contained genuine CGI animation backed up with large amounts of compositing tricks based around matte effects and backlighting; this made the live action footage look as though it had been digitally processed. As a result, the film stands as arguably the premiere example of pseudo-CGI.

In her book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor Clare Kitson remarked on the fact that Max Headroom, Channel 4’s biggest animated hit, was not actually animated. But as she went on to argue, perhaps it is time for a reappraisal:

I wonder if we might indeed classify those sequences as animation nowadays. With the plethora of different technologies now employed, the previous narrow definition (which insisted that the movement itself must be created by the animator) seems a bit old-fashioned. These days anything that appears on a screen and moves but is not a record of real life – including creatures moved by motion capture – tends to fall under the animation umbrella… The current popular synonym for animation, ‘manipulated moving image’, seems to be made for Max.

Of course, if Max had been made using actual CGI he would have ended up as a creaky old relic, rather like the “Money for Nothing” video which came out the year after his debut. Instead, Jankel, Morton and Frewer came up with a genuinely iconic creation that has aged surprisingly well.

Today, it is all too easy for animators to fall back on the tricks of their software and lose track of the wider aesthetic potential of their work. What Max Headroom—and, to an extent, some of the other pieces mentioned here—show is the opposite effect: digital animation spurring creativity in analogue work. They have an ingenuity and hand-made charm which is missing from so much modern computer animation.

Primitive digital imagery has had something of a resurgence across the past decade or so, to the point where pastiches of 8-bit pixel graphics have found their way into mainstream productions such as Wreck-It Ralph. Perhaps it is time that the animators and digital artists of today rediscovered the lesser-known cousin of this aesthetic: the strange world of pseudo-CGI.

NEIL EMMETT is the editor of The Lost Continent, a fantastic resource devoted to British animation, past and present. This piece is an expanded version of a post that originally appeared on his site.

Next month, Giant Robot will host a solo exhibition of work by the Spanish-born artist Alberto Mielgo, best known in the U.S. for his art direction on the Disney TV series TRON: Uprising.

The show will take place at Giant Robot’s GR Works storefront in downtown Los Angeles (114 W. 4th St. Los Angeles, CA 90013). There will be an opening reception on Monday, November 5, from 6-10pm, and the show will run for one week. Titled Albert Mielgo: Solo, it documents the past three years of Mielgo’s output, and will focus on his models and their working process together. “I think it’s fair to talk about them that people know how good they are,” Mielgo said. “How much they mean to me, and why I decided to paint them.”

Mielgo has exhibited his paintings in Spain and the UK. In 2010, Mielgo was a subject of the short film documentary Innocent In A Way (NSFW) by French filmmaker Alexis Wanneroy. Mielgo started his career as an animator on features like Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, El Cid: The Legend and Jester Till. In addition to that, he storyboarded on Corpse Bride, created conceptual art for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, and drew the backgrounds for the intro of the videogame Beatles Rock Band.

Check out this kick ass new trailer for Disney XD’s Tron: Uprising. The series will premiere next month with a voice cast that includes Paul Reubens, Nate Corddry, Mandy Moore, Reginald Vel Johnson and Bruce Boxleitner as “Tron”. Oh, and Elijah Wood plays the main character, leader of a revolution inside The Grid, named “Beck” (great name, eh?).

The show will officially debut on Thursday, June 7th on Disney XD, with a prelude called Tron: Uprising, Beck’s Beginning airing on the regular Disney Channel on May 18th. Charlie Bean (Ren & Stimpy, Samurai Jack) is directing and exec producing, and the incredible Alberto Mielgo is also contributing to the project.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Tron

This funny new Duck Brand tape spot recreates the light cycle scene from the original Tron using duct tape, and features internet “Tron Guy” (Jay Maynard). The concept was generated via crowdsourcing through Tongal.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Duck Tape, Tron

Chris Battle is having a couple of auctions through eBay Giving Works to benefit Give2Asia. Chris: “They’re for 2 additional Tron Quorra prints that were featured in Q-Pop’s Help Japan show out here in L.A. last month. Since the quickly organized Q-Pop show was unable to offer international sales thru their online store, I decided to offer these extra prints on eBay to allow some of my overseas fans (Some of whom contacted me about their inability to buy the Q-Pop pieces) to get in on the action.  The auctions just went live this evening, and will end May 1st @ 9:00 PM.”

The two Quorra auctions are here (blue) and here (red).

TRON Legacy poster by Eric Tan. There’s a second one too, showcasing the original movie. Both posters are far better than either movie ever was. Also: brace for massive reblogging.

Hi everyone, I have a fresh website with some new colourful illustrations and surface pattern designs. Also, I'm featured in Augusts Digital Artist Magazine with a tutorial, on detailing line art :)
New work called Tron Down Town... more here
http://www.mousetricks.co.uk/

Comic-Con predictions (New York Magazine ranks the post-preview buzz around upcoming "tent-pole" releases with 'Scott Pilgrim' named biggest winner and a lukewarm reception to the "Green Hornet" trailer spelling trouble ahead. More on what went... Read the rest of this post