New WOTW film? Maybe, perhaps.... we'll see

[Lonesome Crow]

Jan 21, 2012 0:00:25 GMT 1 stevesudz said:

The Jeff Wayne / Trim fans are ganging up on me....I'm hiding in a cupboard.

Not at all. As much as I like the Trim design, it is not practical to have the legs spread apart that wide (Note to self: Should I rephrase that last statement?.... No! let it stand.) the machine could not lift a foot off the ground, instead of the foot rising up, the body would just angle down until the machine fell over.

[Relyt]

Advanced martian technology. I wouldn't be surprised if they secretly utilized anti-gravity thingamabobs (Strange that spell check recognizes "thingamabobs," but panics when I neglected to insert a hyphen in "anti-gravity.") to counteract the falling over of the main body during steps.

[Thunder Child]

Although I was introduced to the story by the Jeff Wayne album, and read the book years after that, for a long while the Trim tripods where THE machines for me.

However after reading the book itself this quicklky changed and now I think the machines are iconic in design but silly in a praktical sence. And nothing like the original description. I would hate to see these machines in a TWOTW movie, I really do.

The book tells us that the Fighting machines are around 100 feet high, most of the images with the Trim tripod show us a machine that is WAY much bigger than that...

Stick to the description in the book is what I say... And you, Steve, are doing an excellent job with that

Jan 21, 2012 1:55:08 GMT 1 Lonesome Crow said:

Jan 21, 2012 0:00:25 GMT 1 stevesudz said:

The Jeff Wayne / Trim fans are ganging up on me....I'm hiding in a cupboard.

Not at all. As much as I like the Trim design, it is not practical to have the legs spread apart that wide (Note to self: Should I rephrase that last statement?.... No! let it stand.) the machine could not lift a foot off the ground, instead of the foot rising up, the body would just angle down until the machine fell over.

[Thunder Child]

steve: had to laugh very hard when I read this comment on your trailer on Youtube:

Sorry, didnt like it, the martian fighting machines are nothing like what they are meant to be!
britishpatriot12

@britishpatriot12 What SHOULD they look like Mr Patriot?
SteveThinkTank

@stevethinktank Like in the musical version...
britishpatriot12

Man...

[stevesudz]

Cheers for the supporting comments Chaps. yes the comment by Mr Patriot is quite funny but indicative of the dominance that JWs version holds! Fans of WOTW seem to be split and the JW/Trim supporters are starting to gain momentum..
In response to the joint thread comments about a period film, be that a cgi one or live action. It is destined to happen. The only questions are whether it is done as a fan film ( none profit), TV series or big budget movie. I know of a handful of people who are just waiting for the right time. There are some issues to be solved. e.g. UK copyright falling into line with US; time elapsing from the previous versions; The changes in funding strategies for production companies settling into a new post Film Council system; and confidence in the movie markets rising along with producer eagerness. All these add up to the biggest headache being production design and who will fund it. A fan film would take years so I dont think its worth the effort for free. When the copyright lapses in the UK, Ive a feeling something will happen. JW is making as much money as he can while he can. Lets see what he does in 2015. In the meantime, I will carry on...

[Lonesome Crow]

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that a little book about an alien invasion could cause such controversy and public opinion..... ;D

[stevesudz]

Never was a truer word spoken Lonesome..(except when my wife said I was doomed for using the phrase bingo wing). I think all the controversy and argument is great. It shows folks have passion for something they hold dear. I love this book so much, I have gone back to the drawing board and my Tripes are up on the ramp with the wheels off. Too many mistakes. Its all fun though. The script is underway because we finally worked out how to turn the book into a film, with everything in the right place, no tedious narration and expansion of the right sequences into full action scenes. We have altered very very little. The book is a sack of presents but Wells only opened a handful...One sequence is potentially a full ten minutes but consists of one sentence in the novel...EEEEE! its Christmas!
ps I know most folks here are skeptical and they are right to be ( of any attempts). Im not pretending that I have the means to make a film of this scale now because I haven't. BUT, I have got the resources and connections now, to present a concept and market focussed package to investors. The comments made on here are all useful. The emails and letters I get are all useful. The business side of things is propped up by the very same because investors want to know there is a market for the movie and the merchandise. So please, whatever comments you want to make, make them. Good or bad. It all helps. Tell people about what we are doing and feel free to write emails to SSA ( stevesouthernassociates.com). I think that in another 12 months I can put a pretty convincing case to the funders. Any Ideas for a Director?
Steve

[Lonesome Crow]

Love the new sequence of TWotW on the showreel link Steve.
The Thunder Child looks brilliant now and the Fighting machine also.



The whole site is impressive.

[Lonesome Crow]

New short War of the worlds sequence at the end of this film. Although the whole thing is worth watching.

[McTodd]

Impressive stuff - I'd seen Steve's stuff before (at DeviantArt and earlier clips on YouTube), not realising he's the Steve on this forum. His fighting machines are among the best I've seen. As I noted on the Pendragon thread a couple of days ago, however, his 'Thunder Child' looks more Norwegian than British, though very well constructed.

[Relyt]

Jan 29, 2012 2:53:48 GMT 1 McTodd said:

Impressive stuff - I'd seen Steve's stuff before (at DeviantArt and earlier clips on YouTube), not realising he's the Steve on this forum. His fighting machines are among the best I've seen. As I noted on the Pendragon thread a couple of days ago, however, his 'Thunder Child' looks more Norwegian than British, though very well constructed.

I can shed some light on this. I researched into this after reading your comment (I began researching warships that existed before the Second World War only a few months ago.), and you are correct in the resemblance. However, the Tordenskjold was actually built for Norway by Elswick, a British shipyard famous for building fast, handsome warships (Though their protection left something to be desired.). Simply put, Tordenskjold's a British warship built for Norway.

[McTodd]

I know Elswick built Tordenskjold (they, and Armstrong, built ships for many foreign navies). However, compare that vessel with contemporary Royal Navy (British) warships and she looks quite different. When Elswick (and Armstrong) built warships for overseas navies, they were usually built to quite different specifications (from those of similar British vessels) to suit the relevant navy's requirements. This is why on the odd occasion when a warship being built in a British yard for a foreign customer ended up being purchased for the Royal Navy, they tended to be fairly unsatisfactory because they weren't built for British requirements.

My point is simply that the CGI ship being used as Thunder Child - though superbly designed, built and rendered - does not look quite like a British warship (built for the British navy) of the era.

[stevesudz]

McTodd and Relyt, you guys are right on all counts so The prototype HMS Thunderchild has now been scrapped and is being recycled as Lean Mean Grilling machines..
I will however explain my reasoning. This version of Thunderchild was partially based on the Tordenskyold plus a couple of other similar ships for a good reason. The ship which Wells describes didn't exist at the time but ( as usual) he was predicting something or at least extrapolating a concept which was in its' infancy in order to fulfill the needs of the scene in the book. He wanted the Tripods to be in conflict with the most powerful war machines he knew of. The Navy. The trouble was that the navys' warships all needed deeper water than the Tripods could navigate. The only ship he knew well, that could navigate shallow water was the Polyphemus as we now know. But the Polyphemus looks like a brewers dray sunk past the axles and is about as scary as a pair of boxer shorts..So he altered the design of the ship ( in his head most likely although he did converse with Navy Staff at some point) to make it a more fearsome adversary for the Martians. Many illustrators of the book use designs which are too late. The book was written in the Ironclad era. Modern warships as we know them didn't exist then and all the designs except Polyphemus are too deep for the estuary where the fight takes place. Even though the coastal defence ships were not for the Royal Navy, they are the closest in concept to the fast, low, well armed attack ship which is The Thunderchild. The UK ships which are the genesis of the Destroyer ( the closest we would have at the time) are the Havock and Hornet, neither of which fit the bill... Having said all that...Im redesigning it!! There are too many problems yet...keep the opinions coming though!

[McTodd]

Hate to cause extra work for you! One point to bear in mind is that WotW is set in the early 20th century, a few years in the future from writing and publication. So although Wells didn't know for sure what warships would look like then, there's some space for you to choose a real post-1897 ship to base your Thunder Child on (Mike Trim, for example, based his famous painting on a Canopus class pre-dreadnought; David Hardy's original painting of Thunder Child sinking used the Russian pre-dreadnought Petropavlovsk as a model).

Funny you should mention Havock and Hornet - Pendragon's Thunder Child was based on HMS Velox, a similar (though slightly later) vessel. Several marks to them for at least using a RN warship of the right era, minus several million marks for the abysmal execution...

I wrote a set of FAQs about Thunder Child for an earlier incarnation of the board - I found them recently, re-cast as an article with its own webpage, which is nice:
www.freewebs.com/wotwfaq/thunderchild.htm

My main theme in the article was that Thunder Child bears no close resemblance to any warship actually built (as you know) which gives an artist a certain freedom to create their own (within boundaries). My feeling is that basing Thunder Child on some kind of cruiser would fit the bill better than an ironclad, which implies a battleship, although the fact that Wells refers to the Thunder Child as an ironclad could be seen as problematic, but in my opinion is irrelevant as his use of naval terminology was rather loose.

Left to my own devices, I would probably base her on a torpedo gunboat, such as an Alarm class ship:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_class_torpedo_gunboat

Or the wonderfully named HMS Spanker:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HMS_Spanker_%281889%29.jpg

All were fairly nippy, had two funnels as Wells mentions, and their main guns (with a calibre of 4.7" and firing a 45 pound shell) were more than large enough to deal with a Martian Fighting Machine - as we know from the book, the Army downed two tripods with field guns which at that time wouldn't have been larger than 18 pounders or so.

Whatever you do, I'm sure it will be excellent, both because your modelling talents are superb and because you clearly know your onions about warships of that period!

[Thunder Child]

Wow, HMS Spanker is one beautifull ship! The ship is also low in the water, a property that Wells expressly describes to Thunder Child.