The Download Munkey : Tracking the Treasure Down …

An additional 3 wallpapers for the John Woo produced anime Appleseed :Ex Machina from the official Warner Videos’ Appleseed : Ex Machina HD DVD site in 1024×768, 1280×1024 and 1900×1200 resolutions.

© Warner Video

While the first wallpaper of the duo Deunan Knute & Briareos Hecatonchires is definitely my favourite, what’s interesting is the third wallpaper featuring a new character in the Appleseed sequel – Tereus, a Bioroid (artificial human) E.S.W.A.T member created with Briareos’ DNA resulting in him resembling the latter before he was transformed into a cyborg after sustaining severe war injuries in World War Three. On top of that, Tereus has inherited Briareos’ excellent combat skills as well as his personality (including his attraction to Deunan).

Three high resolution artworks for the fans below. Click on the images to view the full versions – detailed enough to see the brand on the hubcap of Deunan’s bike

© Warner Video

Many thanks to Fred from M80 / Warner Brothers for the links to the artworks above and informing me of the existence of the official site (the intro video contains the some of the best action sequences of the 2:18 teaser – also available on MySpaceTv) . Below’s two captures from the teaser. Click for high resolution versions.

© Warner Video

Fred also notified me of a Appleseed : Ex Machina trailer remix contest for US residents. While non-US residents can of course register to play around with the nifty trailer remixer, they are ineligible for the grand prize for an all expenses paid trip for 2 to WonderCon 2008 in San Francisco to meet the makers of Appleseed : Ex Machina As a concession, non-US registrants like me get to watch a few extra clips from the film not seen in the teaser video.

Below is a screenshot of what you can expect to play with at the trailer remix site – 15 video clips and 6 MP3s in total for you to mash-up and express your creativity.

My favourite video clips are: Clip 9 where Briareos tackles the target range with dual SMGs (Seburo MN-23s?) firing and Clip 12 where the acrobatic Deunan singlehandedly takes out a minigun-toting foe. And Clip 8 is just plain cool – ejected brass cartridges and empty magazines falling in slow motion and slick action sequences – pure style in this one

© Warner Video

The 1 min soundtrack snippets are pretty listenable too – love the soaring instrumentation of Tetsuya Takahashi’s Synchronicity and the manic breakbeats of Shogo Ohnishi’s Speed Star. Preview the tracks below.

Ex Machina
Mission
Speed Star
Synchronicity
Sortie
Buddy

Download the wallpapers at the official Warner Videos’ Appleseed : Ex Machina HD DVD site or create your trailer remix @ www.appleseedtrailerremix.com. The contest ends on 07 February 2008 so check out www.appleseedtrailerremix.com if you’re interested.

© Warner Video

I’m pretty hyped up about Appleseed : Ex Machina right now, hope it’s as good as the lovely Deunan says it is

Oh yeah, this is the last post for this month (and this year) – going to be on holiday till next year so posting will resume on 8 Jan 2008

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Official Japanese Appleseed : Ex Machina Wallpapers
Appleseed Wallpapers @ Madman Entertainment
The Best John Woo’s Stranglehold Trailer – The E3 2005 Trailer.
Stranglehold Wallpapers

Back in February, I wrote about the cool concept art I found at the official site for Nuclear Dawn, an anime-influenced sci-fi mod for Half-Life 2. I finally found the illustrator for some of those artworks and he happens to be a local artist from Singapore

Known as ukitakumuki on deviantArt, Kai was one of the artists (together with Daniel “Arcipello” Conway) who did the concept art for Nuclear Dawn. Unfortunately the concepts are no longer available on the Nuclear Dawn site, but you can still see some of them in his deviantArt gallery. Below are Twin Moons (top) and Twin Suns (bottom).

© Kai

There’s more concept art done for Nuclear Dawn such as Hell Divers, To Be Free and Wonderful Days among others.

Other than the fantastic Nuclear Dawn pieces, there’s a lot of great artwork in his deviantArt gallery too, of mecha like the amazing 100 Years of Force (top) and Air in Kyoto (bottom), which was done for Half-Life 2 mod Hull Breach …

© Kai

And of warriors both past For My Pride (top) and future Black Trinary (bottom).

© Kai

Some of the other subjects that he illustrates happen to be things that I like a lot, such as the Death Guard Legion of Chaos Space Marines in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. See We Are Legion below …

© Kai

Gundam, like the lone Zaku II in the Zaku Heat of The Night below …

© Kai

Transformers (mainly Starscream) in Like Nothing on Earth (same as the tagline for the RSAF recruitment ad, only that it’s for the Royal Decepticon Air Force this time round …

© Kai

And grim fantasy stuff like Nation of Sol – Urchin Down (below).

© Kai

Check out Kai’s deviantArt Gallery for even more awesome eye candy.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Zaku II Artwork by Tetuya Watanabe
Warren Louw – Illustrator
Keith Thompson – Illustrator
Adrian Smith – Warhammer 40,000 Illustrator
Andrea Uderzo – Warhammer 40,000 Illustrator
StartDrawing.org – Asia’s Drawing Portal

Four official wallpapers from the upcoming animation Appleseed : Ex Machina produced by John Woo and set to be released on 20th Oct 2007 in Japan. First read about Appleseed : Ex Machina over at the SWFToys blog.

© www.exmachina.jp

The first and fourth ones are very cool – I especially like the body armour design for the Olympus ES.W.A.T memebers in the fourth one.

Too bad there’s no 1600×1200 resolution for the wallpapers – only 1025×768 to 1280×1024 sized wallpapers available at the official site @ www.exmachina.jp.

Can’t find the Downloads section for the wallpapers? You need to launch the official Flash site, click Enter and then look for the Downloads button on the bottom left of the picture of Olympus city that pop-ups in a new window. (see below)

halcyon realms also has some scans on Appleseed : Ex Machina from Japanese magazine Animation Note issue 07 which you might also be interested

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Mecha Image of The Day (miotd.com)
Needa Schuetlitch (ニーダ・シュトリッヒ) Wallpaper
Code Guardian Movie
Metal Wolf Chaos Wallpaper
Anime Wallpapers @ Madman.com.au

Mecha Image of The Day was a site I found recently while looking for technical lineart. While I didn’t really find what I was looking for at this site, I did find a lot of illustrations of mecha-related stuff like:

A very detailed Transformers artwork (not too sure about the original source of this artwork)

Battletech Mech technical lineart (Madcat shown above but there’s Loki and Vulture too)

High resolution Macross illustrations. Links are here, here, here, here and here.

Gundam illustrations. (RX-78-2 Gundam (above) here and Rick Dias (below) here).

And this classic Evangelion picture. Must have been drawn at least a decade back before the introduction of the M1 Abrams because the tanks in there are M60s (note externally mounted searchlights).

Major Motoko Kusanagi from the Ghost in The Shell series. (Just saw some Motoko Kusanagi wallpapers at Rendered Beauty quite a while back).

The good thing is that most of these pictures are at nearly 4:3 aspect ratio and so are perfect for the desktop.

In short if you love mecha, you gotta visit Mecha Image of The Day.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Classic Transformers Storybooks
Kinetic Singapore : Robots, Ads and More!
Tetuya Watanabe’s Zaku IIs
MechCommander 2 Encyclopedia
Transformers Comic Wallpapers

Found this wallpaper of the very pretty Needa Schuetlitch (ニーダ・シュトリッヒ) figurine over at Danny Choo’s blog.

© Danny Choo

Don’t really like the usual style of Japanese figurines with the overly-cute oversized eyes. This one is very different IMHO with a pretty yet realistic face and armed with an exceptionally huge rifle – like a FN P90 or FN F2000 chambered for a really large round

Plus the concept illustration (especially the eyes) at the official site reminds me of Shunya Yamashita’s artwork. Not sure if it’s done by Shunya though since I can’t read Japanese

© Good Smile

Browse through other figurines available at Good Smile or look at more photos of Ms Needa over at DannyChoo.com.

Now let me hope for a wallpaper of the concept artwork for the Good Smile’s range of figurines

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Shunya Yamashita & Other Asian Artists @ startdrawing.org
FN Herstal High Resolution Photos
Alessia Zambonin’s Concepts for Paolo Parente’s Dust
Anime Wallpapers @ Madman.com.au
Hellgate London’s Hunter Illustration by Alessandro Baldasseroni