#bill davis

[mythirdparent]

[highly-important]

I don’t have anything to say about the game, but Leisure Suit Larry 6 has such an insane aesthetic, I don’t even know how to describe it. Its like a mash-up of several different design trends from the early nineties.

I wonder if some of the textures in the game are meant to evoke the surreal aesthetics of early 90s CGI animation. The really bizarre mix of dense textures, near photo realism, intense metal gradients, and objects with 0 texture at all.

What is also likely is that this is just the product of them using early 90s graphic software to create a “photo collage” look. You end up with something that fits in the aesthetic at the time because you’re using the tools of the time.

Image on the left by David Hofmann, 1993  / the right image from Leisure Suit Larry 6. They both have that incredibly textured wall. The frame-less photos. Even similar treatment of gold metallics.

3d artwork from the time was a lot more rigid and geometric. LSL6 has really fun, wonky perspective that is reminiscent of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The  truncated rectangle shapes were just really popular in a lot of graphic design and cartooning of the era.

LSL6 on left, New Wave by Chuck Beeson on the right. I think some of the shape language also comes from some of the Punk / Pacific Wave styles from the 90s.  The use of triangles and zig zag shapes, animal prints and a paper-cut out feel. A little bit of 50s googie kitch in some of the shapes as well. It gives everything a fun feeling.

Look at these two. Detailed, photographic-looking plants mixed with impossible perspective and skewed lines, the 2d carpet pattern, areas of concentrated texture, mixed with smooth gradients and flat, solid colors.

Just incredibly bizarre. I kind of think its genius.

UPDATE

No one asked, but I found the LSL6 design document on archive.org. This is what it has to say about the art direction. “ultra-luxurious, artistic, tasteful, ultra-post-modern.”  ““Toon-like” buildings set in photo-realistic backgrounds. Scanned photographic images of clouds, oceans, trees, mountains, etc. are combined with cartoonish, impossible, wacked-out Bill Davis buildings.” “The contrast of photographs, rendered art, and Toon characters even looks like fun.”

This confirms that they were intentionally using photo collages.

Bill Davis was an art director at Scierra games. I want to make a post about some of his other stuff.

[currentinspiration]

Yvonne Rainer and Bill Davis in “Love,” the final section of “Play” in Terrain (1963), Yvonne Rainer. Judson Memorial Church, New York, 1963. Photo: Al Giese. 

[comic-covers]

(1970)

[onlywhatshere]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Former Ontario premier Bill Davis: Ford wrong to use notwithstanding clause

One of the framers of the Constitution says Ford’s move to overturn a court ruling on the size of Toronto city council is not what he had in mind when he helped create the clause.

On Monday, Premier Doug Ford stated that his government would invoke the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms so that it could proceed with reducing the size of Toronto city council — even though Bill 5, which legislated the reduction, was deemed “unconstitutional” by a Superior Court justice. Most experts say that Ford is on firm legal ground.

But is this what the framers of our constitutional compromise of 1981 had in mind when they added Section 33 to the Charter?

One of the parties to that compromise says no.

As a rule, former Progressive Conservative premier Bill Davis has avoided weighing in on controversial issues since he retired from public life in 1985. He is still interested in political developments but has been content to wield whatever influence he may have almost entirely behind the scenes.

Still, of the 11 first ministers who, 37 years ago, hammered out that historic constitutional compromise, only three are still alive. The 89-year-old Davis is one of them — and he knows what his colleagues had in mind when they created the notwithstanding clause all those years ago.

“Making the Charter a central part of our Constitution, Canada’s basic law, was a deliberate and focused decision by the prime minister and premiers,” Ontario’s 18th premier explained over the phone yesterday.

“The sole purpose of the notwithstanding clause was only for those exceptionally rare circumstances when a province wanted to bring in a specific benefit or program provision for a part of their population — people of a certain age, for example — that might have seemed discriminatory under the Charter.

“The notwithstanding provision has, understandably, rarely been used, because of the primacy of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for all Canadians. That it might now be used regularly to assert the dominance of any government or elected politician over the rule of law or the legitimate jurisdiction of our courts of law was never anticipated or agreed to.”

Continue Reading.

[oldshowbiz]

These great Rowlf the Dog sequences from The Jimmy Dean Show aired for three seasons on ABC Television. They also belong to the History of Canadian Comedy. 

It was the first American gig for former CBC comedy writers and Toronto nightclub comedians Frank Peppiat and John Aylesworth. They wrote most of these Dean and Rowlf sequences. Montreal-born comedy writer Ron Clark also worked on the program, long before collaborating on the script for Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie. And Bill Davis, a Canadian director from the CBC, was a director on The Jimmy Dean Show.

[mistersenorlovedaddy]

leroy jenkins and the jazz composer’s orchestra “for players only”