I changed the Griff poster today on the WiPs page, adding the planet in the bottom corner and a second Reigyn soldier, plus I did just a bit of repositioning. Looks much prettier now.
I've done quite a bit of the compositing on The End of the Year. I should be finished the biggest scene either tonight or tomorrow afternoon, so I think I'll be able to wrap up all the compositing by the end of this week. I still will have to touch up alot of the backdrops though, so I'll proabably be working on it until at least the 7th. Maybe I'm just really optimistic because it's still fairly early on in the process.
I have completed a promo poster for Griff Hagarth. It's kinda empty, so I guess it should still be considered a WorkInProgress. Hence it's on the WIPs page.
I only wrote about 700 words tonight, which is about 300 short of what I normally write on a Wednesday. I did tackle alot from the end of the book and some of the political aspects I was having trouble working out. My new finish line for draft one is April 23rd, and then I should be able to iron out the problems by the week after that. I'm not even thinking about sending it to a publisher yet. I figure I'll look into that once I get back to work on the pirate novel, Fezzup's Gold.
I finally switched Shocking Tales! over to a new server. It should be all propagated by Monday. I also roughed out plots for 3 more stories, so when I get to work on it again in Mid-April, I should be able to do a year's worth of weekly strips and set up alot of future stories with the introduction of a few new villians. One of the storylines is pretty long, I think it could go around 35-50 episodes, and would pretty much be a direct continuation of the original Astounding Adventures comics. The others would all be around 15 or 20 episodes each.
Griff Hagarth is pretty much prepped to go. I did a really rough test animation to test the rigging, and it came out alright. The arms are snpping alot, which is one problem I have with Shocking Tales! stuff. I almost have enough saved up to buy Cinema 4D, but I'm still down a couple of hundred bucks. I'm hoping another little job will fall into my lap so that I can get something, anything with better bones than Max 3.1 I was going to buy a Gamecube this week, but I figured it's better to keep the money for software and just pick up Battlefield 1942 for $20
I'm at 27,990 words now. Yipee. I think that really proves to me that I'll get to 30,000
I mostly expanded on what I wrote last week today. Just fleshing out the relationship between the two main characters. The political portion of the book is what I need to work on next, which is the part that worries me most. With the current stuff that's going on, I'm wondering if any of it will be relevant if a new world order emerges in the next few weeks and months.
Whatever happens, socialism, monarchies and capitalism will still be around when everything is over and done with, and since the thrust of the story is really about the effect of all three systems on the lives of the main characters, I guess it should still make some sense.
I really wonder how I got to the point where I wrote what is, in it's essence, a political commentary. Maybe it's because I know that I'll never have the guts to run for office, but still think that I need to do something to effect positive change on a mass scale. It's quite likely that every publisher that picks up the manuscript will dump it the minute they notice I've tried to do something more than just a kid's book about a kid and a rabbit.
Or maybe the political angle is so light and airy that no one will even notice I tried putting it in there. I dunno. I'm definately no Orwell.
I just added the character designs for "Griff Hagarth" over at the Works in Progress/ page. They are pretty much finished though. I was going to make the garbage can on the front page into a link to the store, but I think maybe it'll be a good place to put promo pics and the like when the series is under way. I'm really happy with the cartooniness of Griff, he almost looks toon shaded. I've got this great toon explosion emitter that I made in pIllusion, so I want to get as toony a look as possible so that I can use it.
And so another week of my life has vanished.
I didn't write all that much new stuff for the book yesterday, I mostly did touching up of parts that needed fixing. I did work out a better reason for the bunny to stick around with the boy throughout the story, so that was worth it. I don't think I'll be writing anything new on it for a while, I want to get everything in the first 130 pages to make sense before I deal with the last 20. My expectation that it would be done by early March has now stretched to late April.
Since I scrapped the Shocking Tales! toon, I started working on some new designs for a series of shorts that I'll be pitching to the ModernTales-esque animation site that may be starting up. I've modeled the two main characters, a ship, a gun, trees, and I've written the first 2 scripts for the show. It'll be about 1 minute per episode I think, and the plan will be to do 12 episodes. It'd be nice to bump it up to 22 and turn it into a pilot for a tv show, but that's probably a little too ambitious. Whether the MT-ish site ends up wanting to host it or not, I may just spend the next 6 months doing it to prove that I can. It's the first time that I have an idea for series where it shouldn't be too much of a hassle to come up with ideas for new episodes. And since they are so short, each story can revolve around one little problem that the hero runs into.
I'm working on the generic "enemy soldier" character now. I started on a default female character, but she looks a little wacky so far, so I decided to go on hiatus from her.
That's enough babbling for now. I will return to figuring whats wrong with Netscape and why it won't let me send mail.
I'm on page 118 of the novel. That puts it at just under 27,000 words. I still have some touch ups to do before I print it out for my writing group meeting tonight, but all the main points are in there so far. Stuff just needs to be tweaked.
It's comforting to know that I'll hit the 30,000 word mark. I think I need about 10 pages for the last chapter (though it could end up being 15), and another 10 pages of fill ins during the second draft.
I didn't get to work on the new Shocking Tales! strips so far this week as planned. I ended up doing alot of work on the animated episode, which is only 23 seconds long so far. So much for my theory on doing one minute in a day. The problem with getting that much stuff done in a day is that I'm animating too much movement still. I really wish I knew when Spy Groove was on. I have a feeling that level of non-movement would look weird in 3D though.
I've got about 2 weeks "free" until I begin some compositing work for a film, so I'm trying to get alot done.
First off, I wrote and sketched out 17 strips of a new Shocking Tales! story. I'm going to work on the required models and stuff for it this week and hopefully I'll get to work on the posing and all that by the 11th or so. I watched the Stan Lee/Kevin Smith interview dvd the other day, and that was a bit of a kick in the pants to get going again. It gave me some ideas of why some characters work and others don't and that sometimes you just have to churn stuff out regardless of how you feel about the end product. Not that I don't plan to make this strip look good. It's just that I've been holding back because I don't want to make some less than perfect story, but I'm not out to cure cancer, I'm not debating the justification for invasion on a world forum. It's just a comic. If I write a few less than perfect strips, no one dies.
I have been working on some villians for a while (since the summer I guess) so it's about time I developed their backstory a little more and put them into action.
I'm also working on a Shocking Tales! short film. I'm approaching it like a Samurai Jack cartoon. It'll be about 1 minute, and 80% of that should Lightning blowing up robots. Actually, it's probably more like 95%. The villain says something evil, Lightning shows up, explosions occur. Light on plot, heavy on cool particleIllusion effects.
