I haven't had any time to write or work on either Shocking Tales! in the past week and a bit. I've been doing some tutorial videos that will ship with particleIllusion pretty much since the 20th.
I did start cutting together the theme song portion of Griff Hagarth. Maybe it's because I haven't started working full time on it yet, but the whole idea of tackling that series is exciting. I'm hoping that I can start work on it on the 12th, which is a week and a half later than I expected, but there's too much other stuff that I need to get done. I will attempt to work on both Griff and Shocking Tales! at the same time. I really wanted to have 150 episodes of ST! done so that I could run it 3 times a week. That's about a 3 month full time commitment though to get that many strips done.
I just hit the 30,000 word mark! Woohooo! I guess that officially makes the story a novel. There's still quite a bit of work to get done on it, but I'm getting there.
I haven't had a chance to work on Shocking Tales! yet, which is a major dissapointment. I still have a bit of touch up work to do on The End of the Year before it's wrapped up for good. Then I'll get back to Shocking Tales! I might even get a chance to work on it on Friday.
I started modeling the Reigyn (the bad guys from Griff Hagarth) battle cruiser last night. It looks good so far, and I think I managed to stay away from having it look like either a Star Trek ship or a Star Wars ship. I still need to design a ship for Griff's girlfriend and some Reigyn battle drones.
I'm almost done my work on The End of the Year. I'm currently working on one last set, the biggest of them all, but all the keying has been done so once I finish modeling the set, I just have to render 5 or 6 stills and throw them into Final Cut's timeline.
Yesterday I found out two slightly annoying things. First off, that the Holoset product from a few years ago seems to have surfaced as a product called Chromatte. I was looking into this years ago, and if I had managed to buy it back then, it would probably have made all this keying work alot easier. It's a ring of little blue or green lights that sticks over the lense of a camera. When the camera is pointed at a special type of cloth, the camera sees the cloth as the same colour as the light ring, and so you get a nice clean blue or green backing without having to spend hours fussing with lights and getting spill on your actors. I'm not sure if it actually works as well as claimed, but it's a fascinating idea, not far off from the DeaneScreen idea I had a few years back, though DeaneScreen is slighly more far-fetched. Though I think that the chromatte concept can eventually grow into what I had thought up, which was essentially being able to have footage with no green or blue screens in it, but using something invisible to the camera that generated an alpha channel. If I had a brain full of knowledge, I could probably write up a paper on the idea and submit it to SIGGRAPH. Maybe I should anyway.
The second thing I found out is that Ultimatte announced AdvantEdge 1.5. I just got 1.13 a couple of days ago to do all the keying on The End of the Year, and all of a sudden a new version with lots of new bells and whistles pops up. Most importantly it has a speed increase, and since I've spent most of the last 2 weeks waiting for renders, it would've saved me some time.
I went out and bought Cakewalk Plasma the other day. I only have the few hundred loops that came in the box, which is a pretty eclectic mix so there isn't a ton that can be done. There are lots of bongo drum beats though, and since that fits the feel of the planet in Griff Hagarth pretty well, the soundtrack will be bongolicious. I would've liked to go with some acid jazz, but it doesn't really fit the theme.
I'm just about finished rigging and skinning the third of the three main characters for Griff Hagarth. I have pretty much finished modeling the one incidental character that appears in episode 2, so once she's rigged all the characters for the first 4 episodes are done. I still need to build two ships, a moon base, and a couple of hallways to get going. That'll all happen between next week and May 1st. I plan on getting going on the new Shocking Tales! strips on Sunday.
