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Here's what I get if I try to import a JPEG into the Mac version of A:M 18.0p SSE 4.2: A project isn't necessary. It just doesn't import JPEGs anymore.

There's something going on with the Mac version that doesn't let you import jpeg files. I tend to stick to png files.

Those are pretty cool, Matt!

Prelude to Ax'd-We-Are has passed 10,000 views on YouTube!

The underlying message is that stockholders only want growth. It's not enough to make a profit (or follow through with the promises made to the consumers who actually shelled out dough for the game.)

Thanks! I want to keep the ball rolling this time.

Thanks, Nancy! I've decided to have fun with this and am going to attend both the Orlando and Dallas cons. (My dad lives in Orlando, so I have a place to stay.) I got a decent airfare on a no-frills airline (don't even give you peanuts) and decided I only live once.

Just got word this afternoon that Stalled Trek: Prelude to Ax'd-We-Are has been accepted by the GeekFest Film Fest! Really thrilled that it got in. Very good chance I'll get to see it on the big screen with an audience at Fan Expo Dallas!

Thanks, Gerald. I'm using an AfterEffects plug-in that generates the water (and the bobbing camera). Obviously, with puppets I'm not looking for reality, but I wanted to find an easy way to deal with the water that wouldn't cost me lots of time tinkering and rendering. I'm just doing a phony reflection on the water by adding another layer of the animation and inverting it and adding a wave distortion to. Not perfect, but it looks better with it than without it. For The Wobbling Dead, I'd asked Mark S. to help me rig a puppet arm with connecting rods. I ended up not using it because I was making so much use of props and moving the characters around on set pieces that I was running into tons of intersection problems and I frequently had the puppets full body, which made the rods seem like they were magically controlling themselves. I also wasn't quite knowledgable enough to make good use of them. I'm feeling more confident now and giving them another go. With this only being three minutes long, I can spend more time planning and making use of the space. The arms add a whole lot to animating the puppets, so I'm determined to get over my issues and make good use of them.

Just a test. WARNING: may cause sea sickness! sharktest2.mp4

This is very crude and I crushed the heck out of it to make it a small file, but this may be a way to do it. In AfterEffects, bring in your art and use the spherize effect on it to turn it into a globe. Set the rotation angles and speeds. Pre-compose and then scale them to flatten the globes into hills. Once you've got them all arranged and moving how you want, I think it will create the effect. Not a 3D solution, really, but a solution. test.mp4

Thanks, guys!

Welcome, Jamie! I love that you are finishing your mom's work. There'll be a learning curve, but I'm sure you'll get over the bumps. Rodney and Robcat can probably point you to the video tutorials and other materials that are available here. My only advice is not to let it overwhelm you. In the beginning it can seem daunting, but if you stick with it, it does start to make sense. We have a pretty small community here, but I've found them to be very helpful with answering questions and offering up solutions.

"Done is better than perfect" Or as Jack Kirby less eloquently put it, "Damn perfection!" :-) I always think about a section from the Red Dwarf book "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers," where Rimmer spends days making color charts to organize the time he'll spend studying for his astromechanics test. He constantly keeps updating them until he realizes he only has a few hours left before the test, hasn't studied anything, and panics before freaking out and writing "I am a fish." on his test paper several hundred times. :-) A very good friend of mine once taught me a very valuable lesson in high school. He was working on a project and would go through it and say, "I like this part. This part didn't come out like I wanted it to, but this next part really came out well." The point of that is that he just breezed by the shortcoming. He didn't dwell on it, he didn't allow it to halt him in his tracks, he just acknowledged what we all really know. None of us are perfect and we can't hope to achieve perfect. Done *is* better than perfect.

Started working on my next puppet parody. I'm going to explore doing this as a shorter form (3-5 minutes.) It doesn't wear me out as much and theoretically, I could do three parodies in the time it took to do one. The plan right now is to try to do 8 this year, each of them taking on what I consider a classic film. I chose this one to be first.

Thanks, Rodney! There's no doubt it's been viewed so many times because Alec Peters has shared it to his audience. I know the numbers aren't big in the real world (I just saw a "my cat is so cute" video that had 18K views in 15 hours), but for me, 8K+ views in five days is a lot of views. I've entered it in two film festivals (both convention-based). One is GeekFest, which just so happened to be taking entries for a "special edition" that included the Dallas Comic Con and the Dragon Con festival. Curiously, I saw that a puppet movie had won top prize in the animated category. I didn't think of puppetry as being animation, but I guess it sort of is. I mean, there's go-motion animation, which is essentially puppeting a character. I should know on May 5th if it was accepted to GeekFest and I think the notification date for the Dragon Con is in June or July. I'm not really thinking it will take any awards (wouldn't be disappointed if it did, of course), but if it's accepted and they show it in Dallas, I could see it with an audience ...which could either be a very rewarding experience or a nightmare. :-)

Martin has a section of his forum dedicated to A:M and some of its greats. It's a kind of archive of the past, though. I don't think it points to anything new.

This would be the facepalm: This would be a forehead slap: And I think this would be burying your face in your hand out of grief:

That's the thing, I'm not sure which it is. Is it self-frustration or frustration at an external thing? I do think a slapping your forehead requires hitting it enough to make a noise. I would think a face palm is more like lowering your head and placing your hand. I see online that a distinction is made between fingers being splayed for a face palm and being together for a slap.

Funny that slapping yourself and the face palm have different meanings. The face palm means someone else has done something stupid or embarrassing. The forehead slap means *you* did something stupid or forgetful. The former mimics having a headache as if the other person is causing your brain to hurt. The latter is like you are trying to inflict pain on yourself as punishment

Not too specific in the criticisms. Mostly along the line of profanity-laced statements about how it was the worst thing ever. :-) I just made a mental note not to go back. I used to try to post links to The Wannabe Pirates on Reddit and they would just vote them down into nothing, so it's clear I don't have an audience there. So, yes, I would not like to dwell on the negative. One of the cool things I got to play with this time was using volumetric lights and lens flares to make siren lights. I think it came out pretty cool. The trickiest bit was rigging it. I only made one flashing siren light and used constraints to attach it to the sign (which had already been animated.) I kept running into issues where I would accidentally lock the bone used to turn the lights around. In the end, they didn't do a full 360 turn, but went halfway and then would come back. That worked out great.

Thanks, everyone. This has certainly been a roller coaster ride. This is the first time I've ever parodied something where I heard back from the person responsible for what I was parodying! Thankfully, he loved it and helped me spread the word in ways I couldn't have hoped to do. I still have about 30 minutes before the first 24 hours ends and the video has 5,227 views. That's compared to Amutt Time only having 1,300 views after two YEARS! The comments that have been swirling around there and on Facebook have been overwhelmingly positive. Reddit, however, the exact opposite. A lot of instant hate there. But there are literally hundreds of comments for the positive and only 4 on reddit when last I looked. Krypton Radio made it their video of the day and the accompanying blogpost described my Stalled Trek parodies as "pretty much all gasping, hold-your-sides-laughing funny."

I'm not a fan of this lawsuit. I've got to assume there's more to it that meets the eye. It claims to be solely about infringement, yet there are plenty of other fan films actively in production who are more blatant. They use the entire original series characters, exact duplicates of their sets and the music written for the series. Prelude to Axanar was relatively light in that regard. Hold up you hand if you've ever even heard of Garth of Izar? :-) Whatever the case, my thinking was this was a chance to parody what I think is a great fan film and the circumstances they find themselves in. The real problem was to get it done and out before some kind of resolution was reached. :-) I sweated bullets on that. :-) The puppets are a bit more elaborate than my previous movies. I thought it was more important to at least make an attempt to make them look like the characters and yet still have that puppet look. I think it's kind of an evolution. There's some extra fun in the planet shot for longtime followers. If you look in the lower left, you'll see Krok, Spott & McGruff from the original Stalled Trek and the Jetsons buildings from my sci-fi image contest entry. All the other buildings came from the Jack Kirby-inspired buildings I modeled for "Apeopolis" in The Wannabe Pirates.

Presenting! Stalled Trek: Prelude to Ax'd-We-Are https://youtu.be/_cnHe0oIJIs This is a parody of the Star Trek fan film, Prelude to Axanar, which was hit by a copyright infringement lawsuit by CBS/Paramount. You can watch the original at http://www.axanarproductions.com More later...

Only 33 days from concept to finished film ...and a whole lot of hours inbetween. As I mentioned, start to finish on the Mac version of A:M, so anyone who claims you can't use A:M on a Mac clearly hasn't tried. :-) It's killing me to have to keep it a secret. Tomorrow can't get here fast enough.