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You only have to watch the first season, which is only six episodes long. But I'll be surprised if you don't end up watching the whole series. :-)

Thanks, Rodney and Jost! Put together the story reel for the remaining part of the show and it looks like I've got about 9 minutes left! Aiming at a minute a day and finishing animation on the 2nd of May. This is gonna' be fun. :-)

Thanks! Well, it's official! I've finally set up all the shots for the rest of the film! That means, that unless I suddenly come up with something new I want to do, all the characters, props, sets, etc. are complete and set up to go! That means my 32 page comic is also complete (save for a nifty cover I'll have to come up with.) Recording the rest of the dialogue tomorrow morning and then assembling the story reel. I'll finally know exactly how long this thing is! I've animated about 12 minutes of it, and I'm hoping I have more like ten minutes to go than 20 minutes. As a back up for the convention, I think I'm going to get some Dropcards made. That way, if there isn't time to have the DVDs printed, I can sell the digital version at the convention. So excited to be this close the end!

Thanks, Nancy & Rodney! Comics and movies are very similar in that they both use a visual narrative. The chief difference is that the audience controls the timing in a comic book, whereas the movie dictates time for them. I'm keenly aware as I put these panels in that the animation is going to give each panel time. Is this panel going to come too quickly after the one before it? In the movie itself, am I going to need to cut to a reaction shot or insert a close-up because of how long it will take to speak the narration. That said, some of the same story telling skills are shared by both mediums. Transitions between scenes, visual cues to the audience. The big gag in this movie is the narration. The main character is telling the story and the humor mostly comes from the visuals either contradicting the narrator or providing the punchline the narrator set up. Speaking of time... I wonder if I'll be able to finish in time. It's doable, but it's not knowable. All I can do now is just keep moving forward no matter what and hope that I beat the clock. :-)

Some different shot setups from The Wobbling Dead!

I'm actually planning on running a con special, Rodney. Buy both for a reduced price. Just wanted to post an update on The Wobbling Dead: Although there is still much to do, I've been doing well with getting the project going. The comic book idea was what I really needed and I will definitely be doing it again for future projects. Of course, this might not work for everyone. I've just been making comics for much longer than I've been making movies and so, it's like being able to do the story in my native language before having to interpret it. I think moreso than a script, it allows you to visually plot out the movie. I'm finding myself being able to push and pull scenes and get where I need to go. Some scenes were written just to move the plot from point to point, but being able to go back and find the gags seems to be much more visual this way. There's that thought that just rewriting lines in the actual script will just get lost. Also, setting up a choreography for one frame instead of animation, seems to be more focused on just what you need. There's the temptation (since it's 3D) to create more than you need for a shot. An entire building or room when in the end, you're only going to see a tiny portion of it. I remember there being some talk about this kind of thing on the Blu-Ray release of The Incredibles. Brad Bird, coming in as an outsider, knew what he wanted to see on screen and the Pixar people were "we can do that because you're not making us build every single part of everything." There was almost a hint of revolution in that. Of course Pixar normally builds more than they need, but that's because they are often still finding the story while they assets are being built. But when you are building the assets for a single frame, you CAN see what you're going to need and what you don't need. It's still going to be a footrace to get this done by the deadline, but I'm running it! Fingers crossed that I make it across that finish line in time!

Yay! The Kickstarter reached its stretch goal! Every backer gets a PDF comic book now! So, if you want to help out The Wobbling Dead *and* get a digital copy of the comic book, go pledge $1! Thanks!

:-) I'm always accepting PayPal.

I didn't know you could add other bones to smartskin. Learn something new everyday. :-)

Hey everybody! I've had to run a quick Kickstarter in order to get more funds to do the DVDs. I found a deal on them last year, that was going to get me 250 of them for just under $200 and now that I'm getting close to doing it, I've found that it's going to be more like $400! Anyway, I've reached my $200 goal to make up for it and have added a stretch goal of $300. As I write this, I'm $19 away from getting it, but if it reaches $300, everyone who gives $1 a more will get a free PDF of the 32-page Wobbling Dead comic book! So here's a chance to support the project for very little money and still get something cool as a thanks! Just go here.

Didn't realize that. But I've mostly been animating on the Mac side because of the dialogue thing anyway. I go to the Windows side if there's something like hair or models that the Mac version crashes with. It's a best of both worlds kind of thing. :-)

You can see shaded in Windows but you can't you can't render to shaded in Windows? Ouch. I can render shaded to frames, but not to a QuickTime movie. Have to make the extra step in windows. Simon, I'm running v18a of both. Parallels is a commercial program. So you have to pay for it and you have to buy windows.

I have 8 cores in my Mac Pro. :-) I'm actually working in both versions right now. I'm running the 64bit A:M in Windows 8 via Parallels. It does render faster. I haven't tried opening too many versions of the Windows one, but I've been working the last few days with two instances open in Windows and three on the Mac. I find myself using the Windows version more and more. There are trade offs. I haven't investigated an issue where I can't hear the playback of audio in A:M on the Windows side. I'm sure it's some hardware setting between Windows/Parallels/OS X, but I haven't tracked it down yet. That's led me to animate dialogue scenes on the Mac version ...but then I've been rendering them with the Windows version. I like to make test videos of the shots before I render them and I can render shaded quicktimes directly from the Mac version, so that's a plus on the Mac side. I've stuck with v18a on both platforms until I finish Wobbling Dead.

The script probably needs to be updated and likely is easy to do. The alternate way is to option drag a copy of the AM folder to your desktop. It can be opened as another copy of AM. I often run seven of them on my Mac Pro.

Hey Guys! I'm running another Kickstarter to raise money to print more DVDs. If you've already supported the first Wobbling Dead Kickstarter, there's no need to support this one, but I'd love it if people could get the word out there. This project has taken so much longer than expected that DVD replicating costs have actually gone up since I started. Check out the little trailer I made for the Kickstarter, too: The Wobbling Dead DVDs. It's kind of shameful that I used an iMovie template to make it, but boy does it look cool. :-)

I'm not a big fan of heavy gray shadows on things, so one thing I've been doing is after I render the AO image separately, I place the color image on top in Photoshop and use the "color" layer effect. This gives me an AO shot in colors. I think take that and put it over the color image and set the layer effect to "multiply." It's a matter of taste, but I like the colorful stuff. Oh and I usually blur the AO layer, too. On the downside, it does sometimes put shadows in where shadows wouldn't be... like a halo around an object. I take the eraser to those.

Thanks, guys!

A couple of more character models for The Wobbling Dead... "Moile" (Merle) and "Glint" (Glenn)

I should point out that by scale I mean just in relationship with the other models in the project, not exact size. I personally like working with small models because it seems to simplify lighting and camera angles and such, but then I'm going for a kind of smaller-than-life look to begin with.

If nothing else, it does show the importance of scale when you're building your models. I kind of play it by ear, usually bringing things into a choreography and adjusting the scale to get everything to match and then making those scale changes to the models. I wouldn't characterize this as a bug. I think it's useful to have as an option. I like happy accidents. :-)

This is something I've been playing with I thought people might find interesting... Here's a render of two models. It's the same mesh copied from one file and placed in another. The surprise part is that they both have the exact same surface properties! The difference is that the first model is significantly smaller than the second one. It's scale has been changed in the choreography to match the second model. But notice that the roughness settings have been scaled to match. I've found I can get some interesting looks this way. Obviously, you could also experiment with the roughness amount and scale to get the look, but it's interesting to me that the effect scales.

Looks like this ProMotion app does it. It refers to both color cycling and palette cycling.

Old School Color Cycling with HTML 5 Someone's figured out how to do it with HTML 5. The gallery is neat-o.

What's next is probably working at McDonald's. :-) Thanks, guys! Although, it doesn't look nearly as impressive when you look at it from this view...

Thanks, Rodney, She saw it when I sent it to her Mom and she was thrilled. I was pleased with how easy it was to composite it all together in a choreography. That new AO also helped add shadow under the character layers.