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Thanks guys!

Time to put it to the test! Will people go for The Wobbling Dead? Boy, I hope so! Check out the Kickstarter Project page and help me spread the word! Thanks, everyone!

Hooray! Thanks!

Well, I keep trying to get ahead on this... :-) I made some pretty good progress on setting up the Kickstarter Campaign in the week before last weekend's Sci Fi Expo. Was down to just having to do the video. Unfortunately, the con wiped me out. By the time I got home after the second day, I was exhausted and had the chills. Turns out I'd managed to catch the flu *and* strep throat. It's now the following Saturday and this is the first time I've felt well enough and awake enough to get back on the horse. Here's hoping I can finally get the ball rolling and make this thing happen.

COMMITMENT! You have to commit to it! Don't think about doing it in the future, do it in the now. That's the only requirement. Everything else will work out or you'll find a way to make work out. I spent 16 years *wanting* to do Stalled Trek and it only took 3.5 months to actually do it! Granted, I did have to learn the skills necessary to do it in 3D, but even then, I hesitated for more than half a year after I came up with the idea of doing it the way I did. Why? Because I wasn't committing myself to doing it. I was just dreaming about it. Trust me, once you're committed, all those excuses and obstacles turn out to be nothing. Robert's answer also plays into it. You can't complete an impossible task. You've got to manage it in such a way that you know it can be done. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses and tailor it so that it favors your strengths. Set a realistic goal and work on it everyday. Even if one day, all you do is model one prop. Don't be afraid of how much more you have to do. It's like when people have so many little tasks they need to get done all at once, that they get overwhelmed and end up doing nothing at all. Whereas, if they'd concentrated on just doing a few of them, they'd have less facing them tomorrow. COMMIT! I really thought I wanted to work in comics when I was a teenager. Now, at 45, I know that I must not really have wanted it. If I'd truly wanted it bad enough, I would have worked night and day on it. I wouldn't have just done a few individual projects here and there. I would have written or phoned every comic book company on the planet. I would have pestered them until I got my chance. Instead, I foolishly believed that they'd come to me. It doesn't work that way. You want something, *you* have to do all of the work.

Happy Birthday, wherever you are! :-)

It does seem to go along the lines of biting the hand that feeds it. Even a year ago, there were alternates to Kickstarter. Including just accepting PayPal donations. All of these expenses are brought up by KS before you launch. They knew what they were getting into and chose to do it. They weren't forced. Saying that KS shouldn't get a piece of the pie because you had to alienate your friends doesn't make sense. You didn't have to alienate your friends. It's your project, do your own heavy lifting.

He looks really great!

Haha, why do I feel a real threat behind this deadline? :-) I think I'm safe, though. Hoping to get Kickstarter up in the next week or two. I have a convention next weekend and want to be able to send people to it. I'm having postcards printed as we speak. There are going to be three cast members from The Walking Dead at the con, so I'm hoping lots of fans come out. Still, thanks for the push, Tony!

LOL, Stian! Thanks, guys! Fingers crossed.

I'm parodying the entire first season, Vong, mostly so that I don't have to leave characters out. :-) The number of zombies is tied into the funding. Folks are going to be able to have a zombie likeness in the film for a certain donation. That's why the indeterminate number. But, just so that there's something to see on this page, how about a pic of the main character?

Bravo! Really liked the quad-screen effect!

Thanks, Gene! Vong, I'm having to approach The Wobbling Dead differently. Part of the success of completing Stalled Trek was that I figured out how to simplify it to a point that it could be done by one person in a short amount of time. I'm finding that more difficult to get a handle on with The Wobbling Dead. Stalled Trek had a couple of built-in time-savers: most of the characters wore the same outfit and the sets I was parodying were simple to begin with. The Wobbling Dead has a much bigger cast and no uniforms (not to mention that I need dozens, if not hundreds of zombies) and the settings are all over the place and frequently outside with trees and stuff. I'm still experimenting with how to simplify these backgrounds so that they aren't nightmares to have to build. There's definitely some kind of mental block I'm running into there. I've also decided to approach funding differently. I think a big reason why I haven't made more progress, is there's no deadline or pressure on me to complete it. So, I want to go ahead and do the Kickstarter campaign upfront. If it's successful, I'll have an obligation to the people who contribute and will *have* to finish it. I think that was a huge reason I was able to complete Stalled Trek. I might have floundered on those last 8 minutes if I didn't know that I had people counting on it being done on time. Conversely, if the Kickstarter campaign isn't successful, then I can move onto something else without having put too much work into it. The Wobbling Dead is something I really like the idea of doing, but it's not like Stalled Trek, where I would have done it even if no one had ever seen it. Stalled Trek was something I'd wanted to do for 16 years. It was the reason I started learning A:M in the first place. So, with luck, I should have the Kickstarter campaign ready to launch in the very near future and I'll go from there.

Love seeing ROM after all these years. As to camera movement and staging, remember that you are being the eyes of the audience. Arrange things so that the transitions are what we would naturally look to next. Keep the movements geographically sound. Don't break the 180.

Haha... maybe I should stick to 3D... :-) Ran into some budgetary restraints along the way and my sister was worried that a little cake wouldn't be enough for the 12 kids coming to the party, so had to start with a pre-made & iced cake. I ended up having to use some kind of green "cake mist" spray to change the icing to a green color. Sculpting out of rice krispie treats was a new one on me and the Fondant stuff really wasn't as easy to sculpt onto it as it looks on TV... BUT My nephew Spencer thinks it is awesome and that's what counts in the end. Picture's a little blurry, but I'm too lazy to pull it out of the fridge to take another one. :-)

My nephew turned five today and is having a birthday party this weekend. After seeing some Cake Boss episodes a few weeks ago, I'm wondering if I could do a custom cake for him. His favorite super-hero these days is J'onn J'onz, the Martian Manhunter. For some reason, he doesn't like it if you call him Martian Manhunter, only J'onn. :-) Anyway, I cranked up A:M tonight and did this mockup of what the cake might look like:

Robert, there's a couple of nice looking ears in this thread. This post by Bill Gaylord has a good one.

Happy Birthday, Kat! Hope you are having a great one!

Here's a question I've always wondered... Is it possible to turn hair into a model? Say, if you wanted to print the model in 3D?

That's a pretty cool effect.

I'm not only looking forward to getting to use this plug-in, but I can't wait to see what everybody else does with it.

WOW! Really looking forward to the update!

Interesting. Thanks for the links, Rodney!

Been hoping for something like this for a while now! Awesome!

Hope your birthday was a great one, Rodney!