largento

Okay, consider my party pooped.

Thanks, Nancy. I'll grant you it ain't small, but in less than 26 days, the Wobbling Dead part will disappear and what's left will be smaller than what I had before. And sometimes, you just gotta' scream. :-)

Thanks, guys! @Rodney. I'm still figuring out what this is going to look like, but I do know that film grain is going to be a part of it. They shot a bunch of the first season on 16mm, so there's a definite grain visible. @Gerry. That's a great idea. My sig is way out of date, too. Needs updating badly.

The cast is starting to add up!

Really sorry to hear this, Kat. I'll keep you and your family in my prayers.

You could go for painted fur. Much more work, but I wonder if you could create a repeating pattern for it? I was looking to see if I could find an example of how they've done it in The Clone Wars (which uses a painted look for all the textures), but couldn't find a relevant example. But you can see how they handled the long fur of Chewbacca:

I think Mark S. would have the right answer about those sort of things. I think it partly depends on how you go about weighting your character. I tend to grab big areas of influence and then weight the intersections. I know some folks do the auto assign and then fix things that don't work right.

I'm with the others, I don't think losing the hair takes anything significant away from the character. It looked great even when it wasn't textured. It's a necessary sacrifice.

Well, the Kickstarter is slowing down, so any illusion that this was going to be wildly successful has flown away. :-) Still, there's an outside chance it will make it to its goal, so I'm journeying on. I got zonked by vertigo the night I put it up and was basically out of commission. Last night, I felt well enough to work up a new character, though! Here's Drrrl. (He won't get his crossbow until I start modeling props.) Also, my friend over at Subspace Communique wrote up a nice piece about The Wobbling Dead.

Form should follow function. If it's meant to be a scary place, make it scary. Use lots of darkness and may have eerie green lighting coming up from below metal grating floor panels, that cast patterns on the things it lights. If it's a flying saucer, it should be designed to look like it fits within a flying saucer. i.e. rounded exterior walls. If you're going for the whole scientific probing aspect, take cues from hospitals and doctor's offices to give it a medical laboratory look. I haven't watched any UFO stories in ages, but I think there were plenty of descriptions by those kooks that claimed to have been abducted. You might see if there's any common threads in their descriptions and incorporate those. Also keep in mind that the background should ideally make the viewer believe that they are in a spaceship, but also stand apart from the characters, so that the characters are nicely contrasted and the background doesn't interfere with the viewer being able to see them. Just things I would think about if I were approaching this problem.

Big time thanks, Will! Thanks, Rodney! Fun fact: all of Paunk's dialogue was lip-synced using the updated Amplitude plug-in. OD-9000's, too. I reasoned that it made sense with having an android and an alien. Saved a bunch of time, too!

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.