largento

LOL, I saw this yesterday and thought it was awesome. Especially making the bamboo cannon to take out the Gorn.

For Stalled Trek, since I was doing almost all of the voices, it seemed wise to record all of one character's dialogue in one session so that I could maintain as much consistency with the voice as I could. I recorded each block of dialogue as an individual file. These were generally single lines of dialogue, but could be multiple lines if it was a long speech. While editing the audio, I would remove all of the time before and after the dialogue and then process it to get the sound I wanted. I named them sequentially like so: "Spott_003_insist" ...this way I could find the dialogue in order and still have a clue as to what the line was. I saved my high quality files as aif files and my low quality versions (for use in A:M) as wav files. This did require me having to replace the sound files in Premiere, but it was fairly easy to match them up to their wave pattern in Premiere's timeline. I could have saved the high quality files as wav files, too, but by making them different, I was less likely to confuse them. Having individual tracks allowed me to put them in and adjust the timing between them. In most cases, a single track was all a shot required, but it was trickier when a shot contained several lines between two or more characters. I used Robert's method a couple of times where I decided I needed to trim some pauses between dialogue (within sentences, even.) I do it this way: It's not very intuitive, but it makes sense. Drop your sound file into your cho and you can visually see the waveform. By scrubbing, you can see that say a pause starts on frame 60 and goes until frame 120. Simply go to the properties panel for the sound (in the cho) and change the Crop end frame to 60. Then bring in another copy of the sound. Have it start on frame 70 and set the Crop start to 120 and bingo, you've trimmed the pause. Note: that in my case, I have to refresh the screen to see the change in the waveform. I usually go up and down with my scroll wheel on my mouse.

At my old job, we had this argument often. Scheduling creative is virtually impossible, because the definition of "complete" is subjective and different for everyone. It's not like a math problem where you can have an exact answer. Stan Freburg has a great song on his History of the United States album. Betsy Ross has just finished making the first flag and Washington comes on and starts asking the ridiculous questions clients ask and then suggesting insane things. The song is called "Everybody Wants to Be an Art Director." You can guess, but if it's too high, the client will be scared off and if it's too low, then you've got an angry client. And don't ask me why, but the cheap client always wants more changes than the client who is paying big bucks. Creatives are then put through the ringer having to work nights and weekends to meet those schedules.

Looking forward to your video!

I experimented this with my Vulcanine set, which made liberal use of a procedural texture. Baking the surfaces not only failed to give as good a look, but actually took longer to render. Go figure. In the end, due to time constraints, I identified scenes where the camera didn't move and rendered a background frame and placed it on a layer behind the animated characters. Where the camera did move, I just bit the bullet and accepted the render times.

I could totally see a ZZ Top video in your style, Gene!

Day 3! Last night I decided to give the Pear OD-9000 a Captain Pike's chair/Robby the Robots vehicle body.

I was really meaning that they both are take offs on the old horror host monster movie shows of the 50s and 60s, but the theater aspect is there, too. One thing that's probably adding to the MST3K look is that I've been using old models as a kind of kitbashing for the decorations on the walls. Mostly the Jack Kirby-inspired ones that I made for Apeopolis. A sidenote: Some of the Kirby art I looked at and aped included the designs Kirby did for Lord of Light that were used by the CIA in a plan to rescue some of the Americans from Iran during the Hostage drama in '79 that is being featured in the new movie, Argo. Michael "Red State" Parks is playing Kirby in the film.

They do both hail from the same source.

Thanks, Nancy! Day 2! Working my way around to the middle of the set and setting up cameras for "standard" shots I'm likely to do. Trying to construct and light the set so that I can keep the same lighting setup. Thinking of this a little like a 3-camera setup. My thinking is that the monochromatic background will help the characters pop off more. The giant viewscreen is a bit tricky to work around, but I felt like it would make sense that Paunk would want to see it on a giant screen. This view will only be used when cutting out of a segment and will quickly switch to a close-up of Paunk. The final part of the set is Pear OD-9000's alcove and will be interesting to develop. Pear OD-9000 is now an android and mobile.

More progress. Building out the set. Going more for a "viewing room" vibe than a bridge set. Going more cinematic and large. Much of this will likely never be seen, since most of it will be shot as close-ups of characters.

Day 1! I've got 28 days to finish this webseries, so today starts the heavy lifting! Working on set pieces today. This is the new Isolation Chamber for Barry, the Earth Nerd. I think this will read better than the forcefields and also doesn't require me to do that extra work.

Thanks, guys. He has non-Hodgekin's, thankfully. I think it's likely they will do the radiation, but he's hoping he doesn't have to. He's due for a PET scan sometime after tomorrow's treatment.

Thanks, guys! Wow, I ddin't know that, Jody. He's doing the 6 months of chemo right now and they haven't made a decision about the radiation. The doctor says he is responding very well to treatment. He's only a month into treatment right now, but it's getting him down and we came out to try and cheer him up. I'll definitely pass on your story. The more positives he can get, the better.

Update! Back with family to support my little brother while he's undergoing his chemo treatments. Couldn't bring my computer, but am able to write on my iPad, so I'm going over the scripts for the three episodes and polishing them up. It occurred to me the other day to check on the original airdate of the Star Trek episode, "Amok Time" and by coincidence, September 15th is the 45th anniversary of that original airing. Now I've got a day to tentpole the whole thing around. I want to have everything up and online by that day and hopefully I can use it to get some stories on Star Trek blogs and podcasts.

Hmm... I re-downloaded the broken project, deleted that CP and rebuilt it. The 5 point patch button lit up, but no patch was made when I clicked it. So I opened the file again, with the issue still there, deleted that CP again and rebuilt it, and the second time, it worked on the first try. So... it seems to be tempermental or something. Anyway! Thanks again for taking a look at it and helping to track down the issue... and enjoy your Twinkies! Are your normals facing the right direction?

After having rested and had some time to recover from the marathon of doing the "Stalled Trek" part, I am finally ready to get this webseries finished and up! Having had considerable time to think about it, I've opted for making this first "season" three episodes instead of five. This based mostly on the fact that I think the audience will better appreciate waiting through three episodes than five. The only real reasons to do it in five episodes are: 1) I get more episodes for my buck; 2) Episodes are shorter. To be honest, I don't think the two minutes will be make or break. Having looked at both alternatives, the segments end in much better spots with this configuration. For those of you who have seen "Stalled Trek: Amutt Time," the segments end up being: 1) Opening --> Fade out after the sickbay scenes 2) Bridge Scene-->McGruff's "Typical" Line. 3) T'Poodle's "Fight to the Death" Speech-->Ending They work much better than the breaks I was having to make for the five-part version. And hey, one of the big plusses when you're the guy doing everything is you are King and get to make your own calls. :-) One of the things that got my engines going was working freelance a couple of days last week. There's nothing like being forced to do other people's work to get you excited about doing your own work again. :-) During the downtime, I doodled some ideas for a new main set and for the exterior of the ship. Spent a little bit of time modeling the latter. Probably going to add some windows and stuff, but thinking this basic shape/configuration. ship.mov

Very nicely done, Matt!

I wasn't aware of it, but Killer Bean Forever was released a few months ago as an Android game called "Killer Bean Unleashed." It's had over a million downloads, but the game is free. I'm thinking he might have worked to create this just as a promotional tool so that he could sell more DVDs. I'd hope that he doesn't regret having done Killer Bean Forever. He took a chance and did something he wanted to do. He seemed to be able to jump back onto the work wagon afterwards. I suspect he may have run into the same problem I've run into. I happily killed myself to create Stalled Trek, but now that I'm in the phase of trying to promote and sell it, I'm miserable. I did a small comic book show over the weekend that I found out about at the last minute. It was exhausting to me and I told the guy next to me, "It's so much fun making these, but it's no fun trying to sell them to people." I'm not a salesman. I should be out looking for every opportunity to sell this, but I'm naturally an introvert and making cold calls to possible outlets is excruciatingly difficult. I can wear all of the creative caps, but the business caps don't fit me at all. "If you build it, they will come" only works *inside* the movies. :-) [EDIT] Digging deeper, I see that Killer Bean Forever is advertised as purchasable via the game for $6.99. It's unclear whether this is a digital download or just a link to order the DVD from Lew's website. [EDIT2] Found a forum thread. Jeff Lew is doing the game himself and it is physical DVDs (since he's still trying to get rid of them all.) The forum doesn't continue past March and he seems frustrated with Android (apparently problems getting game to run on so many different devices.) Still no iOS version, which makes me wonder if things have stalled completely.

@Sean: That may be the case, Sean. I'm toying around with things, maybe one will stick. @Katt: Thanks, Katt. I'm sure it will happen.

Very cool!

Hey Mike, these might be too basic for you, but I did a series of core concept spline tutorials (in comic book form) that can be found here.

Congratulations, everyone!

Thanks, all! The Mad Fold-Ins would be pretty easy to do and once you set one up, it should work by just loading in another image to allow you to use it over and over again. I did consider 3D, but so few people have glasses. I also liked that there was some visual interest in the movement. I purposely set up the cho with only one klieg light to cast shadows onto the parts. Thought they added a layer of realism.

Came across this cool blog Al Bigley does with all kinds of comics and stuff from my generation and thought I'd contribute to it. I took the cut-out table-top diorama from this post and put it together in A:M. I made a YouTube video of it and it's now included in the post. Like I said, nothing fancy, but a fun little project that was basically done with cookie-cut decals (after I clipped the images out in Photoshop.) Despite my mentioning that I did it in 3D, he originally thought it was the real thing filmed with a camera. :-) If you'd like to do one, there were a bunch of them printed on the backs of the old over-sized Treasury comics and if you go through the gallery here, you can download the images.