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Great job! I know it was following someone else's designs, but there was plenty of SpleenGene that managed to shine through.

Thanks, Ken. I wonder if that business is dwindling with the smartphones starting to take over? Having exclusive video content seems kind of passé when you've got all of YouTube and even Netflix on your phone. I think the web series is going to be a different animal than the DVD. I've decided for the moment to try it out just on YouTube and my own website to begin with. I'll try to spread the word as best as I can to various Star Trek and sci-fi blogs and see if I can generate audience that way. If it gets any traction, then I'll have some bargaining tools to approach sponsors or content services. I am re-doing the first episode. There are some changes I want to make and I want to streamline it as well.

Thanks, everybody! No plans for Wal-Mart in the near future, Rodney. :-) They say that one of the keys to success with something like this is to have a defined audience and find a way to reach them. I know who that audience is and I can reach them at the conventions. One thing I haven't considered yet is soliciting it to comic shops via Diamond. That's definitely an option to consider.

Thanks, Mark! It looks like there might be a public showing of it in the near future. I contacted a small sci-fi convention about the possibility of getting a table to sell DVDs at and the head of the con emailed me yesterday and asked me I'd be interested in having it shown in their video room and giving a "making of" presentation with it. Nothing may come of it (they haven't seen the film yet), but I do think it would be kind of cool to see how it plays to a room full of sci-fi fans. And of course, the beauty part is to be able to then sell DVDs after the presentation. :-)

Thank you, Kat!

Thanks, Ken & Gene! One down and (with luck) many more to go!

Thanks!

Thanks, guys! Jason, the DVDs will be available online after the con (May 19-20). I'll post the info here.

I wondered why the postage cost was a negative number.

How's this for a way to end a WIP thread? 1,000 DVDs arrived at my door today! What started as a crazy New Year's Resolution is now a real-deal!

A marked improvement over an already great looking test. Nice work, Matt!

*Very* nice splining, David!

Congratulations!

It appears you can also accomplish this in the UV editor. Select the whole mesh and press R and rotate it. I did it with a simple 4-patch grid and it worked (it did appear to look like it distorted in the editor, but in the model it was fine.)

That's a really short attention span these kids today have. :-) That it offers the possibility of making it better is a cool thing. It's making me wonder if Blip.TV offers this kind of feedback. (They post your content to the various video sites automatically.) Having this kind of information would be valuable moving forward.

Thanks! So, one of the unexpected plusses of putting up the Paunk! pilot is that now that I've generated over 1K views, I can make use of the analytics that YouTube offers to help me in doing the actual series. For instance, these two graphs show Audience Retention. It shows where people stopped watching along the timeline of the movie. The first is the raw data and the second is the relative data, comparing the information with statistics about other films of the same length. My results aren't too bad. I seem to retain the majority of the audience for most of the film. There is a noticeable drop off during the first 30 seconds. This could be people starting to watch it again and stopping it, but it could also be a reaction to the opening titles being too long. I'm going to go with the latter and tighten them up to something much shorter. I'm also going to tighten up the wraparounds. Make them shorter and faster paced. I'm going to add a "next week" trailer over the closing credits to see if I can stop that dramatic drop-off at the end. It also gives me gender and age demographics which are pretty much what I expected: Mostly males between 35-54. This will help me at the convention, since I can focus my pitch to this group. Males between 35-54 is a pretty good demographic considering they usually have more money than teenagers. :-) I'm going to start gearing up this weekend to begin creating the episodes next week.

I'm not sure about "smart," but it was "bold." :-) Yes, I am still a free agent. The road has been a rough one. Freelance work almost completely dried up for awhile and I was forced to move into my sister's spare upstair's bedroom (where I'm still residing.) Work seems to be improving, so I'm not sure how much longer that will be. But without question, the freedom has allowed me to do a great deal of work I wouldn't have been able to accomplish working nights and weekends after a full week's work. I've found that "stuff" isn't nearly as important as I once thought it was. I've had most of my stuff in storage for over two years now and somehow I manage to get by without it. I wonder sometimes if I knew what I know now, would I make the same decision and I'm not sure. The stability of regular income and my independence is a strong lure, but clearly I've accomplished things that in the end, are more important to me. We don't have a whole lot of time on this rock and it would suck to not at least given it a try.

Rusty, I think because this is such a short piece, you see the asteroid moving for too long. Proportionately, it's like the "getting run over by a steamroller" gag in Austin Powers. Enough frames go by to make you forget the preceding image and pulls it out of context. If the impact could somehow be brought closer to our last view of the character, that might do it. Another option might be to intercut between the two shots to keep the context alive.

Will, have you ever considered approaching Roy Thomas with this? I want to say he lives in South Carolina or some place like that now. He might be able to connect you with some like-minded folks who'd be interested in telling these kinds of tales. Heck, Roy might even be interested and then you'd have a pretty big name to use to attract others. He's in his early 70s now, but he still does the occasional writing gig. You might be able to contact him through Two Morrows publishing.

Thanks, Mark! The ocean rig is the star of the commercial. :-)

Definitely entices me to want to find out more about the book. Although, in the first "bread" should be "breed." Unless that's some hip phrase I'm not up on. :-)

I did use Kickstarter to fund the Stalled Trek DVD replication, but I don't think there's an audience for a Wannabe Pirates movie. I'd like to come back to the webcomic at some point and finish up the last storyline, but there's not a good financial incentive. Audience for the comic just never grew to a decent size. It *is* funny reading my old post discounting Kickstarter in light of having used it so successfully later on. :-)

Thanks! I like to make the distinction. Don't want to give Muppet Studios any ammo for suing me. :-) I'm not sure when the DVDs will be available for purchase, but I'll certainly make mention of it here. It would be awesome if I sold out of them at the convention. :-)

Glad to hear they're still valuable! These were fun to do and it was great to be able to pass along the little "lightbulb" concepts I'd learned that helped in my understanding how to use A:M.

Wow, Scott finally finished the music for ! He barely squeaked in on time for it to be included on the Stalled Trek DVD. It's a pity this got waylaid like it did, but after it dragged on for so long on the back end, I lost my enthusiasm for it. I should have pushed for it to be finished earlier, but I was already wanting to do something else. Nevertheless, I still think it came out fun! Here's the book trailer/commercial/"scenes from": !