largento

Awesome!

I briefly looked into that until I realized the cost would be prohibitive. As soon as I saw that I would have to charge $4 each for them, the idea immediately went away. :-) One idea I might consider came from a guy on a webcomics forum. He suggested putting up comic strips between seasons to keep the animal alive for people. That could be fun since I could do more throwaway type things that wouldn't merit an entire 15 minute film. If I do it, it'll only be weekly, though. I know first-hand how time consuming it is. :-) I haven't decided how I'm going to handle the whole website thing yet. I'll just have a temporary one up until the web series is ready to launch. Once the DVD is finished, I'm going to focus on getting the episodes for the first series of Paunk! Shows done. I think now that I am going to go ahead with the five episodes (instead of compressing it to four). I'll have the time to do that and that way, with a second series in the fall, I'll have ten episodes in a year, which is pretty good for a web series. Here's where I'm at with the design of the DVD cover. It'll likely change some as I render out more of the Vulcanine scenes. I'm doing one of those slim digipacks, rather than the bulky amaray cases. It costs more, but since my Kickstarter was so successful, I thought I'd invest more into the packaging.

May have over-stated that a little. :-)

Hey thanks, Mike! In glancing over the thread, you missed the part about it actually being finished. So, kinda' late to reconsider character designs. :-) I'm working on rendering the final five minutes (of the 15 minute total) so that I can send the DVD master to the replicators on Monday. Simplification was the mantra for this project. How else could one guy create 15 minutes of animation from scratch in three months? (And that doesn't count the work I've done for the web series wraparound.) My thinking with the puppets was that I could create a sort of "limited 3D animation." As far as rigging goes, the puppets have very simple rigs that actually allow for more movement than they are actually required to do. My thinking is that with puppets you are essentially animating a forearm and and opening and closing hand. Just like real puppets, dramatic changes are accomplished by swapping out puppets. This simplifies things a great deal. I realize how much this has horrified some people on the forum, but this was always about finding a way to have fun creating my cartoons without having to invest years and years or come up with tons of money to pay for help. Thanks to this, I've already realized a 16 year-old dream in just a few months and I'm going to get to do at least one other fifteen minute film within this same year. I may be able to do a couple of dozen before it's all said and done. So I don't win any awards. I'm not doing this for an audience of animators and I'm too old to get a job in this business. I'm just having fun and hopefully making folks laugh. The civilian folks just watch it as a show. The craft or technique behind it is invisible to them. They might think it's not Pixar, but there's little expectation that a puppet show *would* be Pixar-quality. In fact, more than a few people have mistaken it for an *actual* puppet show, which is pretty high praise when you consider it.

Thanks, Rodney! I'm giving over most of my side of the table to having a 24" monitor that will be playing the movie on a loop. (I went ahead and shelled out the extra dough for electricity back when I bought the space.) I'm also planning on having a retractable banner stand to brand my area. I'll also be giving away postcards that will have a link on them. Among the thousand other things I have to do, I need to set up a temporary website. :-) I appreciate your optimism, and of course, I hope that it will do gangbusters, but reality can be very harsh. Selling out I think is unlikely, but it's how many I do sell that will give me some kind of clue as to whether or not this will be a financial success. To me, just accomplishing making it is success. :-)

Thanks, Robert! Yes, it's the Dallas ComicCon, which is on May 19-20. It's in the Irving Convention Center and looks like it's going to be their biggest convention yet. They have some big names: Stan Lee, Patrick Stewart, a bunch of Batmans: Adam West (along with Burt Ward), Kevin Conroy and Val Kilmer. Neal Adams is coming to this one and boy would I like to see a panel with him, but I'll be stuck at my table the whole con. The one downside of doing this, I never get to see any of the guests unless they do signings in the dealers hall.

Exhausted, but the final shot has been animated! I'm now officially in post-production! The total running time (not counting closing credits) is 14:58, so almost dead on with the 15 minute estimate. I got a surprise contact today from a local composer who does video games and movies and was really interested in scoring Stalled Trek. I told him I wish he'd come along earlier, but he insisted he works insanely fast and so I've commissioned him to score it! This is huge news. By far, the biggest regret has been not having a score on this and now that's not going to be the case! Of course, it now also means, that I'm no longer operating at a profit, but I'm gambling on sales of the DVD justifying it. I've got about 5 minutes worth of footage that I have to do final renders of and there's a lot of sound work needed for this last section, since much of it is sight gags with little or no dialogue. I'm going to be recording a lot of grunts and noises to try to get them to work. :-)

Nifty!

As predicted, once I got back into it, the animation is starting to pick up. I'm 3:08 into the final part and estimate I have about 2 minutes left, which means my original estimate of 15 minutes is going to be pretty true. I have three more shots to finish tonight and seven to do tomorrow and I'll have finished the basic animation. I still need to go back and adjust the lighting before rendering and then there's going to be a fair amount of sound design needed for these "action" shots. I also want to take a crack at recreating some of the more familiar still frames from the closing titles. One thing that's been a big help to me is this app I have on my iPhone: Animation Timer. I bought it years ago, but had completely forgotten about it. I was struggling trying to figure out the timing on the non-dialogue shots when I finally remembered I had this app. It's not perfect, but for many shots, it's been a huge help. I just start the timer and tap out the things I imagine seeing on screen and then I can go back and see the overall time of the shots and the holds between taps. I really wish I'd remembered it before yesterday. As time hurtles out the window, I've decided to hold off on doing the web series until *after* I've finished the DVD. In addition to the animated short, I want to do a making-of feature and spend some time designing the menus and cover art. I'm also planning on getting a retractable banner stand and a couple of postcards, which all need to be designed soon, as well. I don't want to short-sell either, so I'm going to put off doing the wraparound animation and putting up the episodes until after the DVD is complete and off to the replicators. With that in mind, the web series may go back to being 5 episodes, since a big reason for making it four was to conserve time.

Hats off, Gene! That's an amazing accomplishment!

Jpegs don't support alpha channels. Do a "Save for Web & Devices..." and choose PNG-24. Make sure that transparency is checked.

Maps=decals. Once you place a decal you can change the image to be: color, bump, specular intensity, etc. Some materials can include bitmap images.

Thanks, Rob! Yeah, I remember when I first got "Superman: the Movie" on blu-ray and I set it up so that I could pause on the same frame on both the blu-ray and a DVD copy and switch the input signal on my TV back and forth between them. It's astonishing how dramatically "wrong" the colors are in NTSC. Superman's cape is more of an orange and his costume more aquamarine. Seeing the vivid reds and blues on blu-ray to me was more impressive than the resolution. Photoshop has a series of actions you run that first makes sure the saturation levels are okay and then the luminosity levels. It's the second one that is most dramatic. Whites become light grays and blacks become dark grays.

Haha, no, I thought it was pretty good, actually. I tend to surf the forums on my laptop while working on my main computer. I find it awkward to type on my laptop, so I have to actually respond on my computer and by the time I've switched my attention, I forget what it was I was thinking about doing. :-) The characters are definitely odd, but still creative and I think, as I do on each of your animations, that there's a definite increase of quality each time.

Thanks, Gene!

...And that's the end! $2,202.42! 367% of my goal! I'll have to wait to see what the final tally really is, though. Just checking now, $165 of pledges "errored," meaning I probably won't get those. In addition, Kickstarter takes 5% (presumably from the pledged amount) and Amazon takes an unknown amount (usually between 3-5%.) I'm guessing it'll end up being around $1800. That should more than cover the cost of replicating DVDs, printing the packaging, shipping them to me and shipping out the 87 DVDs to the backers. Many are overseas, so they could be pricey, but it should cover it all. As exciting as this has been, I'm relieved it's finished. Now I won't have this constant urge to keep checking the progress and I can just focus on getting the work done. :-)

That looks great, Gerry! Congrats on the story & cover! Look forward to reading it.

Well, the freelance job ended up taking up a majority of the last two weeks, but I'm back on task again. On the plus side, I was able to send shots to render over night and finished all the rendering up to the current part I'm working on. I have just over ten minutes of finished footage now. I've experimented with color-correcting it for broadcast and exporting it as 2.97fps (both from Photoshop) and the result was really good. The colors do get choked some, they blow out without doing this and it does make it look more like an old TV show. Normal/Broadcast Safe I'm about forty-five seconds into this last section. I'm finding it slow going, but I expect it to speed up as I start to see the finish line. Once it's done, I'll start working on the wraparound sections for the Paunk! Show episodes. Those are easy to animate and should go quickly. I want to complete everything before I start putting them online. The has gotten over 900 views without a whole lot of promotion, so I'm hopeful that there'll be an audience for it when it launches. Wild to think that just three months ago this project wasn't even on my radar.

Thanks, Gerry! My Kickstarter campaign has entered it's final 24 hours. Kickstarter says you get a surge of people near the end, but even if that's not the case, I am beyond thrilled with how successful it's been. I'm going to get to make my DVDs! Which was the whole point of it. Giant thanks to everyone who's helped out!

Welcome back, Al! v16 was an amazing improvement. The biggest thing (like Robcat pointed out) is the render speeds. Amazing (even on the Mac.)

Cafepress isn't too great for merchandising. Their cut is far too high on high-priced merchandise to begin with. And I don't think the quality is very good, either. I had a few readers ask me to put up Wannabe Pirates T-shirts and 2 of the 3 people asking ordered one. Since you have to make at least $25 before you can withdraw your funds, it was basically me making money for Cafepress. I ordered a shirt for myself last year and the quality of the printing was poor and the shirt itself disintegrated after a couple of washes. From what I've heard from people who do manage to sell T-shirts, logos and branding don't sell well at all. It's more clever stuff and gags. The people who are good at this do well, but usually banking on existing properties that they don't pay a license for (ie a Peanuts-styled Dr. Who sitting at Lucy's psychiatric stand with the sign "The Doctor is In.") And they print their own shirts, so they can get a higher cut of the sales. Print on Demand is great as a vanity press, but not-so-great for trying to make a profit. I've even considered doing a 16-page comic adaption of Stalled Trek, but the POD cost is just too high. It would force me to charge at least $3 per copy, with printing coming to $2.25 per book and shipping eating up most of the rest of the difference. Selling 100 of them would probably net me less than $25. And the likelihood is that I might only sell 5 of them. It becomes a real what's-the-point? That's why I'm focusing on DVDs. I can sell them for higher than a printed comic with less cost to make them.

Well, my Kickstarter campaign is coming to a close, and to my surprise is continuing to gain donors. The donations are now over 300%! I've even had an email from someone considering donating $500 to get the puppet-cameo! Wild stuff! Currently 52% of the pledges have come from within Kickstarter and 48% from outside links, which means the majority of donations are coming from people who just saw the project and decided to back it. That's a great boost! 79 people have pledged at the level for getting a DVD, with three of those choosing to get no reward. That means I've pre-sold 76 DVDs! I'm still waiting for the final tally to make any decisions about what to do with the extra money, but as of now, I feel confident I'll be able to print 1,000 DVDs (up from the 200 I aimed this at) and still be able to look at getting some things for the convention (like a banner stand that isn't made out of PVC pipes.) I'll post again as things happen, but barring something horrible, using Kickstarter to raise a small amount of funds seems to be working well.

Congrats again, Will. I'm sure you'll figure out a way. Pardon the pun, but you've got the will. :-) I think sponsorship will definitely have to play a part. Tar isn't something you can knock out over a weekend. Kickstarter could definitely be one source, some local fundraising of some kind could be another. I guess the pie-in-the-sky option would be to get some sort of venture capital, but I have no idea how you go about that, and I've even heard that some of them charge *you* money to pitch ideas to them, which sounds criminal.

Hey, you should wear those years of experience with pride! Happy Birthday!

I'm thinking maybe the Symbiont2 plugin doesn't work under Lion. You can remove it from the Textures folder and that warning should stop. Not sure about the dictionary file thing. Hopefully Robcat's suggestion works. (I've never used it.)