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Thanks, Gene! I am just amazed to say that I've officially passed the goal amount and my Kickstarter project is funded! It will continue to run for the rest of the month, though, in case anyone else wants to order a DVD. Unless something changes, my plan is to do this run as a special first edition with just the number of DVDs I get made. I'll send them out to the folks who contributed and then use the others to sell at the convention. I'm planning on doing about 200, so my fingers are crossed that I can sell the rest out there. I think this will make it cooler for the people who did support me and then if I order more, I'll change up the packaging for the second "printing". [EDIT] You posted while I was writing, Darkwing. Thanks!

Cool! Thanks!

I'm certainly agreeable to "audience-widening." :-) Right now, I'm just focusing on getting it finished, but once it's finished I'm probably going to launch the web series on Blip.TV. Beyond that, I'm going to set up a website for it (I have purchased the domains for both paunk.com and stalledtrek.com). I would expect that site to be the hub of everything, but that's going to be built *after* I complete the work on the series and the DVD. I still appreciate any support and if you'd like to point people to the Kickstarter page, that would be a great thing. It has images and additional video as well as a link to the YouTube video of the pilot. Thanks!

Excellent, Lt. Cmdr. Mooney! Thanks! I really am thankful for all the support. I'm just flabbergasted. @Darkwing A "making of" video is definitely something I want to include on the DVD. This process was developed with the intended goal of being able to create content quickly and simply. The solutions really came to me while doing all of that work on The Wannabe Pirates. You start looking for shortcuts and realizing what is slowing the process down. I definitely couldn't have done this when I was first starting in 2007 (and looking at that original thread is complete proof of that!) :-)

Much appreciated, Lt. Cmdr. Harris! :-) Thanks to you, I'm at 75% of my goal. I am completely stunned by the support from people. I didn't even consider the possibility that I'd get this far in a single day.

That's a great looking cast! Especially like the frog!

I know! I'm at 65% and pretty amazed by that. It would be great if it went past that!

Thank you, sir!

I'm not a big fan of them, myself. I use a debit card, which is accepted like a credit card, but doesn't allow me to bury myself in debt. :-) You should be able to get one with a checking account. There are those who would encourage you to get a credit card and use it responsibly to start building your credit. I was terrible with mine. I might be better nowadays that you can pay everything online, but back in the day, I found it extremely difficult to mail in my payment on time. Late fees and sudden changes in interest, etc. always put me into a place where I owed much more on the card than I ever used it to buy. I don't know when it's going to drop off, but I've reached 35% of my goal! Feeling a bit like George Bailey. :-)

Thanks, Stian & Will! I really appreciate the support! @Darkwing Kickstarter uses Amazon Payments, so it's basically like buying something through Amazon (Amazon doesn't charge you until your order ships and likewise, doesn't charge you for your pledge until/unless the project is completely funded.) I DO think you have to use a credit card (or debit card) or have your bank account linked. I don't think there's a way to do it with PayPal. I had to sign up for some kind of business account with Amazon in order to do this.

Hey everyone, I just started a Kickstarter campaign to make it possible for me to replicate DVDs of Stalled Trek for the convention in May. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/197552...trek-amutt-time I really need to spread the word as far as possible, so if you could share the link on Facebook or tweet about it or make mention of it on your website and email your friends and ask them to do the same, I'd really appreciate it. Please help! Thanks! Mark

T'Poodle's "pet-bed" chair.

On the Mac, none of it.

Thanks, Mark! Finished up T'Poodle's model today. Don't know why, but I kept putting her model off. I just have a couple of props to make and then I need to make sure I have all of the voices recorded. If all goes well, I may be able to start animating the final section tomorrow. I'm expecting it to take about 9 days. Once that's finished, I'm going to look at how I can edit it down to 12 minutes so it can be broken up into four parts (instead of five.) The wraparounds shouldn't be too difficult to do. I'm going to try to limit those to one minute before and one minute after. February is almost over (thank goodness this is a leap year!), but I feel pretty good about being able to complete everything by the end of March.

Clever and fun, Matt! Well done! I can appreciate the work of folks who want to spend endless hours obsessing over every detail, but I can't identify with them. My first year of college, I was an art major and there was this guy who would lock himself in his dorm room for a week before a drawing was due and come out with this photo-realistic piece that everybody would "ooh" and "ahh" over. I'd do mine the night before and we both made "A"s in class. Afterwards, though, my teacher would come over and say that he was disappointed that I hadn't put more time into it. And I would politely nod and agree with him, all the while thinking, "Why are you telling me this. Is there a grade above A?" :-)

I'm totally with you on this one, Gerry. It's partly why I've opted for simpler characters. :-) I found Barry's rigging tutorials the least helpful of the set. That's not saying that they didn't convey a great deal of information on the basics of bones, but it seemed clear that Barry was following his notes, too ...and as you pointed out, making lots of mistakes that make it frustrating to follow along. And then Barry sort of skips over assigning control points, which was one of the great mysteries for me early on. Errol Flemm was rigged a few different times and it really put the brakes on my productivity. (I ended up rigging him with the Setup Machine the last time around.) Big thanks to Mark S. for his help and his rig, because I would probably still be stuck. :-) Myself, I approach animation more like stop-motion, so I'm okay with just using FK for everything and you can create a very simple rig requiring no cosmetic or control bones if you're okay with not having any bells or whistles. (I simply use cp-weighting for the joints.) It's not very elegant, but it can get the job done. I also find myself considering the rigging when I design/model characters and look for things that can make it easier (wristbands so that the hands don't have to be attached and twist the arms, etc.)

Have a good one, Jason!

Ah the word I was hoping to hear. :-) Just for fun, here's some stereo anaglyphs of three of the sets I've built for this:

A quick update. Still building all of the stuff I need for Vulcanine. Here are the Vulcanine Bell Carriers:

There wasn't a redshirt who beamed down in the actual episode, but how could I do a Trek parody and *not* kill a redshirt? In previous versions, this was just a monster, but for this one, I based it on a LeMatya, which is a Vulcan animal featured in an episode of the Animated Series:

Just voted again today, so that's two votes!

Fight it! Fight it! :-) Thanks, Ken!

Neat stuff!

Congrats! I'll head over and add my vote!

Thanks, guys! What's been fun for me, is that there are still elements from the aborted 2007 version that I've been able to make use of in this new version. The sparkles come from the "glitter cylinder" I created back in 2007 and showed in this post. I didn't even re-render it. Just used the old quicktime movie I'd made. There's some controversy over how the original sparkles were created. The "official" story is that it was by pouring glitter down a cascade of water with a heavy light on it, shot against a black background. Others have claimed it was a very large, backlit tank filled with alka seltzer. :-) Whatever, I still think the spinning transparent cylinder works, since you can get sparkles moving in different directions. I looked again at some online tutorials, but found them somehow lacking. The basic idea that the characters fade into view (in other words, you fade from a clean plate to one with the actors in it) and covering the figures with a matte outline and some kind of sparkle effect is obvious, but it didn't quite look right. I did some reading and found a reference that Roddenberry made in a production note that the people should come in as a single color. I never found a reference to this before, but it instantly made sense. I added a yellow layer that fades in first and then sort of fades in and out slightly over the fading in of the figure and blammo, it instantly looked more like the real effect. For the actual shot, I want to do a tighter matte around the figures and I plan on adding a couple of moving elements to the scene so that it feels less static.