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Wow, Jim! That's impressive! Thanks! I *will* be needing a transporter sound effect.

Setting up my files for episode two. Already feel better with having some kind of order. :-) I modeled up this over-sized pet carrier for one of my favorite gags from the original version of "Amutt Time." :-) And just for laughs, here's what it looked like waaay back in 1996:

Those are great, Jim! Please do upload the sound effects. Did you create these yourself? [edit] I see that you just did. Thanks!

Thanks, Matt! The experiment continues!

Thanks, Ken, David, & John! Ken, I think I'll be able to look at it fresh later in the process and hopefully fix that. The Star Trek news site, Subspace Communique put up a really nice write-up about it here. Hopefully this early exposure will foster interest in the show so that there'll be at least a small audience looking for it when it officially launches.

Thanks, guys! Now I guess I *do* have to finish it. :-) Big thanks, Steve! I'm hoping to get some feedback from the Trek fans out there. I wrote to one of the Star Trek news sites earlier today and they responded and offered to put the word out about it. I'm going to try to get the other sites to take notice, too.

Thanks, Myron & Gene!

Thanks, Rodney! Really great to get this kind of reaction. It's tough working on these things by yourself and wondering if it will go over. I had originally imagined many many more TVs at different sizes moving around, but took the short cut out. :-) I wanted the ones that came up close enough to recognize to be significant, but really only had three that were. I might update it in the future to feature Barry the Nerd or the Pear OD-9000 computer. I have an okay ear for doing impressions, but what's really helpful is to be able to change the pitch. Even Mel Blanc used to do that. Daffy Duck was just Sylvester's voice sped up slightly. With modern apps, you can adjust the pitch without changing the speed. I'm not positive, but I believe the opening "Direct from Outer Space, it's the Paunk Show!" is the only one where I didn't change the speed of my voice. I just added echo to it. Nurse Chapel screaming is a purchased sound effect. Don't think there's any software that could turn my voice into that. :-)

Thanks, Nancy! This is definitely aimed at the uber-Star Trek fans. No chances of going back and re-doing the hair at this point, Nancy. I tried it with the felt look and didn't like it. It would look great if I could do hair or yarn or something, but that ain't in the cards. Time ain't on my side. To make it even more difficult, I just agreed to work freelance next week from Monday to Thursday, so the better part of next week is lost to me. Gonna' be really frustrating to sit around waiting for work knowing how much isn't getting done on this. :-)

Thanks, Paul! That's the whole reasoning behind the puppet-style animation. There's no way I could produce full animation in this time by myself. I'm still not entirely sure I'll pull off completing it in time anyway. :-) Eye-movement was something I gave thought to, but had to throw out. The only way this gets done is if it's me animating an arm with the hand opening and closing. :-) Paunk's voice is double-tracked to get that harmonics sound. (It's actually me doing an impression of Don Adams.) :-) Like many shows, I'm sure there'll be changes as I go. Hard to start off fully-formed. I can only take partial credit for the music, as it is a GarageBand composition that comes with the program. I just changed the instruments and added things to make it sound more otherworldly. I really wish I had any musical talent... Some of the bits of music are me blowing into a melodica, but they are only very short bits and they sound terrible. :-)

Thanks, Robert! I'll confess that I timed everything to my original dialogue read and when I re-did the lines, I seemed to do them faster. If I have time, I'll re-cut them before it becomes an actual episode. Some of the head animation doesn't match anymore, either. I can't sweat too much, though, or I'll never make the deadline. Right now, I've got 55 days and four episodes to do, amounting to around 20 minutes of animation. I feel kind of funny about the whole "made with..." thing. I'm a MacUser and I still wince at those "Made on a Mac" buttons. The plan right now is to change up the end credits with some kind of gag each time. I definitely want to stay away from those "Written, Acted, Animated, Edited, Directed, etc. etc. by" deals. It seems corny and folks don't really care. :-) I actually uploaded it via Quicktime X using the uncompressed Quicktime movie (a whopping 1.9 GB file!) I haven't googled the problem, but I definitely encounter it with other YouTube videos, so maybe there's a fix out there. [edit] Actually the original file is a whopping 9.9 GB. Yikes!

I've decided to release the first episode out into the open! It won't change anything as to the "official" release date, but I am calling this one a pilot, rather than episode one. You can see it . At least on the first watching, the audio seems to go a little out of sync at the end. Probably doesn't greatly effect the viewing, but as I've spent so much time doing lip synching, it's a big frustration for me. :-) I need to check on what can cause that. Obviously the original files don't have that problem. It's either something to do with the conversion to Flash video or I guess it could be the flash plug-in on the Mac, too. Let me know what you think!

That was a long way to go to suggest something, Rodney ...and still I'm not swayed. :-) Although the point has some validity in the case of a general Misc folder, these folders are specific to their location and are just catch-alls for the random sort of things that can pop up. Test renders, etc. I would suspect most of them will remain empty. EVERYTHING will be archived, so there's no point in having a folder called that. We all, of course, work differently. :-) I was just curious to see how others approached this sort of thing. Mine works for me and for this project. It accomplishes my stated goals (to make each episode modular and eliminate clutter, redundancy and files with the same names) and it makes sense to me and my workflow. As far as the naming convention, I'm going to go with "tps001_01" indicating the production name, episode number and shot number. Dates are irrelevant to the production. As to documenting the journey, that's what the Wannabe Way section is for. :-)

Awesome, Gene & Myron! Congrats!

Thanks. I think having some structure will make backing up easier. And I should be able to archive episodes as they are finished, meaning I'll only have to keep the current episode folder on my hard drive. I think, too, that I'm going to make the Audio folder in the Production folder the low-quality wav files and put the high quality files in the Post-Production folder. I think creating subfolders for types of models (similar to what you show in your directory) is a good idea, too. Who knows if I'll be able to maintain the organization, but at least now I have a place to start. :-)

Thanks, Nancy! Very inspiring... So here's how I think I'm going to set this up to start with. I'll adjust as I go: At the Top Level, I'm going to have a folder for all the Paunk Show Assets. Subfolders will house the assets for the Paunk show wraparounds. The cho folder here will hold choreographies that have built sets, etc. Similarly, I'll have a folder for Parody Assets. They'll be the same structure as the Paunk Show Assets folder, just in individual subfolders for each property. The Final Files folder will have the final videos for each episode that are ready to upload, as well as the DVD files. The Promotional folder will be where I'll put all the non-production files. Ads, graphics etc. The Working Files folder will have a subfolder for each episode. The Episode subfolder will have folders for: Pre-Production, Production, Rendering and Post-Production Pre-Production will hold all the things that are accumulated prior to actually starting the episode. I'm not doing storyboards, but they could go here if I were. Production will have the working choreographies, audio files and I'll have a folder for saving my shaded Quicktime renders. Rendering will have a place for final choreographies, renders and the Photoshop Docs I create to do color correction, etc. Post-Production will be where I can put all of the AE & Premiere Files, as well as the final Quicktime movies rendered from Photoshop & AE. I'm also going to stick in a Miscellaneous folder in each section to give me a place to dump stuff that don't seem to fit.

I don't think I'd work well with the Library feature. I can see its usefulness in bringing in assets, but I know where my assets are. Like you, I usually have a project folder that has some structure, but still has lots of loose files. I had a decent system when I was doing the Wannabe Pirates, but the post files were easy to keep up with. There was a single image rendered for each panel, a single Illustrator file for each strip, etc. Animation, I find, can be much messier. In addition to all of the A:M files (and associated decals, rotoscopes, etc.) add thousands of rendered frames, audio tracks and all the files I stick into AfterEffects and Premiere and before long, it's a jumble. Not a disaster when it's just the one thing, but this is a SERIES, so I'm going to have to reel it in some. :-)

I'm not so much worried about it being transportable, but I want to eliminate clutter, redundancy and avoid having multiple files with the same name. Ideally, I'm shooting for having it modular enough that I can archive episodes as they are completed, but still bring them back in if I need to (like to make an HD version). There's just sooo many files that get generated in the production of something like this. Having a purposeful place for each one is difficult.

I'm over my head in a big project that is going to generate an enormous number of files and I want to establish some order before I get buried. I'm curious as to how everyone else organizes their files. What kind of naming scheme do you use? How do you handle the different types of assets (models, actions, audio files, decals, materials, etc.)?

Just an update on progress. Had a few stumbles with the production process, but better to make the mistakes early on than later. :-) My voice has returned enough that I've been able to do the final voice tracks, but this meant having to reanimate the lip-synching on the first Stalled Trek installment, which in turn, means that I'm having to re-render those shots. It's costing me time, but there were some technical mistakes in some of those shots that would have led me to re-render them anyway. Also, I've developed a sort of "style" with the lip-synching now and I was able to improve what I'd done before. I switched to using SoundBooth to handle the voice stuff and I'm finding I can control it much better than with GarageBand. I'm still using GarageBand for the music and sound effects, though. I'm managing to get by with just plugging in some musical stingers and a bit of me playing around on a melodica that I ordered last week. I lost a lot of time worrying over the audio side, so it's nice to know that I won't have to do that with the rest of them. As I'm waiting for these renders to finish, I'm trying to work up some kind of file organization for the rest of the episodes. When you have a lot of false starts, you end up with a large amount of files you don't need and I'm realizing I need to have everything streamlined, or I'm going to run out of space real fast. Right now, I've got 17.86 GB worth of files. One of the biggest problems is that I started this as Stalled Trek and a few weeks in decided to make it The Paunk Show. They really are two different things, but I need to organize them together somehow. Put everything in an order that makes sense and archive the extra stuff that I don't need. The final running time for the first episode came in at 6:15, which is great for bumping up the overall running time for the DVD, but it's more animation than I originally planned for. Thankfully, the Paunk stuff takes place on one set and is mostly one camera shot. I've found that I can animate a very large amount of dialogue in a day. Getting faster at this was bound to happen and it's making me more confident I can do the animation in the time I have left. It's been important to get this first episode into its final state just to prove to myself that it all will work. I'm pleased with the final product. It looks a whole lot better than I originally expected. I think the Paunk stuff is coming out pretty funny, too. It's going to have its own sort of storyline running across the episodes. But I'm easily two weeks behind on my schedule. I'm still planning on April 1st for the launch, but I may move that if need be. I'm not going to launch until all five episodes of this first series are completely finished.

That is awesome-sauce, Paul!

Thanks, guys! Hoping 44 is going to be a great year. Next year is (shudder) 45!

So here's a case where a guy who does a "stick figure" webcomic for six years launches a Kickstarter campaign to get $58K to reprint his books and gets $238K in the first week! That's the value in creating an audience! Wow.

If you're going for the internet audience, I think you should keep episodes very short. Definitely less than ten minutes. I'm thinking 5-7 is a good length. Folks have short attention spans. I'd shoot for 5 minute episodes and make them episodic (to be continued!) Myself, I'm going to do five episode "seasons" or series. I'll run the episodes weekly, but then take off for a few weeks between series. My thinking is that 25 minutes is the bare minimum running time I'd feel comfortable selling as a DVD. I'm going to finish the five episodes before launch, to give me a buffer. The three weeks between series will be "bonus buffer." :-) I'm thinking of the floppies-to-trade model that comics have. Regular DVDs with the individual series on them and collection DVDs with more content (and a higher price.) Is Tar of Zandoria going to still have nudity? I hate to say it, but a few topless hyena princesses will probably guarantee you more viewers. I don't know what YouTube's policy is on animated nudity, though.

Thanks, everybody! And that WBP cartoon is awesome, Rodney! :-)