largento

Man, this has been a rough week. Most of the time at the freelance gig, I've been there as back-up, waiting for work to come in. Kinda' like being in a waiting room day after day. I've got to go back in today, too. I'm just hoping that I don't get the flu that's going round up there. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the work, but it's hard not to think about how much work you could be getting done at home. Episode two is almost complete. I still need to get my two lady friends to record their lines. Hoping I can get that done soon. I've rendered all of the shots except those three shots that need the female lip synch. I'm looking into the possibility of making it four episodes instead of five. I think it may be possible to edit 3 minutes out of the last two episodes to make it just one. My thinking is that it might seem a little long drug out to the fifth episode and I can make the extra time exclusive to the DVD version, giving incentive for folks to make the purchase. This also means that I don't have to do a wraparound for the fifth episode, which makes meeting my goal easier. I'm waiting until I've got the Stalled Trek part completed to see if this is doable. With the pilot up, I've seen a few comments from around the web. Most are on the positive side, but there was a reviewer who called it "Innocuous eye candy, not much more." But he also said, "...the humor ranges from sophomoric to silly to somewhat sly, but overall I enjoyed it, and I'm pretty much a grownup, at least chronologically-speaking. It's very colorful and fun to watch..." and gave it a mild recommendation saying it would do as a "virtual snack."

Thanks! I finished the main animation for episode two yesterday. I'm going to have to get a female friend to voice the female characters, so I didnt animate their lip syncing. It's just three lines, but there are more in future episodes. Working freelance this week, but using time to render shots. Have a bunch of modeling to do this week and hopefully will be able to animate episode three over the weekend. Four and five won't require any more models, so I should be able to animate them next week. Then it's a matter of writing and animating the Paunk! Wraparounds and Series One will be finished!!

Awesome, Gerry! Very cool!

Join the two crossing splines. That's why there's a hole.

Very cool, Gazz! Nice to see them coming back to life!

Thanks!

Hear-hear, Rodney! That Chaplin is awesome-squared, Paul!

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.