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Thanks, Kat! It seemed to go over pretty well this weekend. I don't think most people could actually hear it over the noise of the con, but it worked to get their attention.

I've given Kickstarter a thought on more than one occasion, Jake. My concern is that I just wouldn't have the fan base and outreach to get it funded. My thinking (and this could be wrong) is that there aren't really that many people who go to Kickstarter looking for projects to give their money to. I think the majority of the successful projects got the word out independently and pointed their large fanbase (network of friends and family) to their Kickstarter. I'm just not sure that I could get the hundreds of donators necessary to fully fund a project. Like I said, I could be wrong.

It ain't free (it costs $5), but Barry Zundel's video tutorial on modeling the head is a great resource. It's the way I model everything. Look at this post to see my first attempt at modeling a head and my second (after watching Barry's tutorials). I highly recommend ALL of Barry's tutorials. Really helped me get a handle on A:M in those early days.

I've been using A:M on the Mac side for 4 years now and I've managed to do a lot with it. That said, if you don't prefer one OS over the other, I would agree with those who have suggested going with the Windows version ...just for the 3rd party plugins. If you do have a preference for the Mac, A:M works great on a Mac. I use it daily, sometimes running as many as 7 instances of it as I work on the Wannabe Pirates and other animation projects. To be truthful there aren't that many 3rd party apps/plugins for A:M (TSM2 hasn't been updated or supported in several years.) The only two others that spring to mind are "simple AO" and "A:M Track" and while both are useful, you can certainly get by without them.

How cool to get to the "cover" scene! It's looking great!

Thank you, Paul!

Great job, Steve!

Thanks, Steve, Jake David & Gene! @Jake I did struggle with the idea of how fast paced this should be. I tried to trim out as much as I could between shots, but the dialogue isn't fast-dialogue, so that dictated a lot of the pacing. I do think the music will add a quicker pace to it overall as well as act as a unifying agent. I went back and forth over whether it should be a commercial or a sampler and ended up leaning to the latter. Where the former would mean making something leaner and more punchy, the latter gave me the freedom to let it expand. To be sure, part of that was the conceit of showing as much as I could.

Thanks, guys! That's a good idea, Chris. I do think I may have lost track of the commercial aspect of this. I wonder if I should switch the two end screens around: have the credits first and then the call-to-order screen? Robert, that is probably wise. I had hoped that it might be ready for next Saturday, but I think that was unrealistic. I don't know how long the music will take, but I'm sure it will be worth the wait. It's definitely missed when watching it. Rodney, the monkey sequence was definitely the most challenging. It wasn't in the original script because I was afraid to try it. :-) But breaking it up into easy shots like that took much of the difficulty out of it ...and added some extra humor to it, too. That same advice would work on any project. It's the old "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." joke. What I really hope is that it'll be fun to see for someone who reads the strip on a regular basis. As much as I hope it attracts new readers, I really wanted to make it something that the readers would get a kick out of. Keeping my fingers crossed that they like it. Even after getting away from it for a good bit of time, I've reached the point where I've seen it so many times that I practically have every frame memorized and it's hard to force my brain to pay attention when I watch it. :-) Thanks for the order, Rodney! I know what you mean about how long it takes those guys to print them and send them out. It takes almost a full month for them to fill the first order and after that, I think they take 10 days to do a re-order. I had wanted to get some more for the show next weekend, but was afraid that they wouldn't get here in time. I'm real pleased with the quality, though.

Why not an early peek? :-) Even though I'm holding off debuting this to the world until it's completely finished, I wanted to be able to show some version of it at the Dallas Webcomics Expo (now called Stripcon) next week. Scott is still working on the music, but sent me an audio file pass with all of the dialogue and sound effects. The absence of music is noticeable, but it does give it that sneak-peak quality to it. :-) There's one shot where Scott seems to have shifted the audio or re-dubbed a line where the lip-sync seems a little off (it's the "or a man who laughs at danger" shot) and I'll need to address that, but for the most part everything really gets a bump from having sound! I didn't take the audio into Premiere, but rather added it to the Quicktime movie with the "Add to Selection & Scale" command, so that could throw the sound off a frame or two in some places. I'll have to work that out before next Saturday. Like I said, I'm still waiting until everything is finished before I put it out for the public, but since I'm going to be showing it to some part of the public next week, I wanted to show it here first! So, here's a sneak-sneak peek at the music-less version! The Wannabe Pirates and the Curse of Greyhawk Island

That's weird. I don't understand how they can charge for Wordpress. It's free, after all. Incidentally, so is ComicPress. It's only that 3.0 that is supposed to have a price tag. Just looking at the FAQ, it looks like the Network Solutions fee includes a domain name, so that's not a terrible deal.

It's a plug-in for Wordpress called ComicPress. There are others out there, but I'd hazard that the majority of webcomics use it. It's relatively easy to set up and has several nice features. I seem to recall reading that active development of it has stopped. They just update it to work with new releases of Wordpress. One of the developers has been working on a ComicPress 3.0 and I want to say that there's going to be a cost involved with it.

Cool, Gene and thanks! I've been very pleased with the job they do printing them. Can't wait until I start getting into the double-digits and have a whole bunch of issues. I'd love to distribute them to the comics shops, but with the way distribution is these days, that's not likely. Not that I could afford it, either. I can't even afford to get bar codes so that the printer can distribute them. :-)

Is it possible there is a permissions problem? I gather the hang up is that when you go to register A:M, it hangs, saying it can't write the master license file. Might be worth checking your permissions with Disk Utility. Also, I believe you need to remove the master license file before you launch the program, which forces it to write a new one.

Hmm. I'm running Snow Leopard and haven't had an issue. Wish I could help, but maybe just try the usual stuff (a restart, make sure you're installing it into the default location and that you are correctly entering the activation code that Hash sent to you.) Hope you get it sorted out quickly.

Very cool!

It's helpful to consider rigging when you're designing and modeling your characters, too. (As Robert indicates at the beginning of one of the videos, citing Buzz and Woody.) For a no-neck character, consider making the head a separate mesh from the body. I did this with my Ballast character: I think this could work well for your penguin, too, allowing him to turn his head as much as he needs to and greatly simplifying the rigging.

Very informative and nicely done, Robert!

Cool, Myron! Glad to see you're not giving up!

Why not play against the movie title and make it "front window?"

Thanks, guys!

Very cool and great conservation of splines.

If you haven't read Friday's installment of The Wannabe Pirates, the story is getting into the exciting part: The super-science apes were designed, modeled and rigged quickly, but I think they came out great! Kudos to Mark S. for the rigging and Ken H. who modeled the gorilla's head for the earlier non-super-science gorilla model I designed a few years ago. This is gonna' be fun!

Cool!

Thanks, guys! I really appreciate it!