Stalled Trek 2012 —Finished!

[largento]

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. :-)

[3DArtZ]

I just stumbled upon this thread. Wow! looks like you are actually one of the few that are really onto something. I do hope you keep going, the stuff you have posted really looks like you've got a handle on this.

now, sofar... the one thing I cant easily get past is the difference between the male and female mouths... There has to be a way to make that mouth appear feminine while keeping the muppet look. its one of the best elements in the design and the women deserve to have it as well. just my opinion.

 

Also, as always I have an interest in the rigging aspect. as you can tell I have only concentrated on the images you have posted and not read much in the thread... sorry. but I have always felt that the productions here have shot themselves in the foot by having a rig design that is overly complex and unnecesary. what are you planning to do rigging wise?

Mike Fitz

www.3dartz.com

[largento]

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.

[robcat2075]

Not horrified here!

[Gerry]

Me not horrified.

[itsjustme]

I can't think of a reason anyone would be horrified...fear of puppets?

[largento]

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

[jimd]

it's brilliant keep it up!

[Gerry]

Also, two more of my cents, I *think* you mentioned awhile ago that you were thinking of developing this into a printed comic (am I wrong about that? Can't find the post) as well. But seriously, you should just stick to animating, that's where people find the most fun. Doing a comic book version seems like a distraction from what is a great project!

[largento]

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.

 

[largento]

Wow, took a really long time to render out that last section. The Vulcanine Arena set made heavy usage of a dark sim texture, which made render times much longer. I did end up rendering some of the backgrounds before hand and bringing them back in as layers to speed up the process, but that only worked when there were no camera movements or interaction between the characters and the background.

 

I've edited together the entire movie including the new music soundtrack and am almost finished with the sound. There's a couple of places where I need to provide some character vocalizations to enhance the action.

 

The last thing is the credits. If JimD is reading this, let me know if you'd like a mention in the credits. I haven't done the Paunk! Shows yet, but I did use your transporter sound effect in this.

 

I got really lucky with finding sound effects on Amazon's MP3 store.

 

I have been pushing myself all day to get all of the loose ends taken care of. I'm really looking forward to getting to watch the whole thing tonight. It really does feel like a different animal with the musical score.

 

All that's left after this is to design and build the menus for the DVD itself and put together the extra "making of" featurette. I was hoping to get it to the replicator tomorrow, but it looks like I still have a couple or more days before I'll be ready.

 

After all these years, it's finally going to be finished and real! :-)

[robcat2075]

The Vulcanine Arena set made heavy usage of a dark sim texture, which made render times much longer.

 

I've noticed that although A:M is much faster overall, procedural materials don't seem to have gained much.

 

BTW, did you consider baking the darksim textures? That would have been faster.

[largento]

I did experiment with baking the surface and the baked surface version actually took considerably longer to render. I'm assuming because of the bump maps and such.

 

We're not talking about astronomical times here. At worst, they never went over 12 minutes a frame.

 

I'd just gotten used to it being more like 2 or 4 minutes a frame on the ship sets.

 

I'll probably have to say goodbye to using the darksim textures, since the plug-in doesn't work in the current Mac OS.

[robcat2075]

I'll probably have to say goodbye to using the darksim textures, since the plug-in doesn't work in the current Mac OS.

 

I wonder... if there's some way we could talk them into letting Steffen have the code for the plugin and do the conversion for them?

[largento]

That would be awesome.

 

So, I'm finished with the film and all of the other stuff and I've built the DVD menus and stuff in Encore. All the functionality works, but I'm not happy with how the film itself came out during the transcoding. It was much darker and contrasty than the original video.

 

I might be tempted to let it go if it weren't that I was about to make 1000 of them. :-)

 

Trying out some different things in Photoshop, but it's slow going since I'm working with uncompressed files. I'm also using Photoshop to convert from 24fps to 29.97fps, which makes render times out of Photoshop even longer.

 

This is the kinda' stuff you don't know to worry about when you start out. :-)

 

I did end up going with a slideshow for the "making of" bit. It just made more sense that way, since it's actually possible to read the earlier comic versions on the screen. I'm also including the 4 minute Wannabe Pirates video I animated last year. The sound part was finished this week.

 

Creating the DVD menus was actually very easy. Encore allows you to create them in Photoshop and you set them up in a certain way so that when Encore opens the PSD file, it automatically knows what are buttons. You then just drag links to what you want the buttons to take the viewer to and ...boom, you've got your DVD interface.

[jimd]

Wow, took a really long time to render out that last section. The Vulcanine Arena set made heavy usage of a dark sim texture, which made render times much longer. I did end up rendering some of the backgrounds before hand and bringing them back in as layers to speed up the process, but that only worked when there were no camera movements or interaction between the characters and the background.

 

I've edited together the entire movie including the new music soundtrack and am almost finished with the sound. There's a couple of places where I need to provide some character vocalizations to enhance the action.

 

The last thing is the credits. If JimD is reading this, let me know if you'd like a mention in the credits. I haven't done the Paunk! Shows yet, but I did use your transporter sound effect in this.

 

I got really lucky with finding sound effects on Amazon's MP3 store.

 

I have been pushing myself all day to get all of the loose ends taken care of. I'm really looking forward to getting to watch the whole thing tonight. It really does feel like a different animal with the musical score.

 

All that's left after this is to design and build the menus for the DVD itself and put together the extra "making of" featurette. I was hoping to get it to the replicator tomorrow, but it looks like I still have a couple or more days before I'll be ready.

 

After all these years, it's finally going to be finished and real! :-)

 

thank you but there is no need for such a small contribution

it was just my pleasure to add to the fun

[robcat2075]

I'm also using Photoshop to convert from 24fps to 29.97fps, which makes render times out of Photoshop even longer.

 

Photoshop does video now? ( I recall it had an old format called "filmstrip"...?)

[largento]

Not the limited version, but Photoshop Extended has been able to import video since CS3.

 

I haven't installed the free public beta of P:E CS6, but as I understand it, you can do even more with video, like rudimentary editing and working with audio.

[largento]

 

Just to make note of it:

 

Today I placed the order for 1,000 DVDs and dropped the master off at FedEx. Barring complications, I will receive a huge number of boxes filled with coolness on May 4th, plenty of days ahead of the May 19-20 Dallas ComicCon!

 

I've got two more small jobs to do: design a banner and postcard to order in time for the con

 

...and then I'm going to sleep for a week!

[Dpendleton77]

I love what you are doing with the muppets. I hope that you can show us how you did it.

[largento]

Thanks, although I'll quickly point out that these are *not* muppets. Muppets is a trademarked term (like Kleenex). Muppets can be puppets, but only Muppet Studios puppets can be Muppets. :-)

 

Although these are really more like representations of puppets, so they aren't really puppets, either.

 

I toyed around with trying to come up some fancy term for the process, but I've just settled on using "animated puppet." "Stalled Trek:Amutt Time" and The Paunk! Show webseries will use that term.

 

Reading this thread (and the old Stalled Trek thread) will give you most of the info on how this was done, but having reached the end and now looking back on it in retrospect, I can point to these key things I would have to say in answer to, "How did you do it?":

 

1) Determination—It's finished because despite how seemingly difficult it was (and boy, was it), I determined to do it. I set the goal and the deadline, dove in and kept at it until I reached it. At any point in the process I could have hopped off of the train, but I didn't.

 

2) Confidence—I said it was a "crazy" idea when I started, but honestly, I knew that it was possible and I knew I could do it. I'd spent years doing an incredibly large amount of work on The Wannabe Pirates. I'd faced many obstacles and found my way through and was reaching a point where I didn't shy away from the hard stuff. If I'd had significant doubts about not being able to do it, it wouldn't have succeeded. You can't finish if you keep putting off the hard parts.

 

3) Experience—Working on The Wannabe Pirates and the other things I've done over the last five years, has given me enough experience to know what the best ways are for me to accomplish the tasks I needed to achieve to finish this project. I was able to tailor it to my strengths and come up with a way to do a project like this in such a short amount of time. The only way to know that about yourself is to spend a lot of time doing. Without experience, I would never have been able to have the confidence to d something like this.

 

4) Talent—The fact is that you must have some talent in order to be creative. There's a pervasive myth that cgi can replace having talent or that people who work in 3D aren't talented ...but it can't replace talent and those people making amazing things in cgi are talented!

 

Probably not the expected answer, but you get all introspective when you finish climbing a mountain. :-)

[robcat2075]

I recommend anyone who wants to see some great looking, economically-splined characters take a look at Mark's "Wannabe Pirates" CG webcomic. (click on the image in his signature)

 

And he's got some threads around here where he showed wips of some of them.

[Dpendleton77]

I didn't mean to call them muppets but that is all I could think of. Yeah I figured it took a lot of hard work to get where you are. I looked through your threads and seen it with my own eyes. So with that I say excellent job and I can't wait to get a DVD.

[largento]

Thanks!

 

I like to make the distinction. Don't want to give Muppet Studios any ammo for suing me. :-)

 

I'm not sure when the DVDs will be available for purchase, but I'll certainly make mention of it here.

 

It would be awesome if I sold out of them at the convention. :-)

[Dpendleton77]

I am sure you will sell out of them at the convention. There is a lot to like about animation and design of the characters. I hope to achieve level of work one day.

[largento]

Thanks!

 

So, one of the unexpected plusses of putting up the Paunk! pilot is that now that I've generated over 1K views, I can make use of the analytics that YouTube offers to help me in doing the actual series.

 

For instance, these two graphs show Audience Retention. It shows where people stopped watching along the timeline of the movie. The first is the raw data and the second is the relative data, comparing the information with statistics about other films of the same length.

 

 

My results aren't too bad. I seem to retain the majority of the audience for most of the film. There is a noticeable drop off during the first 30 seconds. This could be people starting to watch it again and stopping it, but it could also be a reaction to the opening titles being too long. I'm going to go with the latter and tighten them up to something much shorter. I'm also going to tighten up the wraparounds. Make them shorter and faster paced. I'm going to add a "next week" trailer over the closing credits to see if I can stop that dramatic drop-off at the end.

 

It also gives me gender and age demographics which are pretty much what I expected:

 

 

Mostly males between 35-54. This will help me at the convention, since I can focus my pitch to this group. Males between 35-54 is a pretty good demographic considering they usually have more money than teenagers. :-)

 

I'm going to start gearing up this weekend to begin creating the episodes next week.

[robcat2075]

So, one of the unexpected plusses of putting up the Paunk! pilot is that now that I've generated over 1K views, I can make use of the analytics...

 

You're doing well! Compare my dialog test which is all of 14 seconds long...

 

 

 

[largento]

That's a really short attention span these kids today have. :-)

 

That it offers the possibility of making it better is a cool thing. It's making me wonder if Blip.TV offers this kind of feedback. (They post your content to the various video sites automatically.) Having this kind of information would be valuable moving forward.

[largento]

How's this for a way to end a WIP thread?

 

 

1,000 DVDs arrived at my door today! What started as a crazy New Year's Resolution is now a real-deal!

[Gerry]

Dude, watch out, those boxes must be filled with anti-gravity devices! Once they make it through the ceiling they'll be gone for good! What a waste.

[largento]

I wondered why the postage cost was a negative number.

[Gerry]

[Dpendleton77]

Excellent and woohoo!!! believe and achieve.

[itsjustme]

Congrats on a finished project, Mark! Nice follow-through, very inspiring.

[zandoriastudios]

Congratulations! I'm looking forward to watching!!!

[jason1025]

Congrads!

 

Where and when can I purchase?

[largento]

Thanks, guys!

 

Jason, the DVDs will be available online after the con (May 19-20). I'll post the info here.

[fae_alba]

Can't wait for my DVD!

[Wildsided]

Nice one dude, wish you all the success in the world

[largento]

Thanks!

[TheSpleen]

Huge pats on the back buddy! An example to us all.

[KenH]

Achieve the dream!

[largento]

Thanks, Ken & Gene! One down and (with luck) many more to go!

[kwhitaker]

That's huge, congratulation. largento, you've got so much talent!

[largento]

Thank you, Kat!

[mtpeak2]

Congrats Mark! can't wait to see it.

[largento]

Thanks, Mark!

 

It looks like there might be a public showing of it in the near future. I contacted a small sci-fi convention about the possibility of getting a table to sell DVDs at and the head of the con emailed me yesterday and asked me I'd be interested in having it shown in their video room and giving a "making of" presentation with it. Nothing may come of it (they haven't seen the film yet), but I do think it would be kind of cool to see how it plays to a room full of sci-fi fans. And of course, the beauty part is to be able to then sell DVDs after the presentation. :-)

[TheSpleen]

how cool is that?

[MMZ_TimeLord]

That's awesome news... not to mention the fact that the packages are stuck to your ceiling. LoL

 

Great work... good luck at the con! I look forward to my web purchase late in May.

[TheSpleen]

That's awesome news... not to mention the fact that the packages are stuck to your ceiling. LoL

 

Great work... good luck at the con! I look forward to my web purchase late in May.

He prolly just had the Anti-G modules on