Dead City Radio : the operative -16-

posted 2010.08.30 at 02:02

Funny - page wrapped, writeup started.... and The Men Who Stare At Goats is on. More appropriate than funny, I suppose. An appropriateness that's now been name-dropped and will become progressively more obvious as the story unfolds. Whoever said sci-fi gets One Big Idea can jump off a cliff - throw anything of interest on the compost heap. Feed it into the coffee pot, mix with life experience, write. DCR happens to be a place where these things can get called by name. Lots of little ideas, some big ones. Some explained, some taken for granted. Artificial gravity actually being one of the fucking former, eventually. The booga-booga bits? I'd need a Book 1.5 (covering the WGP) for that. And... uh.... no. I'd write one, but fuck if I'm going to draw it.

Too many trees.

Strip 179 : I love the thumbnails for this strip. I love them. One day I'll scan them and post them, either in a blog post or appended to this entry. Chibi as hell and very emotive - the final strip is similar but serious, much less silly and not nearly as expressive. Also pitch black and a righteous pain in the ass in the shading department.

Strip 180 : Depending on how shot comps for the last couple of pages of the chapter turn out, this could be the last shot of the guitar until chapter five. I hope it is- it's a brutal reminder of why I moved almost everything mechanical to 3d objects. So many little.... bits. And knobs. And strings. That and the gin bottle were the big slowdowns for this page - I swear I spent more time getting glass to look halfway decent and stringing the strat than I did shading. Or pencilling.

Strip 181 : Subconsciously realizing the previous two strips would be murder incarnate, I cheaped out on layouts for this one and the next. In fact in the original layouts, I'd really cheaped out - Whitehouse had closed the curtain, his hair being the only character art. While a blatant render reuse still feels kinda like cheating, I do feel better having spiced it up a bit. I can't see this much dialogue fitting into a pair of strips otherwise.

Strip 182 : And man, this volume of dialogue is minor compared to what's been written for the rest of the chapter and the first scene of the next. Hopefully that'll translate into a corresponding reduction in linework and an uptick in page volumes. Two to three days running flat-out is too much. I need MOAR COMPYOOTAR at the very least. That or an environment that looks good without global illumination.

One more page till the Modeling And Freelance Catchup Break - while it could happen Tuesday, it could just as easily be pushed back further. My sister will be in town, and I really have no idea how that's going to break down for time. I do know that Monday is work and Tuesday is laundry and chores. I also know that laundry and chores means a whole hell of a lot of idle CPU time.

development : Tightening the focus.

posted 2010.08.16 at 16:01 | comment

This weekend was enlightening, to say the least.

The trailer (which I've muttered about on IRC, in metadata and to various people in the meatsphere) is still a good idea, still something I want to do, and definitely not an August Project. For one thing, August is half over and I'm still working on the July workload. For another, holy shit on toast - while my hardware can barely handle 720p, my current disk capacity can handle, at most, twenty or thirty seconds of it. As for rendering... thirty minutes of setup, five hours of grind for a five second preview render that looks good aesthetically but falls way short in the animation department and I'm back to thinking Best Use Of Limited Time.

Right now, that ain't it. Another six months of heavy grind on pages and I'll definitely have something to talk about. Six pages from now, DCR will be done with transitional material and setting. All Plot, all the time. Three and a half chapters of it. Finally.

In light of that, I think production of actual pages needs to be the priority. After most of a year (or two years, depending on how you look at it) of shifting, splitting, multiplying, changing priorities... putting another distraction in front of the story seems like something I need to stop doing.

Like, now.

That said, any work or real solid decision-making on the DCR website is also A Distraction, at least at the moment. As such, DCR strips will post to the DCR site until the end of chapter two, which is a good time and place to shift gears - consolidating the comic projects onto the ATC site and retooling the DCR website as.... something else.

website : Readership : Now lower than ever!

posted 2010.08.01 at 04:08 | 9 comments

I know regular updates matter quite a bit, but damn. Averaging thirty hits a day for ATC and eighteen or so for DCR, with almost all of DCR's traffic coming from google image search.

Anayltics numbers don't go back to The Beginning - back then I used Webalizer - but they do go back far enough to see a definite dip.

That's what happens when you don't advertise, don't interact with the community, and don't update. Or so I've been told. Updates are the only thing I really have to go on, and there haven't been many of those over the past couple of years - moreso over the past couple of months, if you want to count the Rewriting Rampage as updating. Which, if the numbers are anything to go by, nobody did.

Not really sure what to do about that, really - marketing has never been one of the legs this thing stands on. I'd like the site to be in better shape, but I've been using that as an excuse for years. I'd like to be updating regularly again, but my workload presently prohibits that... which, as a starting point, is something I can eventually fix.

I'd also like to get to a point where I can write outside of a bar or coffee shop. That will probably take longer.

Or, perhaps, it'll happen concurrently.

Maybe it'll all happen concurrently.

Things usually do.

development : It also means "Advised To Clean"

posted 2010.07.26 at 02:02 | comment

July has been a busy month. It's not over - not by a long shot. The workload that nuked comic production back into neutral will be bleeding over into August - how long that'll last, I don't know. With luck and proper planning, things will be getting thing again in a couple of weeks.

I'm Re-Jobbed, at least for the time being - I don't know how stable it'll be or how it'll shape up in terms of workload, but for the time being it's looking good. That'll have positive benefits in the near and hopefully long term - in the immediate term, I still have a ton of freelance work to wrap up... and as soon as those projects are finalized and the clients are happy, I'll be hacking out new business cards and doing some work on the DCR website.

What kind of work, I don't yet know, exactly. An overhaul at the very least, potentially a total repurposing. Something involving less duplication of effort.

On a web-related note... there's still a ton of work to do on the ATC site. Mostly in Universe, but comic chapter descriptions still need a rewrite, analytics is still being a goober, I'm cleared for ads I still need to figure out where to put, etc.

The DCR chapter two script is inching along - upcoming scenes are now on their third or fourth draft, the next few pages have been finalized and have layouts, and I've managed to get some plotting work done but nothing in terms of actual work. That comes later, after the bits in the previous paragraphs have been dealt with.

development : My love is stronger than most explosions.

posted 2010.07.01 at 20:01 | comment

16:48 < xeno> <- Wagner : Die Valkure
16:49 < xeno> solios: you need to learn flash animation and do a short of wangfish launching like rockets synched to ride of the valkyries.
16:49 < xeno> it would rule.
16:49 < solios> hah.
16:50 < xeno> with a silhouetted Val conducting
16:50 < xeno> a la fantasia
16:50 < solios> hah.
16:50 < xeno> or mst3k
16:50 < xeno> fagbot: doot my brainmeats.
16:50 < fagbot> 2.25 and a handjob
16:51 < xeno> pretty much
16:51 < xeno> except it's more like .45
16:51 < xeno> solios: it would only need to be about 2.5m, because at that point Sven would be chasing her around with a straitjacket

I do need to learn some Flash, but not for that reason. And I *do* have an ATC video thing in the Serious Consideration pipeline. Bits of storyboards, some editing and CG ideas, but no time to work on it at the present.

If I can get my clone out of storage - or pull off some other form of time management miracle - then maybe I'll be able to do something about that little project this month.

Further bulletins etc etc.