dead city radio : all entries
I'D RATHER BE SAILING
posted 2010.06.10 at 19:15 | comment
Look, a screenshot!
That's a not-entirely-accurate-but-I'm-going-to-use-it-anyway floorplan for 608 - Casa De Whitehouse. After a couple of days spent dusting off the floorplan, refamiliarizing myself with the production toolchain, promising myself I'll hate it less after I've reacclimated.. It's GO TIME!11. Meaning, time to fill the apartment with stuff. Stuff like doors - with no future scenes planned for the bedroom or bathroom, the first item on the to-do (now that the apartment is all set for work) is sealing those off. Then it's closet doors and the usual tchotchkes, starting with the few items that can be swiped from The Dualist and proceeding to more complex things, such as the couch, Whitehouse's guitar, etc.
Time estimate : I have no idea. Soon, I hope. It's going to be awhile before I can do anything new with EVE, so I'm making the best of it.
A couple of Studio apartments will be getting some love soon, but I don't need them just yet - the order of operations is (basically) 608, parking lot, studio - with a strip as soon as 608 is useable. My development preference has been for TV space hardware - fortunately, that's not really slowing anything down. Not that things could get much slower - getting over my CG mental block has been an epic* ordeal, so at this point I'm jumping on any inspiration that hits me. The days of trying to manage the idea flow are long past, at least lately - right now, I'll take what I can get, apply my trademark Myopic Determination to what comes along, and hopefully get something done.
I'll settle for moving. That screenshot is a tremor in the windsock - I'd like a typhoon, but I'll settle for a breeze.
The story's in good shape - I just gotta grind out the CG to get things moving again. That's been the case for about two years, give or take - with the rewrites behind me, the whiskey evicted from the apartment, and my video game addiction at low ebb... well, hopefully it'll be easier to get moving again than it was to get moving the first time.
Inertia's a bitch.
* Epically boring, but still epic. And definitely an ordeal.
Signs of life.
posted 2010.04.06 at 16:04 | 2 comments
I just posted a Squelch file from April of 2009 to the DCR website. If you read both sites and are of a mind to comment, this would be the place to do it - I still need a field test of the new comment capabilities and the usual hoard of test monkeys have been sucked into EVE.
When things are being thing again, I plan to update DCR strips, followed by full pages to the ATC site when they're completed. Meaning if a page is a four strip stack (like they've all been so far), there'll be one ATC update for every four DCR updates. If it's a three strip stack, one every three, etc. Strips to DCR, pages to ATC. You get the idea.
With the exception of the new pages created for TD2E, the next new strip - the next new page - of DCR will mark the first time the story has progressed since July of 2008.
That's a heady thought.
In other news, there's sneeze on my monitor.
Finally. (?)
posted 2010.02.02 at 19:24 | 2 comments
I just uploaded the DCR rewrite. it took awhile, but as of a few minutes ago, EVERYTHING has been Rewritten. All of The Dualist, the first chapter of Transitional Voices, the first chapter of DCR and the first four pages I'd completed of chapter two of said.
The comic hasn't been this "ready to go" in years.
Next up - new version of the web site. Some time this month.
And I'm thinking (while I'm thinking)
posted 2009.12.10 at 14:15
And I think I think too much. If you're in my age range, the rest of the Stone Temple Pilots lyrics are probably filling themselves in now. I don't even know if that's correct, and frankly I don't care - I wish The X would get over its aggregate federally-mandated Bush and Smashing Pumpkins boner and play the half a dozen mind-90s radio tracks I actually liked.
When I was exploring CCR and The Animals and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, my dad bristled. He "hates that shit," he said, for good reason - he couldn't get away from it then, and now? Now it's all the classic rock stations play. A purgatory of a few dozen top forty rock tracks on endless shuffle.
Which has nothing to do with the ultimate subject of this post, that being DCR status as it relates to ATC production.
Here's a simple fact: DCR.2 ("The Operative") is heavily outlined, mostly scripted, and needs two or three major CG assets to proceed. It'll need these assets for the rest of the story. DCR.2 already has four pages (16 strips) complete. These will be acceptable with a little bit of work on the writing to correct grammatical errors and such.
TV.2 ("Water") has a firm outline but no actual script, and a CG to-do list that is, in a word, insane. There's a TON of work to do to get the chapter ready, and almost all of it is one-off work. One-off for Transitional Voices, anyway. It's stuff I could use later, and it's stuff I can use for portfolio development (a high priority after immediate production goals are met, along with securing income, employment, etc), but between the shape of the script and the shape of the assets, well... DCR.2 would be ready for production even if I worked on DCR and TV assets in parallel.
DCR needs Whitehouse's apartment (in some detail), Jesse's apartment (skeletal), the outside of Gheny (for closeup balcony shots, and the parking lot for top-down shots at the end of this chapter), and the skeleton of an Aeon corridor. And a DCR.1 rewrite (THIRD EDITION!), but after a very quick skim that can be done in a day.
TV needs a finished Banshee (aerospace fighter), tweaks to Sabrosa textures, a section of sickbay, and part - or all - of the Daedalus bathroom. And that's just for the first scene. From there it's all new exterior stuff, but it's complicated new exterior stuff.
Ultimately, after the current round of re-covering is done, after the website is done, it looks like I'll be targeting DCR for production. The fact that the chapter has an almost-complete script and already has pages weighs favorably, given the amount of work required to get TV.2 into a similar state.
That leads to the puzzle of DCR formatting and layout, with a special emphasis on the DCR website. For the last several years it's been a blog with an occasionally updated strip-format comic. These strips have been the "draft" form of DCR pages and in some cases bear little resemblance to the whitehouse that appears on the ATC website. The story can either continue in strip form (as, after a fashion, my "commentary" on other college newspaper comic strips), drafted in DCR.org and showing up here as full pages, or it can mutate into straight-up Full Pages, in which case, the ATC site is a more natural vehicle. What with being completely geared towards comic presentation and whatnot.
I plan to have the thinking on this done by the time the chapters and site rework are complete. At the moment it looks like production is going to be DCR assets, DCR.2 while TV.2 assets are generated, then TV.2. Then either DCR.3 or TV.3. However things develop, DCR.2 actually has pages - which puts it firmly in the "unfinished business" category. Unfinished Business is what the past eighteen months have been about - it would be foolish to keep the project on the back-burner at this point.
The Operative will be short - shorter than Whitehouse - and with four pages already done-for-art, it's that much shorter. In terms of work left to do, anyway. 18-20 pages as strips, possibly 22-24 if I "expand" to pages or expand the strip format from 4x to 3x or even 2x.
Any way I cut it, regardless of the amount of time I spend on it, we're not going to see anything in the way of new pages on any front until February or March at the earliest. Maybe January if I'm phenomenally lucky and accomplish everything that needs to be done to close out The Dualist, update the site, etc.
Another round of Thinking Out Loud, brought to you by Philosmatika, Garfield Artworks, and a clock radio that can't let go of the 90s.