Damned Thems. Panel five was originally a closeup of the hatchway glass with West’s head in silhouette. I realized that there haven’t been many shots of the fore section of the cargo transfer lock, so I pulled the camera back to add context. The over-the-shoulder shots of Ornix and Val in panels two and three were also supposed to be …
20080708 – Minor tweaks and dialogue changes. Who the fuck cares what a Cycom message pad is, anyway? ========================== The exposition, it burns. The bird head in panel five, it burns more. In my defense, I’m feeling absolutely ROTTEN. This is due entirely to a broad variety of impending (but, unfortunately, not immediately pending) life changes, all of which may …
20080708 – Minor fixes. ========================== 20080531.19:43 – Replaced the “placeholder” Rec Area with a quick-and-dirty render of the actual rec area. =================================================== 14:23 < waltman> In panel 1, why are the shadows only on the left? It looks like the lighting is overhead. 14:24 <@solios> west is standing right under a light. ornix and val are standing right in front …
20080708 – Minor fixes. I’d fix more, but I’d need to either redraw or commit to a serious repair slog. It’s Good Enough, I think. ========================== Looks like I finally figured out how to use Mental Ray properly. 23:00 < mdxi> that there is the best rendering i think i’ve seen yet in atc (no offense) 23:00 < mdxi> i …
2008.06.08.02:40 – Finally fixed West’s shoulder in panel four. There’s a lot of other stuff I’d like to tweak, but I’ll be saving that for after the chapter is complete. ============ A “break” of almost a month to model and light the bridge. Doesn’t look like much at the moment, does it? Almost all of the modeling work went into …
Panel seven kind of makes a joke out of panel one of this page, doesn’t it? Things that can only be seen at 200x magnification in photoshop (or possibly with a magnifying glass on hardcopy): The totally faded out labels on the Mark 21 Jump Seats (a vicious play on words if ever there was), and the movie ‘BiCheese: The …
Twelve – count’em – twelve panels. Much nicer than the original layout, in which panel 9 was a horrible Sammy Hagar joke leadin, 10 was an eyeroll, and 11 was punchline. So, yay for linework and shading in one night – that’s the first that’s’ happened in awhile. The only real bottleneck was reworking the safety belts into the spools …
Let that be as obfuscated as the story gets for the foreseeable future. One of those pages that had to be seriously adjusted to fit the script and original layouts to the bridge geometry. Not as dramatic as the last one, fortunately… though probably minor tweaks compared to the work I’ll need to do to get the next several pages …
Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Rewrote West’s first line in panel two. Also swept the rest of the metadata under the rug. In hindsight it was pretty unprofessional – ATC has its own narrative voice and it took me quite awhile to get to a place where I was confident about that fact. C’est la vie!
At least it wasn’t Uranus. Those jokes just write themselves. The fact that Neptune is blue definitely helps with the aesthetics. In the original script draft made a million billion years ago, the engines didn’t rotate and the innards of the ship were designed to be functional on two gravity planes. I ditched that idea in the first revision after …
20141223, 09:29 – Setting up this page and the next for re-rendering this afternoon. I’ve always hated how the original version of these two pages turned out, and after extensive editing of The Dualist got spacey and touched on Dead City Radio I figured it was time to give Transitional Voices a look. The line art for Earth is terrible; …
Harkening back to the heady incoherence of guide, the disjointedness of clarity, the end of suction, and the aftermath of details. Oh, and earlier bits of this Chapter, of course. One of the funky problems with producing an ensemble epic at a snails pace is that threads take years to evolve into more than snips of fluff. The benefit of …
20130616, 16:25 – I think this is the least revised page of the script. Last week, I mentioned I’d have more to say about Thad’s Utopia? shirt. I don’t, really. A ways back, James Burke blew my mind. Years later, that wisdom rose up through the creative compost heap – the shirt was designed on a vaguely industrial whim. Weeks …
20130825, 11:08 – The hand is a harsh mistress. Production of Transitional Voices chapter two finished early this past week, so I’m coming out of the scheduled August posting hiatus a week earlier than originally intended. The scene is complete, and there will be new pages every Sunday today and for the next six weeks. By the time the whole …
20130901, 11:29 – This is the last page of the scene to be drawn and shaded, so it kinda makes sense that it would be the Labor Day Weekend ATC release. :) I haven’t looked at this page since I finished shading – that was a pensive, crappy day and the build log reflects that. There’s a ton of linework, …
20130908, 10:28 – Space porn, words, and more about FTL and FTL comms than you’ll ever need or want to know. Xand is referring specifically to the loop between the relay and earth, not the relay and civilization. I have no idea how long that lag is, and since an inaccurate assessment now could have major plot repercussions later I’m …
20130915, 22:47 – Remembered I had a page to post during the morning walk, then totally forgot about it again until the evening walk. Then I got lost in get-paid-a-month-after-the-work-gets-approved work until a quarter after ten. Information design, data cleanup and filtering early in the week, template architecture during the later part of the week, major CSS and rich media …
20131006, 10:54 – Nanananaananananana SPACE PORN! This is the last page of the chapter, the last page to be published with Movable Type, and the conclusion of ATC’s first chronological advancement since July of 2008. The last time I wrapped a chapter of Transitional Voices, I followed through with a massive CMS upgrade and site reconfiguring, then the second edition …
20131208, 11:42 – This page has been technically finished since November sixteenth. Since then I’ve done quite a bit of rendering but I haven’t actually drawn anything yet. I’ll be rectifying that this week in parallel with some commissioned illustration work. That’s what I did with the previous chapter and as a means of pacing the work and getting things …
20131215, 15:16 – The first page of the comic to be shaded and finished and posted all in the same day in quite awhile. This year for sure. Hopefully that isn’t the case with next week’s page but I won’t know for sure until early in the coming week. I felt better waking up this morning than I have in …