I should work on my novel (when I can’t work on animation), but I’ve been excited about an idea for an animated TV show I’ve had for a while. I’m still planning it out; my original thought was that I could make the episodes very short (3 or 4 minutes) with cheap blocky animation and animate the whole thing myself (and do all the voices… I’m no Mel Blanc, but I love doing voices). Then upload the stuff to YouTube or something. Seems like it would be a fun project.
It’s still something I’m planning, but I recently realized I could also write query letters and pitches and try pitching the show to agents. It’s, of course, a huge longshot, with 0% chance of success, but still worth a shot, yes?
The nice thing is… you don’t actually have to write that much for the pitch. You just have to detail your idea; you don’t have to write a bunch of scripts. And I’ve already got the idea and a bunch of details, so really all I have to do is put it all together into a clear easy-to-read exciting pitch. That might be somewhat tricky; ideas always seem better to you than to anyone else; excitement can be hard to share. But it won’t be as hard as writing a novel or a script… I think.
And the worse thing that could happen is nothing, which is most likely what will happen, and I can continue to develop the show on my own for YouTube or something. Though I can’t draw very well, so it might just become yet another shelved project…
Here’s an endorsement for a new science fiction site called Daily Science Fiction. I will admit I am a bit biased as my first short story sale was to them. If you go to the site, you can see that my story isn’t scheduled for this month. Next month maybe? Who knows… Anyway, they officially launched yesterday on September 1st, emailing subscribers the first story.
I don’t usually like reading on a computer screen, but these stories are quite short, so they only take 5 or so minutes to read, so the experience is quite fine. Also, the first two stories have been, I believe, quite good. If they keep up the quality (and the to-the-point shortness) I think this will be a really awesome source for a quick fiction fix.
To anybody out there who reads science fiction and fantasy, I highly recommend checking out the site and subscribing. (Should be great for ereaders.) This is also partly blatant self-promotion, so you’ll be ready to read my shorty short story when they publish it… but I really enjoyed the stories they sent out today and yesterday, so I’m looking forward to more!
The second season Hannifin World begins today! So be sure to check that site daily for a horrible corny joke… there are 84 comics waiting in line, so the second season will run daily until November 23rd. Woohoo! Should update everyday at 8 AM eastern time…
Virus of doom!
Everything on my computer seemed fine and dandy and then all of the sudden “Security Suite” popped up and said “You have a bunch of viruses!” … though of course I quite suspected this “Security Suite” was the real virus. (According to Wikipedia, “AV Security Suite can infect computers using Adobe flash or other Adobe components found in regular websites, and so does not require voluntary download of software by the user.” How nice.) So I quickly erased my hard drive and destroyed my RAM to ensure safety. OK, actually I turned off the computer and used my other computer to do some research into this nasty virus. Upon logging in, the virus basically starts itself up and locks your computer up so you can’t do anything, like run anti-virus software. It then wants you to pay for “Security Suite” so that it can remove the viruses that it pretends to have detected. It’s like a hostage situation.
So I restarted the computer in “Safe Mode with Networking” which allowed me to update and run my Windows Defender software, doing a full system scan. It found some stuff and deleted it, but unfortunately didn’t get rid of the virus. So I spent some time online looking for free non-scam anti-virus programs (it’s amazing how many are scams), finally found one, did a full system scan, it found some nasty looking stuff, deleted it, and finally everything seems to be OK… for now… hope it stays that way!
(Some people on the Internet reported that they couldn’t even restart in safe mode; thankfully that did not happen to me.)
By the way, the ordeal convinced me that everyone should always have two computers… in fact, it’s about time for me to buy a new desktop… OK, not really. I’d like to build one eventually. Someday. Hm.
Animation Mentor
It’s week 10 of Animation Mentor! Just three more weeks of the first semester left! Then we have a week break before diving into Semester 2!
Here’s my progress from the last three weeks:
The first shot is of “Tailor” … a little squirrel like sphere thing. The point of the exercise was to show the overlapping action of his tail. It’s always a step behind him, and the last segment of the tail is always a step behind the the middle segment of the tail, and so on, so you can sort of see a wave travel through it. There are some things I might change about the animation, the bounces especially seem rough, but watching Tailor die tragically brought me much happi… I mean, it was very sad.
The last two shots are of the “vanilla walk” which is just a plain ordinary average walk. The first phase is “blocking” … planning how each third frame will look. The second phase is, of course, to do all the inbetweens. I found the assignment to be quite difficult, there’s just so much stuff to keep in mind. In the end, I finally got the knees and head to move nice and smoothly, but you can see that I had to sacrafice some of the head’s up-and-down movement, so now the legs look too straight and stiff. When the ball shifts his weight to his forward foot, the leg doesn’t bend, causing the ball sort of lack an illusion of weight. Hopefully I’ll have time to continue to work on this and refine it.
Anyway, this week looks like a lot of fun. It will still be some hard work, but we’ve got to animate a personality walk … that is, a walk with personality, duh! It can be anything. Maybe he’s excited, tired, drunk, arrogant, scared, stupid, etc. Should be some great fun.