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| A* Episode 6, Dailies 10 - 11 | Sep 29, 2009 9:10 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:These two are part of another pan-o-rama, this one doing some cross-parallaxing. I've put the full wide image in the gallery, check it by clicking this tiny version:
Today's update is brought to you by the Crab Nebula, proudly serving the interests of crustacean life forms since 1054:
(Image from NASA/ESA)
The gnarly structure of the Crab Nebula was my visual inspiration for the nebula sweeping in on Pyrite. But unlike Pyrite's nebula, the Crab is actually a very young nebula, however, born from a supernova recorded on Earth in 1054; its high-energy glow is caused by a pulsar--a rapidly spinning neutron star--at its center, the primary offspring of the massive explosion 1000 years prior.
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| A* episode 3 in German by Vitruv and SEPET | Sep 29, 2009 6:10 PM PDT | url |
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Vitruv announced the release of A* episode 3 with German subtitles. Did you know "thrust" is "Turbo" in German? Plus you can learn the German versions of Vero's mild cuss words. ;)
The credits for this translation effort include Vitruv, Starschwar, Neo87, and SEPET. Nice work, guys!
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| A* Episode 6, Dailies 8 - 9 | Sep 29, 2009 1:57 AM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:And here's a bonus image, this will split time with the image in daily 9 as Vero's saying the line in the animated episode:
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| Our den of ill repute | Sep 26, 2009 6:50 AM PDT | url |
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The latest two daily comics are part of the same panning shot. I put the full panoramic view up in the episode 6 art gallery; click this small version to get to the ~3000px-wide full version:
Added 2 new A* comics:
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| New "bookmarks" for daily comic reading | Sep 25, 2009 12:31 AM PDT | url |
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Added a Javascript "bookmark" feature to the daily comics, just below the comic. Click "bookmark" and it will save your spot as a browser cookie, so when you come back you just press "goto" from any other comic, say the one on the front page, and it will whisk you back to where you left off before.
Also added in some sneaky stuff in the daily scripts to get people off the longer url if they came in that way. The bookmark buttons won't show up when viewing the site through that domain name; did that to avoid confusion since separate domains store separate bookmark cookies.
The original source for the thing is here. Thanks to Senshuu of Millennium for pointing it out.
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| Episode 6 kicks off! | Sep 24, 2009 9:13 PM PDT | url |
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And we're off!
Added 5 new A* comics:Not quite as hm "pristine" as the storyboard doodles I guess ;) but I'll be able to animate the vapors in these versions.
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| Ep. 6 'boards complete; Ep. 3 trailer | Sep 24, 2009 4:03 AM PDT | url |
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Phew, finished the 100+ little doodles that make up episode 6's storyboards, which means tomorrow I can start on the actual comic/animation panels, yay! Here are a few of today's 'boards that actually came out looking like something other people might be able to recognize, rather than just my own weird visual shorthand:
This one even animates (if it doesn't, try clicking on it):
Had to figure out what kind of 'do to give that female character today; had to be something short, but short and wavy didn't look butch enough, short and spiky has been done (*cough*), and Vero already fills up enough of the bald quota, so I ended up giving her an extreme buzz cut. Bzz-bzz!
By the way, if for some weird reason you enjoy looking at these messy storyboards, it might interest you to know that inside the "files" link on each completed episode's movie page lives an "animatic" version of the episode in .gif format: all the original storyboards strung together in sequence, making a crude, soundless prototype of the episode's animation...except you can see all the embarrassing mistakes and things I had to correct later when doing the final art. :o
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Also, I whipped up an episode 3 trailer last night.
Only episode 4 to do before all episodes have their cute little bite-sized trailer versions. :)
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| A* on Blogger revamp, and other networking | Sep 23, 2009 7:15 PM PDT | url |
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The A* on Blogger site has been revamped from an awkward blog layout to an episode browsing layout, mirroring the one on the main A* site. If you hang out on Blogger and like A*, follow that blog to get notification in your Blogger "Reading List" when a new A* episode goes up. And if you have a blog on Blogger, hit me up and I'll be happy to set A* as a follower of it.
Similarly, A* is on Facebook, YouTube, and LiveJournal (my LJ is here); contact me on any of those sites if you'd like to do the cyberfriends thing there.
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| Episode 6 'boards, pretty research pictures | Sep 23, 2009 12:52 AM PDT | url |
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Polished up the script and started on the storyboards for episode 6 today; here are the first four (OMG spoilers!):
You can expect the final versions of these, which should be out by the end of this week, to be a bit more polished, not to mention verbose. ;D
Anyway you might be able to tell that the opening of episode 6 will be a bit atmospheric, or at least, inside an atmosphere, and speaking of such things, in case you missed them when I posted them on the forum, here are tiny slices of some gorgeous images I came across while doing research for this episode yesterday:
(image from NASA/ESA)
^ A small section of the Eta Carinae Nebula, home of hypergiant star cluster Eta Carinae, whose cycle of nova-scale explosions--last observed from Earth in the 1840's, when Eta Carinae briefly became the second-brightest star in the sky--is generating its own double-headed nebula inside the larger cloud.
(image from Sloan Digital Sky Survey)
That is the center of our galaxy, as seen from Earth; the middle of those vast encircling clouds of glowing gas, dark dust, and shining stars is where our story takes place, for therein lies the very real supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.
For the full versions of those images, check the forum thread.
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| SEPET adds sound to his A* Ep. 3 in Italian | Sep 22, 2009 5:35 PM PDT | url |
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SEPET has updated his A* episode 3 in Italian with music and (English) voices. Thanks, SEPET!
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| 10,000 hits yesterday; future plans & ads | Sep 22, 2009 5:16 PM PDT | url |
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My web logs indicate that the site received more than 10,000 page views yesterday, which is pretty exciting for a new webcomic author such as myself; I'm fairly sure this is the first time it has happened (I wasn't so good about managing my logs in the site's earlier days), and I think I can chalk it up for the most part to this week's A* ad campaign on Project Wonderful being unusually successful. The vast majority of the views are from the daily comics, as you can probably deduce from the still fairly small number of views the movie episodes have on YouTube.
Hopefully this rate of visitors will start to happen more often as comics for episode 6 start moving forward. I just want to give you loyal readers advance notice that once the site is averaging about 10,000 page views per days, I'm going to start selling ad space on these pages; I don't like ads any more than the rest of you, but I've learned that selling ad space is a major part of how the webcomic game is played, and if I intend to stay in the game, I gotta start turning A* toward the golden land of profitability...and there are ads there. :P
Now, if you really hate ads, they'll be easy to block, because they'll all be coming from Project Wonderful (projectwonderful.com), and won't be Flash or anything tricky like that--I don't think I'll be allowing any sort of animated ads, for that matter. All you'll have to do is set your browser to block ads from that source, and they'll never trouble you again.
Just wanted to give you a heads-up on that; it's probably still a good ways off, as the site's popularity yesterday was probably something of a fortunate aberration, but hopefully (I say this selfishly) not *too* far off.
For those perversely interested in the gory details, my current thought on ad placement is:
- 1 "leaderboard" ad across the top of each page, above the main menu
- two rows of small "button" ads along the bottom of each page
- one "skyscraper" ad down the side of each page (these wouldn't be placed on the forum, art gallery, or "more comics" pages)
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| A* episode 1 & 2 trailers | Sep 21, 2009 6:20 PM PDT | url |
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Since I had to make a trailer-sized version of A* episode 5 for posting on external sites like Newgrounds and deviantART, the compulsive completist in me figured I might as well whip up trailers for previous episodes as well. So far I've got trailers for episodes 1 and 2 done; even if you've seen the episodes already, these are kind of handy for a quick reminder of what was covered in the episode, maybe. ;)
Links to the trailers are now included in the command-center-like episode list page. I've still got to do trailerify episodes 3 and 4, hopefully I'll be able to squeeze those in in the not-too-distant future and thus complete my nice tidy link grid. :o
And since I added a custom YouTube video embedding tag to the A* forum in the midst of this switch of A* over to the YouTube format, we now have a YouTube party thread for posting whatever nonsense we're currently checking out in that vast internet movie land. If you've got some YouTube movies that are particularly near and dear to your heart, come drop them on us!
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| Episode 5 trailer, icons, and thanks | Sep 18, 2009 9:27 AM PDT | url |
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I whipped up a short little trailer of episode 5.
The Flash version of the trailer is now making the rounds at Newgrounds (vote!) and deviantART.
Bonus: episode 5 trailer icon!
And a BIG THANKS to SEPET and Steven Baughman for supporting A* and the development of episode 5, thus getting their names and web sites forever emblazoned in the episode's credits! Thanks, guys!
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| A* Episode 5 movie is up! | Sep 17, 2009 1:59 PM PDT | url |
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The animated movie of A* episode 5 is done! It was too much action and too many shades of gray for Flash to handle this time, so this one has gone straight to YouTube HD.
I'm going to see if I can whip up a Flash trailer or two for posting on Newgrounds and deviantART; I may also see about getting out another little One-Off joke comic before I go ahead and plunge into A* episode 6—which I'm actually rather excited about. It'll have a deadly nebula and an inhabited planet and—oh, so many things. And it won't have quite as many space acrobatics as this past episode had, so the story should start to move along faster.
Added 1 new A* comic:
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| Episode 5 voice clips | Sep 15, 2009 4:03 PM PDT | url |
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All-righty, today is all about embarrassing myself with voice clips from the characters in episode 5:
- an arch Selenis
- an incredulous Sal
- a relieved Vero
- a covert Proctor
- an annoyed Mar
Doing the lip-sync for these now, tomorrow will hopefully be adding in the music and then uploading the episode 5 movie for everyone to check out.
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| Episode 5 voice work today | Sep 14, 2009 5:25 PM PDT | url |
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Only one daily comic left for this episode and I have to save that for the day on which I release the animated version, so I don't have a daily today--buuut maybe tomorrow if I can get all the voice work done and synced up today!
For today I'll try to tide you over with this rough cut of Mar's rant in the last scene (click if it isn't animating for you):
I wasn't sure if that bouncing reflection when he hits his desk was going to work when I drew it, but it seems pretty decent in motion. :)
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| A* Episode 5, Daily 178 | Sep 11, 2009 5:40 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:Nearly done getting this episode's several thousand Photoshop layers squished together for the episode's animation. Here's a preview of the double-zoom effect I mentioned I'd use with this particular image, back when it came out as a daily (click if it isn't animating for you):
Zoom-blur-zoom! If only I could get that much snappy animation mileage out of each drawing. :D
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| A* Episode 5, Daily 177 | Sep 10, 2009 7:50 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:Got the urge to revamp the A* animated title to something that takes advantage of the full gray-scale route I'm going now, and is closer to the black-on-black-with-white-back-lighting style I've been using in recent versions of the A* logo. I've placed the result of this overnight design fit in the episode 5 gallery; click this low-color cropped icon version to check the full thing out:
It isn't quite as high-contrast, "arty," and dynamic as the old title intro, but I think it's a little more polished, and easier to read...maybe a little darker and more ominous, too! Oooh dark.
The version you can see in the art gallery is the full 256 standard gray-scale; the "color banding" effect you see in the swirling cloudy gray stuff, particularly toward the beginning, is an artifact of the Gaussian Blur Photoshop filter I used to make the clouds, and that artifacting gets more pronounced when you layer semi-transparent layers, which I did a lot of in this to get the effect of movement.
If I'd have been smarter or more resourceful I'd have used something smoother, I guess, but I've convinced myself I like these artifacts ;); I do tend to prefer art that includes the "rough edges" allowing you to see the hand of the artist and how they put it together, like individual pencil strokes in a sketch. It reminds me of the law of conservation of information, which says that even something sucked into a black hole, completely crushed, mangled, melted, atomized, sub-atomized--in other words, entirely disintegrated--could, in the full course of time, be retrieved and reassembled (Stephen Hawking, as you'll see in the book that link above goes to, didn't agree with this at first, but he eventually showed that black holes *do* release their mass back into the universe at large through a process he described with quantum mechanics, and which came to be known as "Hawking radiation").
Good matter for science-fiction, but the only use of it I can say I've seen was in the most recent Batman movie, where Bats recovered a fingerprint off a bullet that had been shot into a wall by somehow scanning the bullet fragments in the wall and using a computer program to calculate their physics backwards, thus reassembling a perfect 3D image of the bullet pre-firing, complete with fingerprint. There is absolutely no way that we have anything close to the knowledge and data gathering and processing power necessary to accomplish this (I tend to think we never will; computing knowledge and physics prowess aside, there's still a little thing known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle standing in the way), and it's ludicrous for the movie to try passing it off as something conceivable with roughly modern-day human technology and resources. Oh well, I'm sure someone will come up with a better conservation of information story implementation one of these days.
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| A* Episode 5, Daily 176 | Sep 09, 2009 7:35 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* comic:Is Proctor referring to the arrival of their troop squadron to Vero's vicinity, or the impending release of Episode 5? Only have three dailies left for the episode, so hopefully the animation/sound/music won't take me much longer than that. Here's a low-quality preview of an action sequence that came together yesterday (click if it ain't animating for you):
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 174 - 175 | Sep 08, 2009 5:29 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Since I'm not trying to squeeze the episode 5 movie into a sub-10MB Flash file, I get to indulge in one of my favorite effects: long multi-stage fade-outs! Here's an unused alternate version of the fadeout that will come after what is, in the dailies, Episode 5, Daily 51:
(Click the image if it isn't animating for you.)
Originally-originally, Selenis was going to end by looking down at the ship's hull, since that's what she's about to "cut open." I think her straight-ahead look is more arresting, though, so instead I'm having her look down first, then straight ahead (is she breaking the 4th wall? OMG!). The version that will be in the final animation keeps her staring ahead throughout the entire Cheshire Cat-ish fadeout, but then I got to thinking maybe I should have her lower her gaze right before it goes black, to show some humanity or something. And I want her to have that, but in the end the straight-ahead fadeout was smoother and much more powerful, so I went with that, and preserved this alternate version for todays news post, huzzah!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 172 - 173 | Sep 07, 2009 5:19 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Matrix fans will know what today's last daily means: Solvan Mar is now unplugged! :o Heh anyway I think that one came out pretty well, so I put a recombobulated (that is not a word!) larger version in the episode 5 gallery; click this tiny version to hop to it:
Over the weekend I got down a good start to outlines for episodes 6 and 7; several interesting hints of much larger schemes will be showing up in those episodes, along with what I think will be some fun new locations, characters, and action scenes, so I'm excited for those. And animating up episode 5 proceeds apace!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 170 - 171 | Sep 04, 2009 7:55 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:I just can't help fitting that weird flower of Mar's in the corner of some of these office scene shots. :D
Here's some looping space battle action for you! Just finished animating this section (click it if it isn't animating in your browser/reader):
Now this is just a small snippet of the rough first pass on the animated version of episode 5; to get to the final version of this section I still have to add vocals, sync the lip movements to audio, tweak the timing of the camera switches so they flow nice and snappy, add music, and the final version will probably be straight to YouTube and won't have the dithery color reduction you can see if you look closely at the background here during the laser fire--this is only 16 colors, final output will be full grayscale...if my computer can handle it for the whole length of the movie! :o
I'll be doing this week's The Princess and the Giant comic a day early, so that should be popping up sometime overnight tonight. Monday's a holiday here in the States, but I will be back with new A* comics, news, etc on that day, so stop by if you're around, otherwise have a nice (long) weekend!
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 168 - 169 | Sep 03, 2009 6:38 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Nasty computer virus delayed me from posting today's comics (note to self: don't be dumb!), but now we're back on track. I did indeed finish the art for episode 5 yesterday, so now actual animation begins, woo-hoo! Not sure how long it'll take me since there's a ton of art to assemble for this one, but we'll see. I may be able to work up some little preview clips as I go.
I've also done a few One Off comics this week, so if you haven't seen those yet, give 'em a look. One Off is my little one-panel gag strip.
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 166 - 167 | Sep 02, 2009 5:47 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Reminder: today's the last day to contribute to episode 5 and get your name in the animated episode 5's movie credits. You can do that on the support A* page.
Looks like I should be wrapping up the drawing for the episode today, then it'll be on to animation and voice work.
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| A* Episode 5, Dailies 164 - 165 | Sep 01, 2009 5:13 PM PDT | url |
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Added 2 new A* comics:Added "Episode x" panels to the start of each episode's collection of dailies; a side effect of this is that any links to dailies from elsewhere on the internet are now off by one, including those in my previous news posts for this episode. :o Ah, progress. For instance, A* Episode 5, Daily 163 is what was called Daily 162 in yesterday's news post.
I also changed the "first daily" and "last daily" links in the daily browsing interface to read "episode start" and "episode end," respectively, which hopefully convey their actual function more accurately.
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