Yay, A*'s second episode is posted on the site. Visit the episode 2 page, and don't forget to check out the Episode 2 Voiceover Contest, too!

And let me know what you think of the episode!

(Oh, I still have to make a little teaser for it for the front page of the site. I'll get to that sometime today.)

Cool episode. I love the idea of the Barnacle ship - a little parasite that hooks on to larger ships, a la The Empire Strikes Back.The "getting sucked into space" effect was creepy. That wasn't a reference to the takeoff scene from Project Moonbase (9:20 to end) was it?

GREAT!!!

I love how everybody fear Solvan Mars, and i love his behaviour!!!

Nope, I haven't seen Project Moonbase before! Which effect in this episode were you referring to, though? Where Vero dives through the hole in the floor?

There's no "s" on the end of his name--he probably hires hit men to kill people who spell it wrong! ;D

He's a big-nosed bad-ass!

he is too big for just one man, so i use plurals.... :)))

The effects on everyone's faces, the rippling effect on their skin. Kinda like g-force, except in reverse.

Ohh. Yeah, I was just trying to make them look like they weren't really enjoying the explosive decompression and all.

I read on Wikipedia (:p) that people don't actually explode or insta-freeze or anything in a vacuum, which is too bad. You can get embolisms or whatever from the lack of pressure, but what'll actually kill you is just having all the air ripped out of your lungs--holding your breath in space doesn't work--so you just suffocate very quickly.

Darn, I had some practice drawings I did for Selenis, but it looks like I deleted 'em. That'll teach me.

Near the end of this episode we see glimpses of the bounty hunter, Selenis. The first thing we see is her turning around to address her computer. One frame from that turn animation is this one:



The unadorned background for that, incidentally, is



Because she's in shadow against a dark background, I didn't need to be very specific in drawing the profile of her head, but I actually did draw it in a roughly complete profile because I wanted to work out what she will look like. I don't think I've quite got it yet--and I was closer to it in the later studies I did and deleted, hmph--but for instance I thought it might be interesting to go with very aquiline features. So her actual profile in that frame, with the background removed, looks like this:



It took me a while to work out how to draw an acquilinish nose without making her look like a Klingon or something. :P

Later we see the lower half of her face. If you've looked around in the files for episode 2, you might have seen the original cartoon for her small grin in the animatic:



When it came to drawing the final version, though, I'd already been trying to develop a face with stronger lines, and looking back on it, the storyboard version was too soft. I spent some time doing studies and confusing myself (at one point I was convinced I had completely forgotten what lips look like 8/). Eventually I ended up with the version you see in the episode



which I was reasonably okay with. Still, I suspect that I'll continue to evolve her face a bit once I get back to drawing her for upcoming scenes.

Just for you A*'s--I'll put it out on Newgrounds, YouTube, and deviantART later in the week--A* episode 2 is now up with sound. There are a lot more speaking roles in episode 2, so let me know if I was sufficiently big-glasses-y as Proctor, sufficiently calculating as Mar, sufficiently female as Selenis, etc. I'm not sure if I did all that great in the bit parts--guards and things--but I do think that Selenis' computer is some of my best work; keep an ear out for its "Proctor, Core Sys Corp, private encoding" line. Go computer!

Now, the Episode 2 Voiceover Contest is still on like Donkey Kong, and in fact the deadline for entries is this Thursday, so mark that one on your calendar.

As for me, after a week spent learning the innards of YouTube, teaching myself voice acting and audio editing--oh and RSS--it's time to get back to what I really want to be spending time on, which is making new episodes! I'd been worried about episode 3 for a while, because it's going to be a flash-back episode, where we learn just what sort of dire accident struck Vero and his buddy Sig near the fateful binary system Tempus 477, and I wasn't sure that I could keep people interested in past action. But having worked out the episode's plot in my head a bit, I'm pretty sure it is in fact going to be the most exciting A* episode yet, featuring, among other things, a MASSIVE SPACE EXPLOSION. Omg spoilers.

So I'd better sit down here and actually start writing it before I forget how the explosion happens.