Finished the art so I'm starting on the episode 6 animation today, yay! This means that if you were thinking of supporting A* for this episode and thus getting your name and (if you like) web site emblazoned in the episode 6 movie credits for all eternity--eternity for a mere $5! Not a bad deal, right?--then get that in by the end of the day this coming Monday (which is December 14th). I really appreciate the support! You can get it done nice and easy and online via the gold button on the support A* page.

So as I animate I'm spending my not-so-carefully hoarded buffer of daily strips a measly one at a time! Whee here's today's...

Added 1 new A* comic:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 134

Ah, I knew this episode had been missing something: an explosion! :D Do you think it's:

a) Murphy's ghost, come back to wreak its horrible revenge
b) The "signal" Selenis was talking about
c) Surprise supernova!

Ad rates on the web just about double in the big holiday ad blitz, but the stars have aligned for me this Christmas season or something, because, thanks to the massive generosity of others, A* has not just one but TWO free ads running this week! Yay!

First, a fine fellow known as Jelly Bean Sniper has been kind enough to host an A* ad in the ad rotation on his new comic, The Space Between. Thanks, JB! It appears in alternation with others at the bottom right corner of his comic, and looks like this (I also did up a Princess and the Giant one, not that he's running it but eh just for symmetry I guess =P):



The A* one lives on the icons page.

Second, the fairly famous Fesworks of such projects as The Webcomic Beacon and his comic P.S.I. has kindly put an A* banner in rotation with others for a week on the Rampage Network forums. The Rampage Network hosts a bunch of fine comics which of course you should check out. Thanks for the free ad, Fesworks!

Added 1 new A* comic:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 135

Today's comic is brought to you by my good friend, Photoshop's Smudge Tool, which I will proceed to exploit way too much, as I often do with my good friends. Yay friends!

I know it's a bitter time when I only upload one A* comic per day during this frenzied animating period at the end of each episode, but I almost forgot that I did put up a new -word- poem comic yesterday, sooo it's *almost* like two comics in a day, right? Sorta? The new poem thingy is called "RMHN," and the secret meaning of that acronym is revealed inside!

Speaking of the animating, it's pretty interesting this time around what with all the atmosphere's and gasses involved. For instance, remember the nebula swooping in on Pyrite, as seen in episode 6 dailies 10 and 11? Well, here it is animated (click-um the icon to get to the full version in the gallery--it's about a 5 MB animated GIF):



SPACE GOES 3D! Actually it's just panning layers in Photoshop. Still it's not a bad illusion, eh? It will be in the episode 6 movie along with a bunch of other neat stuff which I am about to get back to animating after I finish all today's news!

Added 1 new A* comic:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 136

By my watch there's about four more hours left if you want to support A* episode 6 and get your name in the movie's credits.

Hopefully I'll have the movie done by the end of this week! Here are some rough previews of animation sections I worked through on Friday:







All that atmosphere takes a lotta animatin'!

And hey don't forget there was a new Princess and the Giant comic over the weekend! I made some new icons out of it and the previous week's strip; here they are as links to their respective strips, in backwards order:

Page 29:

Page 28:

Added 1 new A* comic:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 137

Hah well I didn't get anywhere near finishing getting the pre-sound animation assembled yesterday, but at least I'm through the atmosphere scenes and safely indoors, where the going should be a lot faster now. Here's a rough cut of one of the last gassy bits:

Added 1 new A* comic:

• A* Episode 6, Daily 138

Almost at the end of putting the pre-sound animation together. Here's a rough preview of a bit I put together yesterday:



So I should be getting on to the sound later today, and keeping my neighbors up all night with funny voices.

I've only got one daily comic left for this episode, and I've gotta save that until the day the animated episode is done, so that means that we're going to have a day or two here where I don't have a new A* comic for you! I am super-good at planning! But I will have more fun things like animation clips or voice clips or something that I will make sure to post here in news articles each day.

Among other things, I gotta figure out what Auri's voice will be. Technically people around A* shouldn't have what we think of as regional Earth accents, due to how they got there (OMG spoilers), but I've found it hard to resist resorting to accents, both because they're fun (<3 Mick's drawl), and because I've only got my own fairly inflexible voice to work with, so I need to use every trick I can to differentiate the characters vocally. So maybe Auri will have an accent of some kind! We'll see what desperation drives me to.

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I added "<< movie" text links to the episode list page, next to the movie buttons, just to make it even more obvious that there are movies here on A*! Scientists think that at some point I will reach maximum obviousness, at which point we'll reach perfect clarity and universal oneness. Om.

Had a productive yesterday, finishing laying out the animation AND recording all the voices for the episode 6 movie. The animation for the episode weighs in at 202 MB in GIF format--nearly twice as much visual data as episode 5's 105 MB! Must've been all that animating gas. ;)

Today and probably part of tomorrow is going to be taken up by processing the recorded voices, placing them in the animation, and then lip-syncing mouths to the words. I don't have the lines really cleaned up and balanced yet, but here are a few rough cuts of new character voices:

Auri the bartender -- Came up with an actual voice for him without having to resort to an accent. There are Sal-like overtones in this particular line, but I think of Auri's voice as that of an aging swinger still flying high on the rose-tinted glory days of a decadent youth.

Murphy the tragic trooper -- Evilly cocky. Poor Murph.

Just processing the voices for episode 6 took all day yesterday (and some of today), so I've still got the lip-syncing to do, which will probably take me all the rest of today and some of Monday. After that is just the music, and then generating the actual movie file; those two together should take less than a day, soooo if nothing untoward occurs, I hope to have episode 6 playing before your peepers by late Tuesday.

Now that I've got the audio all nice and divvied up, dig some lines from the main characters. In fact, these three taken together kind of encapsulate the plot of the whole episode, so I'll blot out the name of one of them juuuuust in case you're a reader who's managed to come all this way without already having read episode 6 in the daily comics

--if that's you, and you've been trying to avoid knowing about the episode all this time because you want to experience it for the first time in movie form, then you DON'T want to listen to these files, because they're SPOILERS for the movie--

but if you already know the plot, then enjoy these first glimpses of the main character voices in episode 6!

- Vero decides to go pay [someone] a surprise visit
- [someone] surprises Vero with a hug
- Selenis gets in some surprises of her own!

Still working on lip-syncing today, so let's see, what else can I show you for the upcoming episode 6 movie...

Ah, I learned some new audio tricks this time around, including how to do muffled/spiked "radio" effects using, among other things, High Pass and Low Pass filters. Yay! So here are voice clips from guards two and three (the ill-fated Murphy is guard #1), coming through their little headset radios:

Guard two is looking for Murphy

Guard three is all about the west wing

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Oh and hey, my weekly comic, The Princess and the Giant, got a new page over the weekend as it usually does, so you can go check that out right here or via this handy-dandy little button/banner thingy:

Ooh, I'm digging the radio effects.

Yeah, those high/low pass filters sure are handy--probably easier than trying to do the lines talking through my sleeve, too. Oh, I also used them to muffle Vero's voice when he greets Mick from outside, while wearing his breathing mask.

Lip-syncing and general timing editing seems to be done. Should be able to get the music added and the movie file generated tomorrow (or today--whatever), so we're still on track for a Tuesday release of the movie, probably late-ish or even in the wee Wednesday hours.