Okey Doke. As milestones go, this is the big one: I finally finished the last illustration for Part One of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

For the moment, I’ll ignore the fact that I still have three inventory illustrations to go; and having ignored that so successfully, I’ll pretend that I don’t expect to redo ten to fifteen of the illustrations I’ve already done; and while this ignoring thing is going so very well I will also neglect to remember that with all the art done I’ll still have a few weeks worth of debugging and finishing to do on the web site. And extras, like desktop wallpapers, to make.

Hey! Ignorance really is bliss!

On the other fronts I am pointedly not looking at the trailer because I’ve looked at it so much I can’t really see it any more. It’s pretty close to being finished. But I need to look at it with fresh eyes so that I’m sure what changes I still need to make.

I have a test book coming from the printer to work out any kinks in the printing process… so that once the art is really, definitely done I can put together the print version.

And I’ve continued to work on the Pulp Sci Fi Title Generator I put together for the Thrilling Tales web site… it’s continued to improve and it’s gotten a spiffy graphical facelift. And I’ve even made a Mini Title-O-Tron that people can install in the sidebars of their own blogs or web sites, if they like: I want to do a Facebook app version but so far whenever I look at their docs, my brain hurts.

So I guess I can take a deep breath for a bit, at which point I’ll need to stop ignoring those things I mentioned above, get them done, and try to catch all these balls I’m juggling at about the same time so that I can launch the site.

Technorati Tags: thrilling tales of the downright unusual, interactive fiction, retro science fiction, pulp sci fi, art, illustration, really need to have a bit of a lie down now thank you very much

Just a random, unprocessed frame from the bit I’m rendering right now for the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual trailer. This is from the second scene. Now that I’ve pretty well worked out the timing for the first minute, I’m going in and making the final versions of those shots.

I’m not sure when I’ll be uploading the finished trailer (heck, I’m not sure when it will be finished). I may not want to promote the site until I’m done with the first printed volume, and ready to get to work on Part II. But I have a good and mysterious reason for wanting to get it done early – I’m thinking about incorporating it into something else that needs to be ready before I start on Part II.

Anyway, this is pretty fun. It’s always nice to see what happens when I put a camera in Retropolis to see what’s moving around, and I don’t do that often (enough?) these days.

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I’m in that last (ish) long haul here, and so I’m quiet; but I’ve got just four more illustrations to go for Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves. One or two are challenging ones, but heck… I’ll take what I can get in the not quite instant gratification area.

I’m actually going slower than I might because I’m splitting my time between these and an animated trailer for the Thrilling Tales web site. It’s weirdly relaxing to switch from working hard on one thing to working equally hard on something different. I can’t explain why that is, but like I said, I’ll take what I can get.

It’s been quite awhile since I dusted off Premiere and put together a piece of video with it (and why do we still call it video?) My old version of Premiere won’t install on my main computer (16 bit installers: gotta love ‘em) and on my second one it looked at the memory available – which was way more than its programmers had believed possible, I guess – and ran screaming into the other room. So I had to remove memory to make it work. Go figure.

But anyway, that’s working, I have some neat period music for the soundtrack from the public domain Prelinger archive, and that, like the story, is slowly coming together. Prrrrrrrrogress!

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Seventy illustrations down, twelve to go!

Doctor Rognvald, like me, is pleased.

I do have one massive exterior set to rebuild for half of those pictures (I’m not happy with the version I made originally) so it’s not what you’d call a slam dunk. But still.

Then there are three remaining inventory images. That’s because – in adventure game style – characters may pick up and carry items around. You get to see a bit of information about those, hence the illustrations of the objects. Add about four or five redos for illustrations I think should be better… some global adjustments for brightness and contrast… and then the art for Part One of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS will be done. Incredible as that may seem. To me, anyhow.

The brightness and contrast adjustments are mainly necessary to sync the web and print versions together – printed art is always a bit dimmer than it seems onscreen – but I’m also fighting the gradual decay of my fine but aging monitor. Every few months I have to check it out and adjust its display. So I’ll make a final pass through all the art at the end to make sure it’s copacetic.

Once the art’s done I can go back to work on the web site. I need to disable or modify one feature that I haven’t used, add another feature that I thought up while working on the illustrations, and implement a couple of things (saving and restoring your place in the story) that I didn’t bother with until I had a story to save and load. Add in some supporting pages, season to taste, fix the couple of problems the site has in the Chrome browser… and there it’ll be.

I’m still hoping to launch the Thrilling Tales site by the end of March. We’ll see.

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The rayguns have come out as I near the end of this batch of illustrations in Doctor Rognvald’s lab – and when these are done I think I’ll have nearly reached the "light at the end of the tunnel" stage. Almost.

When I guesstimated that Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves would need about eighty illustrations… I was pretty much exactly dead on. Amazing, seeing as how that involved arithmetic and everything. Next time I’ll track the exact number as I refine the script. It was hard this time because some of the story nodes shared the same illustrations and I didn’t keep a tally of those as I went. Anyway, like I said, eighty pictures was about right. Sixty seven down as of this morning.

I got to thinking last night about Kickstarter. That’s a fundraising web site where a lot of musicians and artists are raising funds for their projects. I’m toying with the idea of trying that when I start Part Two of the story.

The whole thing ends up being a bit like a Public Radio fundraiser in which ever-neater premiums go with the ever-higher contributions. You can see that there’s some math involved there (egad!) to make sure that the total raised, minus the cost of those premiums, still gives you the funds you need. And if the cost of the premiums is high then the project’s funding has to be higher… which makes it harder for the project to reach its goal.

There are some Kickstarter anecdotes here at the Whitechapel forums. Fora. You know what I mean.

And you need an invitation to start a project, so when the time comes I’d have to scramble around on the web looking for one. But it seems like there’ s some potential there. Still thinking.

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