Moon Diary Released Online!

So uhh... sorry about the year long lack of updates. Haha, I was busy? I guess?

Anyway, here's an update for the 4 or 5 of you that look at this thing occasionally, one which you probably heard about elsewhere already but...

Moon Diary is online!

Here is a list of places where it can be viewed so far...

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/576141
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm7O797P0uo
http://vimeo.com/27259802

As more places become available, I will post them here. Give them all a view and a "like" or whatever other garbage each website is using! Thanks!

Fire Operation Demo

Been a while since my last post. Moon Diary has been on sabbatical for the last couple weeks as I've been learning how to use Blender so that I can make these educational videos for my job. It's got a near 90 degree learning curve, but once you memorize the capacities for the program it's pretty simple to put something together. I made this video in a little under two weeks, and in this format it wouldn't be too hard to extend it to an hour as proposed (I hope.)

I've also made another short film for submitting to the Olympia Film Festival. I'll put that up sometime this week, and it'll go on the main site, so official vid. It feels really great to get something finished. The current plan for Moon Diary is to record vocals for day 6 sometime this week, and once I have those full production will be back in effect.

Close to Starting Day 6

Don't get me wrong, when I started Moon Diary, I intended it to be epic, but it keeps increasing in intensity at an accelerating acceleration. Just spent the last month brainstorming the script for day 6, which included reading half of Godel, Escher, Bach, to increase my understanding of what it means to mean something. The team held weekly brainstorming sessions where we would mix the ideas we had come up with since last week. I specifically spent hours researching paradoxes, both visual and literal, and despite everything we're not even really done yet. We've only nailed down the structure, not the details. I guess we'll try to work that out in story boarding to try and streamline a bit.

The one year anniversary of starting this project is vaguely around this month. Originally I intended it to be a short project that would only take a couple months. Woo yeah! All my efforts to reduce my workload just encourage me to get obsessive about other aspects! Moon Diary might not be done this Summer as the trailer suggests. How embarrassing.

NAESA International Company Profile

Just finished the NAESA International company profile earlier today, just uploaded it to YouTube 10 minutes ago. Been working on this thing rather than Moon Diary for a while now, but I just got ahold of "Godel, Escher, Bach" and as soon as I've started making some good progress on that I'll be starting the storyboards for days 6 and 7, meaning the beginning of the end.

Any way, enjoy this informative diversion!

Sita Sings the Blues

Nina Paley recently decided to release her full feature length flash animation, which she made by herself, for free on the internet. Not just to watch, but also to appropriate, without paying fees or even asking permission.

Check it all out. It's real good.

Her work has been somewhat of an inspiration for the aesthetic of Moon Diary. She manages to create very powerful ideas using very simple animation, not trying to hide from the "flash" look and instead embracing it as a medium. I feel like I'm not as good at it, I've started dabbling more and more into realism as I learn how to, but I'm going to try and get out of that as soon as this city scene is done. I realized I've been working on this 3 minutes of animation for nearly 4 months now, and I've got to speed it up a bit. Granted, I've had a part time job most of that time, and it's been cold all the time because my roommates don't turn on the heat, but I got the first two minutes done in about 3 weeks and I've got to get back to a pace closer to that.

It's not impossible, someone out there is doing it.

What a cutie!

In other news, I got another eyelash stuck in my upper punctum (although it was the other eye, wtf,) I just invested several hundred dollars in gold in case the economy collapses, and my supply of 36 cans of mountain dew is just about run out, so I'll need to go get more. These scenes with people take forever, since they have to be drawn and organized before they can be animated and plus there's so many of them. But I'm putting in some good long hours when I'm working, at least.

Moon Diary Trailer Hits the Fan

We made a new trailer for Moon Diary and it's really great, but we took a short cut and just used an Azure Ray song for the music. YouTube then deleted the audio, and, as you may know, audio is like 80% of what makes a trailer good. I need to read up on the law, I think that if we play a cover of the song then it's alright. If it's not then we'll probably make a song from scratch, but for now the trailer is delayed due to copyright infringement. Jeeze!

However, there is a new section to the site, the "Soon" page which shows the next upcoming project, in this case Moon Diary. It will be the future home of the trailer, as well as screen shots and a general progress report of how Moon Diary is going. There's a few new screenshots from finished parts of the animation.

 

You can visit the Soon page at http://www.yesbutwhatisit.com/moondiary/

Our animation studio has three employees. There's me, there's Erin Tanner over at http://www.erintanner.blogspot.com, and then there's our most important member, Bay Bay the cat. Usually she's in on time and never complains.. But see, Erin Tanner took her outside for the first time a couple weeks ago, and she was for the first time able to look up into the vast and infinite sky. Can you imagine looking into that bleak void for the first time? Bay Bay's productivity has dropped sharply, but we'll try not to let that delay Moon Diary too much.

The image above was posted on Erin Tanner's blog. I thought it looked really cool as a screen shot, so I decided to post it too.

Teusday

Things are going pretty slow on Moon Diary. The shots we are currently on are extremely complex, and difficult to figure out. Over a minute has been animated on day 4, and it is no more than one third of the way done. There has been some talk about cutting planned content for day 4 to get it done faster, but since this is a labor of love we decided to just keep plodding away at it. Hopefully by next week we can get a screen shot up of a new setting in day 4, we've been stuck in that dirty dusky ocean for weeks now.

One small update is I designed a website for http://www.thezestylibrarian.com. It's really simple, and only took about 4 hours to get this far once I had started. It was nice to really feel productive again, it's been a while.