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!

Moon Diary Complete!

Moon Diary is finished! DVD's in production, film festivals are being researched, steps are being made for public viewing. It's been a long journey! I wish I had something to post here rather than just text, I probably will soon, but I don't have anything I can really publicly release yet. WELL, actually, I guess I can post the image for the DVD case...




So much for a 7 minute film that would take 3 months! Final stats: 29:50 minutes, 22 months, 25,500 frames, 4 studio locations, 7 houses lived in, 3 girlfriends, 3 money paying jobs, 2 breakdowns, roughly $14,000 between living and production costs, and one more finished product on my kill list. It's been great! Let's see where it goes from here.

Aww jeeze

Finally finished Day 6.

Just day 7 left.

And the extended remake of day 2.

And the music.

And the sound.

And the technical conversions for playing on DVD.

And the publicity train.

And film festival research.

And hundreds of dollars.

And TEHN I"LL FINALLY BE DONE.

Pterodactyl Fight

The First Sign

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.

Cinco De Mayo Update

Day 4 is DONE, as of several weeks ago, which means there's only day 6 and 7 left. I estimate day 6 to be two minutes long and day 7 to be three to four. Moon Diary is currently 12 minutes long, and once you add titles and chapter transitions that means this thing is going to be just under 20 minutes when it's done. It's already the longest thing I've ever made.

I got commissioned to do an infomercial type animation for naesai.org. That means that, for now any way, I am a PROFESSIONAL animator, in the literal sense. There is absolutely no mistaking it for a hobby any more, I'm being reimbursed for work with money. Since I've decided to post fewer screenshots from Moon Diary I might be focusing more on this paid animation on the blog for a while.  

Here's the character design for the narrator.

Wolves

Moon Diary has been progressing well the last couple of weeks. We got a sound guy who has been working on foley art, and we had a company picnic at wolf haven where we all got to observe real wolves in action. They didn't move too much while we were there, no surprise, but I feel like the experience has lead to a sense of authenticity in the wolf movement none the less, they have been turning out really well. Chris Duncan, our sound guy, tried to get some wolf howling while we were there but all we got was a bunch of ravens screeching, and the tour lady talking.

Like I said, work has been progressing nicely. If all goes well, Day 4 might be done by the end of this week.

Charlie's Back

Charlie Daugherty has already been a major part of Moon Diary by drawing the teeth and candy in day 2, animating the ridiculous rotting ooze of the same day, drawing multiple backgrounds throughout, and being another animator for consultation in general. He's been busy being the TA for an animation class, and thus virtually animating every student's project for them. There's been a change of schedule though, and now he's back! He's starting off with some touch up work on previous animation, but is going to be animating wolves with me and soon as he's caught up to speed.

Also, I managed to get 3 day weekends for my work. Moon Diary has never had such facility for actualization! Prepare to be amazed as we animate multiple seconds in less than a week!

Super Speed

I recorded myself drawing in the latest background over the course of 3 and a half hours, and then sped it up about a hundred times to see it all happen at once. I only recorded the drawing part, I didn't bother with the animating part since that would have been extremely repetitive and plus I wouldn't have had something big to end on. I probably spent another 3 or 4 hours animating and tweaking to get the final 5 seconds of animation. I didn't realize all that much about my process, except that I spend a lot of time tweaking and that windows take forever.

I just decided it would be a good idea to flood the entire city, so I spent two hours going back and adding as much as 20 feet of water at the base of the buildings. It's okay though, because everyone is flying any way...

Moon Diary Trailer

The Moon Diary trailer is FINALLY up. As you may remember, YouTube found out my video had a copyrighted song and disabled the audio. The song was originally Sleep, by Azure Ray. For those that are interested, I implore you to look up the original and then listen to the song that I created for the trailer. Mine isn't quite as savory, but I feel I did a good job of making a song that fills the same aural niche without actually copying.

Let's get this hype machine rolling! Show your friends the trailer, or whatever it is that you do that makes me famous! Please?

Presidents Day

It's presidents day! No Work today! Everyone say "Screw you, Gravity!" and fly into space! No one can stop you from doing it!

Money Pump

We could really use one of these for the office.

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.

Frame by frame gets pretty tricky. I recently got a part time job (Working for an Elevator Inspection Certification Company, yeah!) so the 8 hour animation days have been more like 2 or 3. I spent the last week or so working on this water effect pictured above. The image shows the outline of every shape in the water sequence, about 200 in all. It's a 5 second sequence in the animation, but at least it looks awesome!

10:39 am

Sometimes I forget how crazy flash looks from a distance. Do I really know how all those buttons and knobs work? Seriously? Have I been wasting my life?

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.

Keep it simple stupid

Well, two full days of work has amounted to this nice shot. I mean, it's great, but if I spend this much time on every shot I'll never get done. This is just the opening! Today is not over yet, so hopefully I can draw a whale or two, and maybe add some sailors.