It’s a really interesting time to be doing this because I’m writing a technical book. I can’t say much except that it’s going to be a monster time suck for February and March. I’ll get a little extra money, and because this isn’t self published, the promo will position me as an expert, which boosts my brand. But this isn’t a Year of Creativity project. It’s a technical book, promoting me in my career as a technical content writer and developer relations professional.
I do get creative in my technical work and I’m even writing a monthly cartoon for GitGuardian, but the Year of Creativity is mine.
But between the book, work, Todd, and trying to make progress on my other YoC projects, there will be times I want to quit all of it and go hide under my bed.
Status Updates:
Todd the God
Todd the God has been growing slowly in readership, but in the last few weeks I started posting it to the r/comics subreddit. I started off small, a few upvotes, a dozen upvotes, a couple dozen, a few dozen… then boom.
I was posting a couple of the strips that I’d initially run on the site when Todd launched. Strip #2, at the time of writing, has stalled out around 532 upvotes. I’m just praying it’s not an anomaly and that Monday’s strip gets a decent response. It might go back down to just 20 upvotes total. We’ll see.
I’m still trying to figure out how to have Todd have a braingasm when he discovers “Forged in Fire.” I mean, yes, they are making knives and swords, but they make them with hammers. Such a hammer-forward show…
Animated Shorts
I’d considered that I was going to do this by getting AI to help me create 3D rigged puppets of my characters, then I’d use mocap software to let me act everything out on camera and have it translated into 2D animation. I’d put a puppet on a stage, frame it, act my piece, do some voice dubbing, and boom. Cut the shots together, add some music and sound effects, and I’ve got a short film.
AI is not there yet. AI Filmmaking bootcamp was hardly a waste of money, but while it gave me more of an appreciation for the art of filmmaking and the abilities of AI, it also helped me realize the limitations of AI. It also focused more on cinematic pieces. I make no pretense of being an auteur. I just want to make funny animated shorts that aren’t too clumsy, so some of the stuff I learned was “file this away for future use.”
I’ve been going with a concept, but not a lot of character or script work, so my show bible is pretty lean and while I’ve had an image in my head of how it should look, I haven’t committed a lot to paper. But this morning during breakfast, I had a breakthrough on a script idea, furiously tapping at my phone as I ate, sending myself an email about the story, some lines, etc.
And now, with a half a script under my belt, I’m turning back to how to animate it. I could create a few stills with AI, use Pika or Runway to turn it into a simple animatic, and have it online in a few weeks… But I don’t want an animatic. I want animation.
In this case, two tools have been looking like interesting options: Adobe Character Animator and Reallusion Cartoon Animator. Each has upsides and downsides, but they’re the two seemingly best puppet animators with built in motion-capture. It’s hard to look at the showcases of animations made by users, because I know what I want and I know they’re not going to give it to me. But I do not have the drawing talent and time to be a one-man frame-by-frame animation studio, putting out theatrical quality.
Eventually, despite the hobbling price of Adobe Creative Cloud ($659 a year), it’s got the features I need at the best price and with functionality across Windows and Mac. Reallusion Cartoon Animator is cheaper for the main bundle, but when I start getting into the “plugins,” bringing some of its capabilities to par with Adobe gets expensive and it’s just for Windows while I’m primarily a Mac shop.
The downside of doing it this way is it will take me a couple of months to learn to get my designs right, rig them for keyframed movement and mo-cap, make it possible to turn them a bit, then figure out how to create multiple bodies (with different clothing and different angles) to put their heads and hands on. Essentially, it’s going to be all about perfecting the new character workflow, but hopefully I can share early tests that don’t suck… or suck so bad it’s funny. And, if I can build some efficient workflows, I can train people in them if this ever becomes a “growing” concern.
It’s a MUCH bigger learning curve to get a lower level of quality than I’d dreamed about, but them’s the breaks. I still want to do it.
Music and Fiction
Those are slated for the second half of the year, so I’ll start talking about those as we get closer. I know how Chat GPT will help with the sequel to Hell on $5 a Day as a writer’s assistant and helpful research bot. Not so sure how the music will pan out, but I’ve got some tools in mind.
That’s all, folks!
And this concludes the update. See you on the webs.