Rant update

Still working on the rant animations. It's frustrating how long it's taking, I guess I didn't realize when I said 12 rant animations that that would be an hour of animation! Still we are working on it as fast as we can, and it will be totally worth it in the end!

One of the problems I had was that the Chris and Joe animations are all code driven, so there really isn't anyway to see what you have animated until after you publish the swf format (flash file output). Since these animations are about 5 minutes long each if you animate something at the end of the rant you have to wait until you get to that point to check it properly. So I made these code guides that animate each section of the code that I will be using. You can't really do it effectively with stills since you need to know what the animation looks like, how long it takes and how it interacts with each other piece of code you are calling at the same time. With this I can tell what the animation I am coding up looks like while I code it. I still have to check it. But it's a lot easier now. I was trying to keep it all in my head before. Anyway, Try it out! Click on the Chris and Joe images below.



Here are some more Chris animation screenshots for your enjoyment









And a close-up of "the Nietch" sleeping.

Boring!

FallCon & Anniversary

FallCon went really well for us last weekend. It was a smaller convention than we usually go to, but it was local and they give free tables to comic creators. This was also the first convention that we've gone too that they provided soda and food. A+ on that ;) It's nice when the organizers take care of you.
I finally broke down and made my own backdrop to take with us. At Otakon I had to rent a backdrop and it really wasn't cost effective. It needs a little bit of tweaking but it collapses into a suitcase and that was what I was looking for.


The competition was fierce!


We met some other webcomic creators.


And bought a bunch of comics.

This weekend I'll be heading up north to my friend's cabin for my 7th year anniversary with JQ. Jackie has
never been there so it should be pretty exciting for her.


The cabin is just south of the Minnesota-Canadian boarder.


On a fairly large lake called White Birch.

Angels 2200 Guest Page

We were asked to do a guest page for an old Angels 2200 comic a couple weeks ago. I finally got around to doing it this weekend and I think it turned out pretty well. Even though it meant one less Alpha Shade page this week it was fun to draw something else for a change.

So with that out of the way it's time to get back to work on A-S related things. I'm going to have a table at FallCon this year and I need to make some sort of backdrop for my area. What I would like to do is make one that I could fit into a suitcase for when I got to conventions I can't drive too. I have some good ideas for how to do that. Hopefully I'll get to work on that tomorrow.