Fear of Prime

I'm kinda terrified at the direction the whole movie business is going in.

Amazon Prime, you know, because they can, slashed rates to pay out to small filmmakers. Six cents an hour.

The Crealty 3D CR10-S printer is six hundred bucks. Might want one to make interior spaceship panels -- as one does.
Themendous is a prop-house nearby in Union City.

Experiments.A

A bit of a paint effect.

Also, Blender has really fixed some things. Firstwise they've gone ahead and created the "shadow catcher" as a kind of object. Thanks be to the Dutch rendergods. 

I've gone ahead and joined the $10/month Blender Cloud services thing.

The original right out of Blender.

Desaturated somewhat in Photoshop. Boy, the effect seemed more extreme in Photoshop.

Hippos of the New Year

Suzi is a robot cop.

Medina Happy Chassis Agent Puppet

The amazing Medina Senghore in SyFy's Happy. Dig it.
For six thousand dollars you can get a chassis for a 3-wheeled car.

Finding an agent for your book.
Luna's puppets.

Wheels.

Servos. How do they work? Especially RC servos (especially for helicopters.)
The Fanatek Club Sport steering wheel. $200. I'm starting to wonder if the vehicle should be left-hand drive now too.

The 300 Series, v16

If we are actually going in this direction, sphere "cockpit" or "command module," and some sort of other thing at the nose, I gotta figure out how we build this. Um. It won't be easy. I'm thinking some sort of CNC-cut foam on top of a welded or bolted frame. I mean, the actors have to be able to open hatches and crawl in somehow.
If we end up really hating seeing the bicycle wheels we can put the skirts down really low -- just a couple inches off the ground.
Now that I'm looking at this I'm wondering if we want the hatches to actually be down low rather than on top. I have a sequence where a character is riding with her head out the hatch but maybe that gets altered? I don't know.

Cruiser 300 series version 09

Now I'm thinking we want the practical vehicle to be entirely remote-controlled and not have anyone have to actually ride in it.
The top of this is a Soviet moon landing vehicle.

V09

The idea I'm trying for is to have a creepily organic undercarriage which sort of "exposes" itself in the middle section, with a more geometric and block-y top section.
Obviously, I did not model the wheels, the lunar lander, or the woman. Heck, I didn't even model the other pieces, which are just greebles that I bent. Huh. I actually removed all the parts I may have actually modeled.

This is actually the bottom of a Soviet lunar lander.V10

And this is version 11:

V11

пингвин должен молчать

Alibaba -- cheap bicycle.

Moar bikes.

And more 3-spoke wheels.

Motorized bicycle kits.

Cheapo WalMart conversion kit.

BikeBerry conversion kit.

Polyurethane microcellular foam

Wow. This post looks like a Russian troll-bot took over my blog. Shockingly, it's still just me.

Dragon Girl Preliminary Art

From the great Chance Shirley.

Version 1

We're going punk rock here.

Version 2

Carbon Copy Japan

The Japanese artwork for Carbon Copy.

Where At I? (Says the Horta.)

Making ADR lists of dialog. Must finish movie before AFM...
The color space of my monitor in normal viewing is very unlike inside Premiere. That very queered pinkish color was totally gone and the shadows were more better inside Premiere. Huh.
It's kind of a huge relief to have the novel done. Now I don't have to deal with it anymore. It's done. It's out there. Nobody's gonna buy it, of course, but it's not weighing on me.
And oh. I guess I owe rent tomorrow. Huh. Funny how that all works.

Earthkiller Novel on Amazon

The novel is here. It's available. Buy many copies.

Three things for August 6

Blend Modes.
I should have read this, like, 20 years ago.

How to encode ProRes files on Windows. The process is a tad fussy to set up but eventually it seems to work.

And further drafts of the Earth Killer (Earthkiller?) book.

And yet more novel artwork

This is the second draft of the art for the cover of the novel Earthkiller. (No relationship to the movie.)