The Velawesomeraptor Production Blog

Patience is a hard thing to maintain, as is momentum.

Impatience can drive momentum, but generally it will drive it in directions that you don’t want it to go.  Understanding that keeping things moving just for the sake of keeping them moving is a bad thing… you need to let the inspiration drive you, not your need for “something, anything” to happen.

This project is something that I would love to start shooting RIGHT THIS SECOND, but I know that there’s ALOT to do to get it to a point where we can successfully launch the production.

Still doesn’t keep me from going a little crazy though.  Especiall with horoscopes like this:

I hope you won’t merely wander around the frontier. I hope you’ll undertake a meticulous yet expansive exploration of that virgin territory. Here are some tips on how to proceed: 1. Formulate specific questions about what you’re looking for. 2. Develop a hypothesis for the experiments you want to carry out. 3. Ignore what doesn’t interest you and pounce only on what stirs your fascination. Halloween costume suggestion: an alien anthropologist visiting Earth from another planet; a time-traveler from the future who’s doing a documentary on this historical moment; a religious pilgrim who’s keeping a detailed journal.

Put progress is being made.  A team of excited folks is starting to gather.  And as long as I can keep the wind in our sails, we’ll move forward just fine.

On the virtual sets/world side of things, we’ve been making good progress. Clay continues to work on refining the schematics for the Intrepid, and I continue to learn a lot about the overall 3D process. continue reading…

The outline for the first story arc is done. It’s more introduction to characters than anything, but it should work okay.

It’s also an interesting excercise in finding five separate beats in a story that keep the story moving and interesting. Most tv shows are a teaser and 3 acts (I think — although more and more seem to be breaking that rule these days). I’m sure the episodes themselves will require many drafts…

I had a minor (as in “hyperactive, can’t stop talking” rather than “oh my god, hide in the corner” type) meltdown yesterday. Poor Clay, listening to me babble about how much there is to learn in Blender.

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I continue to work through the Essential Blender book. I’ve done the user interface overview, and things are starting to sink in. I still have to double check on keyboard shortcuts, especially if I haven’t been back in the program for a day or so, but the main controls are becoming more and more automatic. continue reading…

One of the reasons I love working with Linda so much is that she’s full of questions.  SHE thinks that she can be too anal with them, but honestly, they really help to flesh things out… for instance: We never would have come up with the wicked awesome propulsion system for the ship had it not been for her questions…

So anyway, as part of our building of this universe, she gives me homework questions to answer about anything and everything.  One of the questions in the first set inspired this answer, and may have sparked a title for the show:

In the late 20th century, after much campaigning and hard won political battles, puppets around the globe were given the right to form Independent Puppet Nations, much like the Native American Nations in North America. But instead of casinos, they dove into education and technology. In the mid 21nd century, they formed the United Puppet Nations as an advisory counsel made up of representatives from all of the IPNs. It was the UPN that was able to coordinate the Puppet Tech markets from all of the various IPNs to get them working together and focused on a new, singular goal: a puppet home world. And so the UPN is the controlling body of of the small fleet of IPVs that make up the para-military force known as Galaxy Scouts.

Last week I poked around Blender a bit and ended up frustrating myself no end. My 3D app experience is limited, but I’ve tried enough in the past (VRML, Maya, Cinema 4D) that I had a lot of preconceptions about how things “should” work. The Getting Started tutorials on the Blender wiki just were not giving me what I thought I needed, and I found myself shaking my fist at the screen at the apparent stupidity of things like hiding the object properties panel under the “N” key shortcut.

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So today became our first unofficial production meeting for Puppets in Space (working title).

To be quite frank, it was exciting.  One of the first things I did when I thought about how to get this project off the ground was to bring Linda on board, because 1) she doesn’t take my shit and 2) she’s got one of those minds that asks all the right questions to get me just vomiting information and ideas from my brain.

In today’s meeting, we discussed the universe we’re working in, the structure of the episodes, the rudimentary technology, and some rough ideas for story lines.  What we really DIDN’T get to were characters.  But we’ve got time yet.  Alot of time, because we still have to figure out how the hell Blender works. 🙂

But for now, we’ve got the building blocks for a universe… and that’s awesome.