Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual: Progress! Progress!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Well! This morning I’ve hit another little milestone for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual – I finished an illustration that completely wraps up one of the two interactive branches of the story’s first half. The other branch is quite far along too, but it – and the remaining illustrations for the latter half of the story – needs one more complex environment, a simpler environment, and some work on two characters. Still, it’s really nice to see such big chunks of the tale coming together.

I’m really happy with this latest batch of pictures. That only reinforces the idea, though, that I’ll need to go back and rework a few of the ones I did earlier! But although there’s no light at the end of the tunnel I at least figure that I’ve got a lot of dark tunnel behind me now.

Once the illustrations are done I’ll need to go back to the web site itself to incorporate a few changes in the way the stories are presented and add a couple of features that were just waiting for real live content. In fact I’m also removing a feature – or modifying it, anyway – which it turns out I haven’t had a use for.

It looks as though I’ll soon have to set Thrilling Tales aside for a bit to get to work on a freelance job, but I’m not too worried. Part one of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS should still be ready some time in the first quarter of next year. In its web version, anyhow. Print’s another story entirely!

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Thrilling Tales, Continued

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

So now that I’ve got my new Retropolis web site up and running and ticking over quietly, I’ve finally gotten back to illustrating the first story for my Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual project. Here’s the third of the new batch. Click it to embiggify.

Here Nat Gonella and Ray Noble are investigating the theft (or, according to some, the kidnapping) of an encanted brain at the Bel Geddes Neurological Institute. The only witnesses would be the other brains, and they say they were all asleep. It’s pretty hard to read their body language, so maybe that’s true, and maybe it’s not.

The interview nodes were the most complicated to set up in this mildly interactive format. I had to diagram them to make sure I’d covered all the conditions. (In fact, I’m thinking about using flow charts when I plot out the next episode).

Several of these story nodes are so similar that they share the same illustration. So this scene is shaping up to need need nine pictures for its fifteen nodes. That’s actually a pretty dense ratio of illustrations to text, which is why this is taking so long to complete.

I did a lot of pretty smart work when I set up the authoring system and that really simplified the tasks of creating and editing the story nodes. But as good a job as I did there, the bottleneck is the number of the illustrations. Sometimes I think that – which will make story updates infrequent – is a thing that’ll keep Thrilling Tales from getting as wide an audience as, say, a webcomic site. There may be a fundamental problem there, I’m afraid.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Thrilling Tales, a Random Pulp Title Generator, and Time Goes On

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’m now at forty illustrations for my first Thrilling Tales project – which puts me more or less halfway done. There are still three or four pictures that I’ll be revisiting, but heck, I’ll take my milestones as I find ’em. No matter how long the setup for a set of pictures takes, I still seem to average 1.25 days per illustration. This is a constant source of wonder for me.

Along the way I’ve been tinkering with a random pulp sci fi title generator – also for the Thrilling Tales site – which has really gelled now. It was an interesting problem that involved getting the right flavor for the titles while also creating variety in the sentence structure and coming up with a pretty extensive vocabulary. I’ve been trying to make sure that the titles almost always make grammatical sense without restricting their logical sense. There’s a kind of magic that happens with unexpected combinations. The more you restrict the potential nonsense, the more you lose of the unexpected wonders.

Anyway that’s a diversion, but in fact it’s meant to be a diversion: one of a series of little playthings to flesh out the content for the site. I want to do more of those…. but many of the ideas I have would be best done in Flash, and I don’t want to take the time to learn Flash at the moment, since it’s the stories that are the main event.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

Hey! You got some Film Noir in my Retro Future!

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Another week, another set of illustrations for the first story at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. This week I’ve started working on a different branch of the story (which is Part One of The Toaster with TWO BRAINS!) – because the format for Thrilling Tales is designed for (mildly) interactive, illustrated stories. In the course of illustrating these stories, I get to explore how different characters experience the same events, or events that are linked to those events in the other interactive branches.

That’s one way of looking at it. The other one is "Cripes! How many illustrations does this thing need, anyway?!"

A question that we very nearly explored last week.

But I digress. This branch of the story becomes something like a detective story: a crime’s been committed, and a couple of our heroes spend the day investigating it. It’s a puzzler, and no mistake. What’s fun about this for me is that because our future here is based on the 1920s and 1930s, the dialogue and the situation are flavored with a little Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. (If I could conjure up a weird stew of writers’ brains, these stories would be looking for a recipe that included Damon Runyon, Dashiell Hammett, Ring Lardner and Terry Pratchett.)

So without banging the viewer over the head with it (I hope!) I’ve used lighting here that’s a clear callback to film noir – the strong light and dark areas, and the Venetian blnds with their shadows and dusty beams of light. It’s pretty fun, or at least it was for me. It’d be easy to drive that over the top, but I hope I haven’t.

Anyway, I’ve wrapped up the scene that takes place in this office and in the coming week I’ll be building something else – someplace we’ll actually see just before this.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

The latest illustration from Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

So here’s another illustration from my Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual project. It’s a good example of a bad thing I’ve been doing.

It’s been years since I’ve had to pump out work on a difficult schedule – well, except for smaller projects, anyway – and I keep running up against that eternal problem: the picture wants to be as good as possible, but it has to get done today. Or tomorrow, anyway.

So what I keep finding myself doing is fooling myself into believing that an illustration is good, or at least good enough, and that I should wrap it and move on to the next one. Then, after a day or a week, I know that I was wrong about that, and I end up doing it over again. Like I said, this one’s an example.

It’s usually the lighting that suffers the most, since especially in the more complex scenes just rendering out the slightly different previews can take awhile. As those minutes add up, my its-done-o-meter begins to malfunction.

On the other hand, I’ve got over thirty of these done now and there are only a few (remaining) that I think I’ll be reworking. So that’s progress, anyway. When I wrote the script for this story I created a number of story nodes that share the same illustrations – but I didn’t total those up as I went, so at this point I don’t even know how many illustrations I need to make. I could tally them up now – but what a waste of time! It’s less than 105, anyway – probably around 80. Which would make me over a third done.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

More Mad Science from the Retro Future

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Nope: it’s not a self portrait of me in the Secret Laboratory. I still have lots of hair. Though in fact there was a time when I did work in a place that looked a lot like this, even though the turbines were bigger there.

No, this is yet another illustration for my ongoing project Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

The pattern seems to be that I work for a whole week on an environment and then I (more or less) quickly produce a series of pictures in that environment. Still three or four more to go in here, which is the machine room under the Tower of Doctor Rognvald.

The payoff is – this is what I keep telling myself – that later in the story, and in its two following chapters, I’ll be able to use this same scene again and again. It’s a good theory, and I think it’s even true. But I should have another twenty to thirty days of image making before I can even think about opening the new site up to the public.

But scenes like this remind me why I think it’s a good idea to go through all of that.

If you haven’t figured it out, click on the picture to see it embiggified.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

In which I pause for breath before stapling myself back to my desk

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’m continuing my marathon with a series of illustrations for an online + print project based on my pulpish, imaginary magazine Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

This has quite a bit in common with a sprawling retro future comics project I was struggling with for a long time, and this one, though it’s much smaller in scale, shares many of the same difficulties that broke my ship on the rocks of that other project. Chief among those is the sheer volume of objects and illustrations that I need to produce.

Once I’d done ten of these, I was surprised to see that in spite of the long time I’d spent on some new environments and other objects I was still averaging about a day and a quarter per illustration. It didn’t feel that fast, believe me. And to you, that might not even sound fast. For me, though, that’s blazingly quick.

But I feel an unusual amount of pressure to produce the images quickly, and I don’t think that the results are as even as I’d like. There’s at least one illustration I mean to go back to and rework completely.

So I’m still wresting with fit and finish issues. Still, working on sequences like this one has let me experiment with all sorts of things, as we see here – where the story has gone from the broad to the narrow, and I’m starting to use wide angle "lenses" to reinforce the idea that the action here is largely internal in a character who’s become isolated. Neat stuff.

Update: the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site is now alive (alive, I tell you!) at thrilling-tales.webomator.com

…Still flying high in the Future That Never Was

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Still throwing up the girders and lofting the rocket fins, here in the Secret Laboratory. There’s stuff.

A little retro futuristic preview illustration

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Just an illustration I think I’ve finally finished, from that second project I kept alluding to down below. This one, as simple and small as it seems, has shown me neither mercy nor quarter. If there’s a difference.

Though it means nothing to you, we have here Gwen Hopkins in front of the Icelandic tower of mad Doctor Rognvald. She’s about to deliver his… toaster. Honest. I wouldn’t make that up.

Okay, in point of fact I did make that up, but I didn’t make up the fact that I made it up. Previously. In good faith.

Thrilling Tales: The Tune Up of Terror

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Change the oil, test the tubes, adjust the positronic circuits… but DON’T, please, use those jumper cables or strap me down to the… wait! Help!

Aw, heck. Not AGAIN.

This dramatic re-enactment of a senseless, preventable crime is meant to remind you how very important it is – even in emergencies – to make certain that any Sanity-Challenged Technophile you consult is fully vetted by the Retropolis Board of Technological Sociopaths. Check their certificates! Get a recommendation!

As with the rest of this series, TUNE UP OF TERROR is available on shirts, posters, greeting cards , coffee mugs, and on blank books.

Because this message is SO IMPORTANT to the Robotic Friendship Devices in your life, and mine.