Hey, it's been a month

And where the hell have I been? Well, on a long trip back to California for one thing. And whilst there on a dial-up connection I found that the PL Flash site doesn't give a very good indication that it's loading the graphics when you click on certain externally-loaded resources. I'll have to fiddle with that a bit.

But more PL-related, I've spent a few days getting this puppy ready for web-publishing -- Malachi, some of whose art is in the WR guest gallery, had this project in the works for some time, and it's ready to show now. He animated an entire opening animation sequence for Pink Lemonade on his own! His original file had a rather short music loop in it, but the ever-resourceful Louie Ambriz rose to the task of creating some original music for it, and threw in some nicely-mixed sound effects, as well. Check it out:

• Malachi's Pink Lemonade intro animation

I've seen the writing on the wall.

And it says HDTV. I knew it would happen eventually, and I've been seeing more and more of it lately, so I figured I might as well take care of it now. Today I adjusted all the existing PL short shots to be HDTV-safe, which is to say I expanded the TV safety margins a bit to the sides. Since I'm working in vector the resolution issue is no problem -- I'm now using the HDTV resolution that's 150% of the resolution of regular NTSC: 1280x720. There is in fact a higher resolution available that's 200% the resolution of NTSC, but for a transitional work such as this, I don't think that'll be necessary, even though it supports as high as 30FPS progressive at that resolution. It's the same frame rate as NTSC unless you want to go interlaced, in which case you can go twice the frame rate as well -- 60 fields per second, just like NTSC. The difference is that at the 1280x720 rez, you can actually have 60 full progressive frames per second. For anyone who doesn't understand what all this means, it just means HDTV is up to twice as detailed and twice as smooth as analogue NTSC.

The fact that HDTV is also 16:9 aspect ratio (widescreen, that is), means that I had to make sure there was nothing on the sides of the existing animation that I didn't want to show up on TV, and that the backgrounds didn't just end before the edges of the screen.

My items in the "Coffee Break" shop are back online, as well as the "Kissing" journal. If this problem doesn't happen again, you can expect to see more designs regularly.

[Edit: Ignore all that.  The shop doesn't exist anymore.]

New shot, and goodies for sale!

The next shot I'm working on, by request, is s01-c04. It's another long one, like the previous one. I think I'll also work on s03-c01 and s04-c02 at the same time, as they're much shorter and I can show some better progress that way.

BTW, it's mentioned on the main WR site, but I'll state here, too, that some Pink Lemonade goodies are now available via Cafe Press. There are currently 4 designs on a variety of products, and I'll have more added regularly, but first I'm waiting for them to put back the designs they took down because they need some kind of proof that I own the copyright/trademarks.  You can mix and match from any of the designs in the same order, even though they're not linked together except from here. Just come back here to go to the other designs, until I can get something better worked out.

[Edit: Cafe Press was more trouble than it was worth]

s04-c07 is finished (finally)! Now, on to the next shot.

As mentioned on the main WR site, the new PL site went up a few days ago. s04-c07 is now animated, and the lip sync for it will probably be done tonight. The shot status chart will be updated accordingly. I may have to add a header to that, because even after the previous entry saying so, it's still being mistaken for a calendar.

New version of the Pink Lemonade site is almost ready. It's functional as it is, but needs some placeholders for the content I haven't converted yet. The black, white, and blue colour scheme of the main WR site is giving way to the pink, red, and yellow scheme like what we have on this diary page.

Spent some of today devising an interface for playing Flash movies on the web site, with the option of resizing the play window to match your computer's ability to play it smoothly. Such a thing would be very welcome on, say, Homestarrunner.com. I'll be converting the Pink Lemonade section into its own Flash-based site, and I plan to have the web stuff fullscreen, but the movies themselves will have to be smaller for most people's computers at this point in time. With this interface, people with fast enough computers will be able to view the movies fullscreen as well.

And s04-c07 continues. It's close to being done now.

Averted disaster

After some major power spikes caused by the neighbours trying to clear away some damaged tree branches from the hurricane (which fell on the power line), I started having some problems with Windows freezing on me sometimes when a confirmation dialog box would try to appear. Really, the power spikes shouldn't have anything to do with it, since I'm on a UPS, but perhaps it was because of the rapid shutdowns I had to do because of it. At any rate, I tried to correct this new error by installing some Windows updates. When those didn't work, I tried reinstalling Windows. That's where the trouble began.

The shortest explanation is that the pre-service-pack Windows was no longer able to handle the full capacity of my 160GB drive, so Scandisk tried to "correct" it. This resulted in a bunch of corruption, but after I reinstalled the service packs and ran Scandisk again, it repaired the damage. Nothing was lost. But just like the last time this sort of thing happened, I'm in the process of backing up a bunch of stuff. Anyone who has recordable CD or DVD capability, I highly recommend saving your work!

Anyway, despite the lack of notes saying so, work continues on s04-c07.

More work on s04-c07. Probably another day or two on that one. The good thing about my work in Flash with this is that most of what I do is cumulative and progressive. I'm sure if I decided to just do cheapo animation of the sort that so plagues TV both here and in Japan (of the sort that I ranted about on the main page in regard to Flash), I could be done with the shot by now. But honestly, it doesn't take much longer anymore to do it right.

Some progress

Worked on s04-c07 today. I'll put a chart of all shots and their status on this page soon. It's a small chart, so it can fit easily in the left column.

Update: added the chart. It's that thing that looks like a calendar.

First post

Created the blog. This diary will track the progress of the Pink Lemonade short up to its release, at which point it will begin tracking the progress of the first Pink Lemonade OVA. There are a number of shots completed for the PL OVA in addition to the short, but they will not be tracked here until that time.

Any shots in progress will have their numbers appear in red on the chart, and completed shots will appear in blue. I never animate in sequence, so don't be surprised to see the colours scattered throughout the chart.