It was a ton for work and it took a month of sleep deprived evenings but the sneak preview of
Happy Box is finally live at
Gothtober.com! To see it, go to the Gothtober website and
click on the 29th.
For those who need more info,
Happy Box is our first Brudders 'mini film' and our second short film for Gothtober (the first was
Hello Frankenstein.) Gothtober is an annual Halloween inspired internet event featuring short films, animation, slide shows and recipes from a variety of crazy people (a.k.a., artists) for the entire month of October.
The reason I'm calling this a 'preview' version is because I had to cut some corners to make our October 29th deadline.
Most noticeably missing is the lipsync animation—I simply ran out of time to finish it so I decided to leave out the lipsync completely because it looked weird to have only half the film with lipsync animation. Arguably, the show still plays well without it.
There are also a few 'bugs' that need to be fixed, props that need to be properly finished, a few FX added, and I really wish to re-render the entire project in HD. (My little render farm lost half it's capacity last week so I wound up rendering this project at 320 x 180; surprisingly this 'web res' actually holds up when scaled to double-size (640 x 360) for Gothtober.)
The final release version of Happy Box, with lip sync animation, bug fixes and other improvements should appear at our website later in November.
In the meantime, please enjoy this exclusive Gothtober preview!Now, I beg your indulgence as I take a moment send out heartfelt thanks to my friends:
To JP and Cristin for presenting Gothober every year. Gotober has been a great motivator in getting me to do 'big things' just for fun.
To the guys at work, for their curiosity and encouragement, and for just being a lot of fun to hang out with.
To the Lightwave and iPi Soft user and developer communities for their interest and support. Especially to Cageman and Rebel Hill for their technical advice and assistance in setting up my motion capture pipeline.
And finally, extra special thanks and love to my wife Alisa and my daughter Sienna Kai for putting up with all my nonsense. I could not have done this without you guys.
Come Monday morning, I'm taking a break and going back to work for a while. :)
G.
