Hackberry Hollow

Ultimately we will be getting actual fresh eyes to look at our story (i.e. the expanded test audience), but during the writing process we need to look at our story differently and more critically in ways that we haven’t before. What I mean by this is as a writer you naturally need to be critical of your ideas, your story, and the characters in it as you are developing it. That critical eye is dictated by your understanding or theory of story, and what you think the main conflict of your story currently is (because that may change as you work on it, and it certainly has with Hackberry Hollow…twice). That naturally critical eyes is what I’ll call the baseline self-critique level. But what causes you to step up and/or expand your level of self-critique to look at the story differently and improve on your story’s shortcomings?

Yeah, the chapters we’ve been writing recently have been much shorter. In fact some were so short that we ended up merging them.

Hard work and long Skype sessions pay off. We’ve been writing like crazy and it looks like we are still on track for our year-end deadline.

I added a new feature to the graph; it now shows how long each chapter is by line length. That’s very useful information because it definitively explains why our writing has been going slower than we had hoped. Quite simply, the chapters we’ve been writing over the past two weeks have been really really long.

During our “Finish the Hackberry Hollow Script by New Years” writing sprint we’ve been doing a lot of typing, and I mean a lot. We’ve talked about our process and some of the tools we use, but did you know that both Adam and myself don’t type using the QWERTY keyboard layout? We both use Dvorak.

Today we are kicking off a (probably biweekly) progress report of sorts. This graph shows were we are at in writing the story as well as what has been recently finished. As you can see we’ve been busy.

Also, as a matter of blog housekeeping, we have MP3 versions of the podcast available for download. Now you can listen to the podcast the way they were intended: as MP3s and not in 10 minute chunks. We’ll be releasing MP3 versions from now on in addition to the YouTube videos for exposure.

Hackberry Hollow Podcast 1
Hackberry Hollow Podcast 2

So that does it for today’s triple update. Lots of writing and not much pictures to usher in lots of writing and not much pictures.

Now that Adam is done with Animation Mentor we are going to hit the writing again hard. Our production schedule is to get the entire script for all 5 volumes done by the end of the year.

There. We said in on the blog so it’s official. Hold us accountable!

Some of you were aware that I’ve been a student at Animation Mentor, the online animation school. I recently completed the program there and am officially an alumni.

This week I decided to go from the inside-out with this architecture project. I’m exploring what the interior may look like inside of the museum, trying to figure out how different architecture and lighting will feel, and how that will inform the outside structure. After doing some research, and watching Philip Dimitriadis talk about environment design at Animation Nation Night, I learned some cool stuff that helped take this museum design project in an interesting direction.