Hackberry Hollow

Because yesterday was Labor Day lets talk about how much labor (i.e. creative work) we’ve put into this project so far since we first started it over a year ago.

I’ve been using Klok to keep track of just about everything in my life, and that includes the time spent on Hackberry Hollow. So these numbers are quite accurate. This is how long I’ve worked on this project so far. In total? 807 hours. That’s 20 40-hour work weeks.

Here’s the Klok data shown in a nice graph. The first graph shows the totals for the project, and the 3 graphs after that show break downs of the Writing, Concept Art, and Blog sections.

So far most of our time has been going into writing the story, which makes sense because you can’t create concept art without a concept. The green graph shows the break down of time spent writing, and you can see that currently more time has been put into the outline than anything else, but as the months go on we expect the script writing part of the pie to easily overtake it. The Research section of 14 hours isn’t quite accurate because we do a ton of research while writing (about half) and I never go into Klok to switch tasks when we do that.

Keep in mind that this is just the time that I personally have spent on the project. The Outline and Script parts of the graph were done collaboratively with Adam, and the very small slivers of Outline* and Script* were done by me working alone. So take the Writing section and double it for total man hours of writing.

The blue graph shows how much time I’ve spent doing concept art related activities. The Sketching/Painting section includes making 3D mock-ups, sketching out random ideas, and of course creating finished paintings. The Research section here is a pretty good representation of the amount of visual research I do. Again it’s probably a little bit more than that in reality because we do research whenever we need to even in the middle of painting. With art I always have to do research first, whereas with writing we do research constantly which makes it difficult to keep track of.

Art Directing is when I work with Shane and tell him what to do (bwahaha). Discussion is when two or more of us are talking about the art style for the comic, which has been a topic of great debate and struggle, and is also why I’m currently taking a character design class with The Animation Academy. In short the character design is the final thing we need to overcome. We are happy with the story and we are happy with the backgrounds, but the character design is the last step because these types of characters are completely new to us and we’ve never done anything like it before.

The orange graph shows the time I’ve spent putting together this blog and create other publicity material. Blogging is how much time has been spent writing blog posts or creating the template design for the blog. Publicity Art includes our business cards and desktop backgrounds. Copywriting includes a few documents that I’ve written in advance that we’ll plan on using later after the comic is released. And lastly the Logo is how much time spent designing the logo for the comic.

This information is useful to see exactly how much time it takes for us to put a project like this together. Again, this is just my time clock data. If Adam had been keeping track  it would look different; I spend a lot more time on the orange blog areas and he’s spent over a hundred hours working on those 3D models like the pirate ship. And of course there’s the time that Shane has been working on concept art and 3D mock-ups as well. So the total between the three of us is probably around 2,000 man hours. That’s a lot of work. And soon, once we finally release the comic book and we don’t have to hold any information or spoilers back, you’ll be able to see the full fruits of our labors.