Hackberry Hollow

That’s right. Today Google has stretched forth its almighty hand and imbued us with the power of posting videos longer than 15 minutes on youtube (and collect money from advertising). Usually this is an honor reserved for people that are more important…like, content producers. We didn’t even post any cat videos! (Or squirrel videos as Glen points out.) No, apparently Google—on a whim—decided that we were worthy. Apparently Google worship has payed off at last.

To celebrate we have uploaded a video of 16 minutes of silence, just because we can.

In other news, we set up Gobby 0.5 and it works great.

Big news folks. The Animation Academy is starting their online program next week on Wednesday the 8th! It’s going live! Woo! (For those that haven’t been following this blog, or it’s been so long that you’ve forgotten, we’ve been working on the online software for the school for the past several months.)

There’s more info about the school and enrollment after the jump, but here’s the summary:

The reason why Hackberry Hollow is going to rock is because the training program at The Animation Academy rocks. Without it I couldn’t create good character designs.

Okay. I actually don’t have any plans on turning this into a series; I just loved that headline.

Over the past two months I’ve felt really good about attending Animation Nation Night. Let me rephrase that: I always feel good about attending Animation Nation Night, but these past two months have made me feel particularly smug good because two months in a row the guest speaker said that writing the script first before doing anything visual is the best way to go. The two guest speakers in question are Peter Chung (creator/director for Æon Flux and director for Firebreather) and Max Howard (producer/executive for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Space Jam, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit to name a few).

So what exactly did they say that made me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside? Read on for the rest.

A real-life voodoo plushie!

Yes, this is the announcement.

Founded by Charles Zembillas in 1998 (character designer for Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, and Jak and Daxter), The Animation Academy is an excellent training program for production design in animation, and coming up in March The Animation Academy will be going online.

What does that mean for Hackberry Hollow? Read more to find out.

…delayed until Monday, from what I’ve been told. The announcement has actually already been announced publicly, just not on the Internet yet so we are still going to wait until then.

By the way, did you know our post last week was our 100th blog post? Neither did we, and we used it on an announcement announcing an impending announcement. What a waste!

As we announce a future blog post that will announce a future announcement, we are actually announcing two announcements today. The first announcement is announcing the aforementioned announcement, and the second announcement is that we are trying to use the word “announcement” as many times as possible in this announcement.

Because we’ve been working so hard on getting the script for Hackberry Hollow done for our test audience, all of the concept art has been pushed off the home page. It is high time that we set up a gallery so you can quickly view the best artwork created during pre-production so far.

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?

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.