<< 2009 2008 2007 >> You can now get email and RSS alerts to monitor these updates. 27/11/08: Christmas is canceled :(     Real Life Work has piled up such that my spare time has radically shrunk. End result is that the Xmas Special won't be finished by this Xmas. That isn't the end of this, though - it's too good to let die. It's still being worked on, and will be done before I work on the 1990 chapter next year. So, make a note in your diary for December 1st 2009, because that's when the Xmas Special will be released! 30/10/08: As you know, the Xmas special is made up of little parts, each about 1.5 mins long, plus or minus a few seconds as I want sections to end when a song section ends (no cross-fades here, more of a dice-and-slice). Two things I've just realised:     1) the soundtrack so far sounds *really* good, and     2) this could run to 40 minutes... yikes... 24/10/08: Right, enough with the teasing, here are a few more details about what's in the pipeline.     The next video will not be a documentary chapter. It will be a stand-alone, self-contained Christmas Special!     As a result, it will be longer than a single chapter - I'd say around 20-30 minutes in all. It's also being created in DVD quality (twice the width and height of the documentary chapters), just to see if it could be done. Early indications are that it can, but with much higher download sizes. For 30 minutes or DVD-quality action, I'd say it would be a 750MB download. Even at "normal" VCD-quality, it would be 300MB. So, distribution might be "interesting" to say the least. But, the worst-case scenario is being restricted to GooTube and BitTorrent, which really isn't that bad in the days following a new release.    So, why a Christmas Special? When I started on the documentary, and on this website, I tried to capture the feeling of anticipation created by the hype building up in the months leading up to Xmas. That's difficult to do - so far Christmas has had brief mentions in the documentary, and on the website it's even more difficult to relate. This Christmas Special will hopefully change all that with a new structure away from the year-by-year documentary. It's going to be more of a "mood piece" - very visual, with music taken from the December charts of each given year. Whilst the Special will be episodic in nature, each year will probably only get three minutes to itself max. The Special will cover 1982-1990, and briefly touch upon beyond 1990, as well as having the odd feature between years.     It's looking quite good already, but the main issue has been disk space and CPU time! Even with a Pentium D940 and plenty of RAM there's still rather a lot to do to generate each frame. These past few weeks have been spent mainly on the animation side of things whilst planning the structure of the main body (or rather, bodies) of the Special. Once I settle on a few designs, then production of the non-glitzy bits will be quite fast, especially now that I've cottoned on to how to turn my 3D animation package into a 2D animation package (the key is using an orthographic camera), and that gives me far better antialiasing, scaling, rotating, etc. Before, I had to scale images to 5x their size, which is quite a task considering I'm doing lots of uncompressed work with a 704x576-sized picture frame. I've also been getting into the details of how to view this on my telly - I think I've now got to the stage where I can set a process going to produce a DVD ISO image overnight so I can preview the whole special the next morning. The new 3D animations look great in high-definition with the better quality MPEG2 codec used when making DVDs - puts the MPEG1 VCDs in the shade!.     Anyway... Things are looking good, and if luck is on my side it'll be available before this Christmas. 08/10/08: 19/06/08: "No, this time it was me, Sunburn in the third degree." 27/05/08: 1989's gone down a treat, and no one so far has mentioned the mistake (ahem - fixed for the future DVD, if there is one). Meanwhile, I've rendered some high-definition desktop-sized images of a few frames of the intro animation in the Gallery if you'd like to see the flaws in the animation close-up :) 26/05/08: It's done and ready to download! 24/05/08: Barring any last-minute twiddles, it's done - animations, soundtrack, everything. All I need to do is sort out webpages and distribution, and we're good to go. Expect it on Monday. 20/05/08: At long last, I've now reached the stage where I'm generating the draft chapter - all 7.5 minutes of it. Phew... been a bit of a slog, this one, with my perfectionism getting in the way of things. Once the draft chapter has been looked over and twiddled, then it'll be released - after I've put together the soundtrack, of course.     Not long to go now! 07/05/08: Almost done with the intro animation (the 3D scene also being used for one of the animations within the 1989 chapter). I'm now looking at a June release. Seriously. 25/04/08: Yep, this intro is a bit on the indulgent side :) Having so much fun though. 30/01/08: A quick update now that the dust has settled from the house-move. Although still a little braindead from that, I've started tinkering with the 1989 chapter intro and making quite a bit of progress with that. Still quite a bit to be done, and it reminds me of the Head Over Heels intro I did for the 1987 chapter where I went a bit overboard, but this will look pretty good and I'm having so much fun working on it.