Post by Jeff on Jan 3, 2004 9:53:57 GMT -5
Ep 07: Repair! Repair!
Episodes 7, 8, and 9 were all made and posted on January 18th, 2003, one week after the first episodes went up. These were the first episodes made after I'd recieved an initial response to the comic.
The only storyline to survive from my original ideas for ACT, episode 7 introduced the repair probe that never really found its place in ACT. It gets destroyed next episode, shows up nearly 70 episodes later, and then disappears without an explanation. Oops.
This episode demanded that I do a lot of things I'd never done before. For example, the first panel is the first time in ACT that I had to show a setting other than inside the Autobot ship. This is the first time that you see what the ship looks like from the outside (which is obviously a totally different toy). A friend of mine still thinks I'm hysterial for using the carpeting in my apartment as the ground. Fortunately for me, he doesn't know I'd intended for people to take me seriously on that one. This was long before I knew how to use photoshop, so super imposing the ship on a real background was out of the question.
Next, I had to make the Repair Probe float. Anyone familiar with the Star Wars Death Star kit this probe came from knows that it sits on a translucent stand. Since (again) I wasn't using Photoshop yet, I had to paint over each pixel of the stand to make it look like there was nothing there. VERY time consuming, but my first succesful special effect, as well
The little surgical laser the probe shoots out was actually a far easier effect, stolen from The Adventures of Cyberpope Moses I and Wormwood. It's just a white line surrounded by two pink lines. Amazing how well that works.
The last panel was the hardest part. I REALLY wanted to avoid making ACT look like any other toy comic (a few of which I'd seen by this point) by just having them in front of a blank background or on someone's desk. I wanted to make their world at least partially convincing. That slightly lopsided road is actually a card table with the white lines made from a combination of paper and MS Paint detailing. Fred is at the edge of the table (where a wall is), and the rest of the road is painted pixel by pixel. That explains why it bends slightly. You can make out some of my other toys in the background. This inadvertantly became a part of ACT's style, as their semi-convincing world and my apartment constently collided in episode after episode
Which cars to have on the road along with Fred's well disguised forces was a very deliberate decision. I wanted to make it clear that I actually had nice Transformers (I'd slowly rebuilt my collection since starting the comic), and that choosing beaten up ones for the main characters was a stylistic choice. As a result, I chose three of my nicer TFs for the shot, though I kept some of the nicer ones that had a chance of appearing in the comic down the road out of the panel. I didn't want someone to look back and say "Hey, they met this guy in another city, but here he is driving next to Fred!". To date, none of those three toys has ever appeared in the comic again.
Episodes 7, 8, and 9 were all made and posted on January 18th, 2003, one week after the first episodes went up. These were the first episodes made after I'd recieved an initial response to the comic.
The only storyline to survive from my original ideas for ACT, episode 7 introduced the repair probe that never really found its place in ACT. It gets destroyed next episode, shows up nearly 70 episodes later, and then disappears without an explanation. Oops.
This episode demanded that I do a lot of things I'd never done before. For example, the first panel is the first time in ACT that I had to show a setting other than inside the Autobot ship. This is the first time that you see what the ship looks like from the outside (which is obviously a totally different toy). A friend of mine still thinks I'm hysterial for using the carpeting in my apartment as the ground. Fortunately for me, he doesn't know I'd intended for people to take me seriously on that one. This was long before I knew how to use photoshop, so super imposing the ship on a real background was out of the question.
Next, I had to make the Repair Probe float. Anyone familiar with the Star Wars Death Star kit this probe came from knows that it sits on a translucent stand. Since (again) I wasn't using Photoshop yet, I had to paint over each pixel of the stand to make it look like there was nothing there. VERY time consuming, but my first succesful special effect, as well
The little surgical laser the probe shoots out was actually a far easier effect, stolen from The Adventures of Cyberpope Moses I and Wormwood. It's just a white line surrounded by two pink lines. Amazing how well that works.
The last panel was the hardest part. I REALLY wanted to avoid making ACT look like any other toy comic (a few of which I'd seen by this point) by just having them in front of a blank background or on someone's desk. I wanted to make their world at least partially convincing. That slightly lopsided road is actually a card table with the white lines made from a combination of paper and MS Paint detailing. Fred is at the edge of the table (where a wall is), and the rest of the road is painted pixel by pixel. That explains why it bends slightly. You can make out some of my other toys in the background. This inadvertantly became a part of ACT's style, as their semi-convincing world and my apartment constently collided in episode after episode
Which cars to have on the road along with Fred's well disguised forces was a very deliberate decision. I wanted to make it clear that I actually had nice Transformers (I'd slowly rebuilt my collection since starting the comic), and that choosing beaten up ones for the main characters was a stylistic choice. As a result, I chose three of my nicer TFs for the shot, though I kept some of the nicer ones that had a chance of appearing in the comic down the road out of the panel. I didn't want someone to look back and say "Hey, they met this guy in another city, but here he is driving next to Fred!". To date, none of those three toys has ever appeared in the comic again.