More than meets the eye

Most of the new stuff recently (like the Pink Lemonade opening video) is on the Pink Lemonade site. I don't always annouce it here, if it's Pink Lemonade-related. I'm putting up a new title banner at the top with a link to lead traffic directly there. Ah yes, and I've seen the Diamond Previews ad. Looks pretty good. EDIT: And there's the new header. The Pink Lemonade button's the thing on the right side.

Diamond Previews

So, I haven't seen it yet personally, but I've been told by several people that the new DVD is listed in November's "Diamond Previews". I believe this means that you can now order the DVD through your local comic shop! Try it and find out!

New DVD is now available!

White Radish Collection of Shorts: Magic & Monsters is now available! The printing came out very nicely, including the screen printing of the disc. I'm very pleased (and relieved, as I didn't get a sample of how it was going to look). Full description and more pictures on the DVD page! Also, some new postcards and notebooks in the Pink Lemonade store.

Okay, now I have a single unified store full of Pink Lemonade goodies, with more stuff on the way! Go to http://store.pinklemonadeanime.com!

Cafe Press has finally restored the missing products. There is now one more item in the "Kiss" shop and 3 items in the "Coffee Break" shop. [Edit: oops, fixed the link] So, I'm guessing I was right about them not doing anything over the weekend. I say it is rude and inconsiderate at the very least for a service provider to shut something down at the beginning of a weekend if they give no opportunity for redress during that time. I've experienced the same thing with Internet service providers. Why never on a Monday, or Wednesday, I wonder?

As predicted yesterday, I am indeed displeased, as they have still not responded to my e-mail, nor restored my designs. Here are the designs that are currently still available: Jadie & Misty Embrace, Jadie & Misty Kiss, and Pepper. You can mix and match from any of the designs in your order, even though they're not linked together except from here (they're all under one account, even though they're in multiple "shops". Just come back here to go to the other designs, until I can get something better worked out.

I'm currently in the process of creating a line of Pink Lemonade-related merchandise (but not t-shirts or mugs). However, Cafe Press is currently giving me a hard time over the designs that I've uploaded, i.e., they don't believe the art is mine. They were very quick about taking down the items that I designed, and they are now being very slow about addressing the issue. My major problem with this is that their e-mail stated that they took them down because they "may be copyright/trademark protected and require a license prior to the use for merchandise sales." Well, that's true. They are protected. Under my name. I'm the one that controls the copyright, but they're acting in my stead in enforcing it. That, I did not authorise. Actually, I've had this problem before, several times. Kinko's, for instance, has made me sign extra documents when I've made copies of my art books or companions, or in one bizarre case, I had to make an official White Radish permission slip, signed by me, giving myself permission to copy my own work! Similarly, when I sent off the DVD to the replication house, it was delayed by them sending me an additional form to sign to attest that it was mine to duplicate. I'm all for copyright protection, but I had already signed their initial forms that said the same thing! That's the same case with Cafe Press. In signing up, I agreed to their terms and conditions, and with every single image I upload, I have to check a little box that attests that I own the artwork and that it's not infringing on anything. If they're going to require additional proof after the fact, and disable my shops in the meantime, why do I have to check that stupid little box in the first place? What's more, they did this on Saturday, so I can't call them and get some immediate answers, because they're not open on the weekends. I wonder if it's going to be down all weekend. I will be very displeased.

The Pink Lemonade site (www.pinklemonadeanime.com), is now redesigned as a primarily Flash site. Also added is the production diary I mentioned before. As the Flash is a bit experimental, please let me know via the e-mail link here if anything seems wrong or non-functional (i.e. not seeing the content).

New release and a minor site improvement

I was recently perusing the site of another independent filmmaker, and he had something I've seen on occasion before: a production diary. I've often contemplated having such a thing on my own site, primarily to keep interested people informed, but I suppose it would also be useful to track my own progress. I believe I will add one to the Pink Lemonade section, even though I'm usually more comfortable working in silence and surprising everyone -- I don't like stringing people along. Case in point: Circumstances forced me to push back the release of the Pink Lemonade short (my apologies to the roomful of people to whom I announced an end-of-summer release), in favour of completing production of a new, professionally pressed and distributed DVD of three of the previous shorts. The new DVD (titled "White Radish Collection of Shorts: Magic & Monsters") contains The Item, Apprentice, and Cutethulhu, making Cutethulhu available on DVD for the first time. Also included is a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of our animation over the years, as well as multiple commentary tracks for the shorts. The Evil At Tentacle High is not on this DVD, for reasons of grouping together all the 13-up animations. It will be re-released later in a new pressing bundled with the Pink Lemonade short. In the meantime, it can still be obtained on the DVD-R Perfect Collection, which will be retired when everything has been released on pressed DVDs. Magic & Monsters is being manufactured as of this Monday, and will be available here in 2 weeks. It's currently available on preorder at The Right Stuf. Since Google obtained Blogger, they've made some improvements. One of the improvements was a clarification on some of the coding tags, the result of which is that archives of previous news postings are now available from a link near the bottom of the page.

Hurricanes suck. No power for 6 days. Catching up on stuff now.

Small update, just back from Otakon. I have a few pictures from the con now online in my personal section.

Not so negative

When I rant, it doesn't mean I'm angry, or that the things that I rant about affect me as much as it may seem to. I just enjoy discussion and debate, and my little editorials here are a form of that, to me. I thank those who responded to my last one, both on the Yahoo group and in e-mail. I hope no one interpreted my rebuttals as actual attacks on their positions. I frequent a few discussion groups on Usenet where debate is de rigueur, and I suppose outside of those settings it might seem harsh. None of that is intended! I was at Anime Mid-Atlantic this weekend, where I promoted my work, sold DVDs, and held my panel on how to animate in Flash the way I do. It was again a very intimate gathering, but hopefully those who attended came away with a better understanding of the ways Flash can be used for character animation. In other news, I have a few Pink Lemonade-based games, some Flash, some Java, that I've had for a while, and have been debating putting online. Recently, I've decided that I will. A couple of them need a little polishing, and I need to make a page to showcase them, but after that, you can expect to see them within a few weeks.

Someone 'splain this to me.

Okay, so I went to A-Kon, which was nice, and people watched Cutethulhu during the judging of the cosplay, and there was good response. I also showed it at my table, where I received some direct comments, and this is what confuses me: Many people asked me if I used Flash to animate it. The answer was, of course, "yes," but I wanted to know why they thought so. Only once did I get an actual reason, and that was "It moves like Flash." Now how can that be, since I animate frame by frame, not using Flash's motion tweening feature that typifies most Flash movies? Those who know me, know that there are a couple of things that seem innocuous to most people, but that get under my skin. One of them is when people ask me questions while holding false presumptions. My conclusion is that there are two possibilities why people keep asking "Was that done in Flash?":

1. Because the background was cel-style (rather than painted-style, or my usual 3D style), which is typical for Flash movies. However, this doesn't explain why the same people presumably don't wonder whether the cartoons they see on Cartoon Network are animated in Flash. Indeed, some of them are, but when I discuss Home Movies with people, or Samurai Jack, Clone High, Sealab, or Aqua Teen Hunger Force, it rarely comes up what production methods they use. (For the record, I don't know what methods any of those shows use, except for Home Movies, which does use Flash. I mention them because any of them could be.)
2. Because it was animated outside of a big studio, and Flash is the only animation software these people have heard of.

I'm leaning toward this one as the more likely reason. Especially since people asked the same thing of my previous works, which were not done in Flash. Indeed, when I'm creating animation solely for DVD, and don't need to worry about an online version, I use my normal backgrounds, and there is no visual difference between my work done this way in Flash, and my work done in Photoshop. Anyway, the other thing that annoyed me was the frequent compliment (said in some degree of amazement): "It looks good for Flash!" I'd be perfectly happy if they didn't qualify the statement with "for Flash". Flash is not a genre, it's a tool. And it's a very good one. There is nothing at all preventing good animators from creating good animation using Flash -- in fact, it facilitates it! The trouble is, it also facilitates bad animators to create bad animation. There are countless animators creating great, professional-quality work in Flash, that look no different from their work using other tools. The fact that there are by statistical necessity a far greater number of bad artists creating crap is not our fault. Taking Cutethulhu as an example again, the viewer (armed with an understanding of the principles of animation) may notice that my work includes the fundamentals of motion, such as squash & stretch, anticipation, ease in/ease out, and recoil. The fact that most TV animation (such as all the ones I mentioned above) does not include those things (i.e. they are very cheap), means that my work is better than professional TV animation. I wish there were a tactful way to communicate this to those who say "It looks good for Flash." Comments about this? Post them on the Yahoo group. You don't need to be a member to post a message.

New stuff in the Pink Lemonade section! Three new desktop wallpapers for you to choose from, in 3 resolutions each, featuring Jadie and Misty.

If you're going to Project A-Kon this weekend of the 30th, look for me in the Komik Market. You might get to see a sneak preview of the Pink Lemonade short!

There was a major site outage over the weekend. Any e-mail sent to me between Friday and Monday is probably lost. E-mail was back up late Monday, but FTP was down until today, so I couldn't update here to announce it.

In anticipation of the upcoming Pink Lemonade short (to be released online soon), Pink Lemonade now has its own web domain! The domain points to the existing PL content that is also accessable as before from the main White Radish site here, but now you can specifically access it at pinklemonadeanime.com or, if you prefer, pinklemonade.org. Unsurprisingly, pinklemonade.com and pinklemonade.net are reserved, and in a sense it's my fault for not registering them earlier, but I do hate those opportunistic squatters for taking those names, out of hopes that someone would buy them back at an inflated price. It is, of course, possible that it wasn't an act of squatting, but the fact that the URLs don't currently lead anywhere (except to one of those we-have-your-name, ha ha ha! "under construction" parked-domain pages typical of squatters), I think it's a fair assumption. Anyway, Pink Lemonade news will always be posted here, as well as on the PL sub-page/new domain. The short is 7 minutes, and is intended as an introduction to the Pink Lemonade characters and their relationships to each other. It's in Flash, and it will be posted in the same manner as Cutethulhu was. This one will feature some useful playing controls.

I've done a little reorganisation on the site. Some URLs are different. I've left redirectors in place of a couple of the more popular ones so as not to mess up outside links.

Well, as anyone who went there knows, Katsucon was hit by something closely resembling a blizzard on the last day, causing most of us to be stuck there an extra day. It was a fun day, regardless, and I survived the slippery trip back home with no incidents. Cutethulhu won first prize in the Katsucon original animation contest, but to my misfortune I missed seeing the audience reaction both times they showed it. This is a call to anyone who videotaped or knows anyone that videotaped the Katsucon opening ceremonies and/or Cosplay. I would very much like a copy of the parts involving Cutethulhu! Speaking of which, many people are continuing to link to one or the other of the bigger and smaller versions of Cutethulhu. One of the reasons I created the info page was to allow people to make the choice for themselves, and so they don't have to go into it with no idea what's going on. Link to the info page!

I've reorganised the Animation page to be more compact and informative, and added all the current Flash animation to it. Also created an info page for Cutethulhu, including all the info quoted below, links to both size versions, and the Newgrounds entry, as well as the reviews that have been written about it. So far, over 170 reviews!

Looks like I've been linked to by a Japanese site, so I'm suddenly getting a lot of hits from Japan. Hello, visitors from Japan! Would have been nice if he'd linked to the HTML rather than the SWF itself, though. [Update: the link has scrolled off that page, but I'm still getting hits, so I guess it's somewhere else, too...]

I've received a few questions regarding Cutethulhu, so until I make a specific "about" section for it, I'll try to answer them here. Firstly, I don't intend to make a series involving the same characters or situation...it was just a one-shot joke, and an experiment to see what I could do in Flash. You may see the character designs resurface in later works, though not as the same characters. Sarah's design, for instance, is very similar to one of the girls in The Evil at Tentacle High, although of course in Cutethulhu she's much younger. Think of it as the same actor, but a different character. ^_^ I should also mention that although I chose to save the movie in Flash 6 format, I didn't use any features specific to Flash 6 to make it. I just think the interface for 6 (officially called "MX") is much better and easier to use than older versions. The reason I prefer to save in Flash 6 is because the files are much smaller than their ancestors. Speaking of The Evil at Tentacle High, I may end up putting that online in Flash, too. I primarily used Flash to animate it, but I used some other non-vector software for various parts of it, so it would actually take a while to re-do those parts in Flash. It was my first experiment with using Flash for an animation, and it was rather primitive compared to Cutethulhu. So, back to the subject of a series, while I am doing a series of Flash toons to be released periodically, they'll be a mix of shorts and little things like the greeting cards and other little interactive widgets. Most of the shorts will be Pink Lemonade based.

I submitted Cutethulhu to Newgrounds today, and I was surprised by the amount of response. I'll definitely be putting more animation on that site as I complete it! For anyone visiting from Newgrounds and looking for more Flash content, you'll find it at the bottom of this page, under the "Latest content" header. The selection is small so far, but it'll be growing. Non-Flash animation is on the Animation page, trailers in AVI and MPEG format. Thanx for all the reviews!

Surprise! A brand new animated short, available for viewing right here in Flash! You'll definitely need the Flash 6 plugin for this one, so make sure you have it before trying to view it. For people with faster processors, click here for the 640x480 sized one. Slower processors, click here for the 400x300 size.