The book trailer for The Rabbit Trap went through a lot of evolution.
It’s technically an ‘animatic’, a kind of draft animation that can be quickly produced and adjusted as ideas change. A fully-animated work would follow on from it.
I started out by drawing a few rough sketches on paper and putting them in order.
Then I decided to try Boords, the online storyboarding service.
Continue readingI have been working on an animatic, a kind of limited animation, to make a book trailer to promote The Rabbit Trap. I hope to have it done in a few weeks.
To express my gratitude for the help I have gotten with it, I have ordered shirts! They will include the new logo I have developed for the story.
As far as the story itself is concerned, Akosua and the Write-Now Club are proposing another writing challenge: another Fifty Thousand Words in Fifty Days challenge! This will take us to the end of summer, conveniently when I had planned to have a first draft done. I’ve pulled out Scrivener and started organizing things already.
I just sent the interior of the Toki Pona translation, complete with text and pictures, off to the translator to be checked!
Once that it okayed, I will assemble the book files, create the ebook, and make them ready for uploading to IngramSpark! Then we only await the printer’s e-proof.
Today, it came. Well, the first part, anyways.
Let me back up a bit. Last July (2021), I backed a Kickstarter by Shelly Bond called Filth & Grammar: The Comic Book Editor’s Secret Handbook.
Today I got an update. The books have been printed, but have not been shipped yet. In the meantime, the promised digital copy was made available (early!) to backers.
I was flipping through it on my phone at lunch at work. And even in those few minutes, I found three things that help with my children’s book projects, as well as with characters I am developing for other projects!
Now I am going through it and realizing there is so much more to learn… and my next projects will benefit enormously from the organization of the production process that this book teaches.
This book will have pride of place on my comics-creation shelf next to works like Kevin Tinsley’s “Digital Prepress for Comic Books”, Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” series, the Etherington brothers’ “How to Think When You Draw” series, and Duc’s “L’Art de la BD”… not to mention all the books about actual drawing and writing.
I am so excited by this!
Filth & Grammar is by Shelly Bond
with Imogen Mangle, Laura Hole & Sofie Dodgson
edited by William Potter & Heather Goldberg
proofread by Arlene Lo
cover by Philip Bond
Off Register Press, Los Angeles, 2022
ISBN 979-8-9855622-0-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 979-8-9855622-1-7 (softcover)
A couple of nights ago, I had a short dream in the drawing style of Camila Nogueira. After I woke up, I quickly drew a rough sketch storyboard in the Tiny Sketchbook I take everywhere with me, enough for me to remember it.
I think I’m going to do a proper storyboard and then do my first rough-draft animation, or “animatic“. It’s only a very short sequence, 15 seconds or so. I am thinking that it will be a kind of “Hello World” work as I step into the world of the animatic.
In the world of computer programming, a “Hello World” program is traditionally the first simple program you write when you are learning a new programming language, environment, or toolset. All it does is print or display the words “Hello World”. Sounds simple, yes? Perhaps. But it is a critical step for the programmer, because it shows that they have figured out how to operate the tools required to create the program, which may be a completely new set of equipment or commands… or familiar ones used in new ways.
So this is my Hello World animatic. I haven’t actually made one before, and I have to figure out how to do it. Scan in externally-drawn images? Draw them on the computer? And how do I put them together with the right timing, and add sounds? Photoshop? AfterEffects? Clip Studio Paint? Audacity? Something else? And where do I get the sounds?
I’ve been wanting to do this since I was in animation school all those years ago…
So, I’ve written a book! Anyone want to translate it? 
“The Lonely Little Fridge” is a children’s story, based on an idea I had in a children’s-lit class at Durham.
A few editorial adjustments remain, and it will be ready! I will be setting it up to be distributed as hardcover, paperback, and ebook through one of the online publishing platforms, as well as getting a few copies printed locally.
But I very much want it to be translated. I’m working on the Esperanto translation, with other languages to follow. I would love to see it translated into Indigenous languages, but I’m honestly not sure whether it would make sense in an Indigenous context. The most I can do is offer it.
Is there anyone out there who would be interested in translating it into French? The total text is around 1 page, spread out among the pictures.
It turns out that Facebook does not allow external plugins to display posts from a personal Facebook tiimeline. Only posts from a Facebook page or group can be selected and displayed remotely. This is apparently for privacy reasons.
I picked up a Custom Facebopok Feed plugin from Smashballoon to display selected Facebook posts on my WordPress blog. Its FAQ mentions this restriction.
So I may have to make a proper SRD Books Facebook page, and post art things to that. Since many of these would be various stages of artwork and book preparation, that makes sense. But general sketchbook posts like I’ve been doing lately? I’ll have to think about it. Maybe I can sort and redisplay them on my personal page and then link to that.
A proper FB, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc page for SRD Books is something that Orzala would probably recommend anyways…
The book came! How to Draw Black People volume 2.
So what I want to do is put a hashtag or something in each on my Tiny Sketchbook posts on Facebook, and then gather them all up on a page here on my WordPress blog. However, using the WordPress embed for Facebook to access the first of my Facebook drawing posts… did not work.
Looking at the WordPress embeds documentation…
…tells me that Facebook has decided to ‘close the oEmbed end point for embedding Facebook links’.
https://wordpress.org/support/article/facebook-embed/
Well, it turns out that you now need to provide a FaceBook Application ID and an authentication token to use the Facebook API to display posts in other locations. I think. Facebook does provide ways to embed posts:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/embedded-posts/
Fortunately (?) I have a Facebook developer account, from when I was taking web development at Durham. I went back in and discovered all the FaceBook apps I had written as assignments, forgotten, but still there after all this time. I archived them, and am now trying to refamiliarize myself with the whole thing.
After 2018 I started following things on Kickstarter and Patreon. After pledging to a Kickstarter project to create a clock-radio using actual nixie tubes for display, I started to look at descriptions of other projects.
One such project was a series of cookbooks of art and writing tutorials by the Etherington Brothers out of England. Lorenzo Etherington handles the drawing; Robin Etherington handles the writing.
Lorenzo has a very intriguing, very traditional style of drawing. It’s very 1940’s dieselpunk, all big internal-combustion engines strapped to race cars. It reminds me of the old CARtoons magazine I used to read when I was a kid, or the original Mad Magazine, or even some of Will Eisner’s work (for examples, see Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art).
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