Status Updates

Just a bit of a status update as we near the end of the year.

The Rebels is going like a passenger train on turbo. Now that Adrian has decided to make his opinions public, I can't seem to shut him up.



I'm on chapter 10 of the edit, adding more scenes for Sester and beefing up several of the relationship interaction scenes. I will be rewriting the last 5 chapters because having three storylines intersect at the end didn't work as explosively as I wanted. Too many things going on and I wasn't able to give each one the attention they deserved. I will separate out Adrian and Kali's scene and have their meeting apart from the main action before putting them all together at the end. At least, that's the idea.

A trailer for The Empire is now up on YouTube. Spent two days researching the best movie editing programs, testing them out, gathering media resources, learning the programs and finally doing the trailer.

The great program, which is 'free' because it comes bundled with Windows, is Windows Movie Maker. What it does is amazing considering you don't have to pay extra for it. The only drawbacks for me were the limitations of the titles and audio/music. It only has one audio/music track. You can get around this by adding the music or sfx track, exporting the video and then importing it and adding the missing sound track. It's a pain but doable. The effects are great, and I found they worked better for my purposes than the one I ended up buying. I bought several option packages that added to effects which was great.

The best program for doing movies, at least in the affordable range, is CyberLink's PowerDirector. An amazingly flexible program that can do multiple pan and zoom effects, has highly flexible title effects and gives you the ability to layer multiple (up to 100!) sound tracks. That was a great feature that I used a lot.

Using both, I was able to create a trailer I was happy with.

Anne, the cover artist has gotten back to me. She's all booked up until the end of the year but can work on it in January. In the meantime, we're doing back-and-forths on concept ideas for the cover.

Have two people lined up who can do illustration panels for The Rebels.

In thinking of the trailer for The Rebels, I realized it would be harder because it is even more character based and only has smaller scale fights and doesn't have the explosions and ship battles that made The Empire easier to make into a trailer. So, my idea was to have several anime panels done for the trailer. I could also use the panels separately for promo purposes.

In conversation with them now. One is more expensive than the other one. We'll see how the discussions go.

I've also done up a scene to develop the character of Trevellian, the enigmatic mentor/hero of the Mrs. Beeston book I'm planning for next year.

That's it for the updates...