Blooper of the day!

We were trying to record brief presentations of the Alice: Demon's Gate team members. This was my fifth try.

First Alice Demon's Gate VLog: Making backgrounds for outdoor picture panels

We are testing an easy and fast way of chronicling what we are doing, and giving everyone who is interested a peek into daily work on the project: VLogs.

Instead of setting up a studio and creating high quality, carefully edited video, we do this the quick and dirty way: Shoot on a smartphone, iPad, or whatever is handy, edit minimally, or not at all, and upload.

We do it quick and dirty because we want to spend as much time as possible on moving the project forwards.

Why do it at all? Partly because we want to let you see the creative process, the good, the bad, and the weird. Partly because we want to chronicle what we are doing for ourselves. We want to maintain records that we ourselves can learn from. Partly, because...well, we´ll keep that a secret for now.

Alice: Desert Dragon

Alice and Ragnarr fights a Desert Dragon. Actors: Petra Brewitz and Peter Markusson. Photo & Edit: Henrik Mårtensson

Alice: Desert Dragon is a picture from a recent test shoot. We are trying characters out, work on their back stories, and test image editing software and techniques.

An image like this looks quite different from the original.

The Secret Alice: Demon's Gate Group on Facebook is now public and open for new members

Yep, we opened the secret group! You didn't know about it because it was...secret.

We started the group early on to document what we were doing in the project. Our intent was to open the group so everyone that is interested could join the conversation once we were under way.

Now the time has come, so the group is open.

Join the conversation! We'd love to hear from you.

Alice: Demon's Gate - Test rendering enemy soldiers.

We are back to working on Alice: Demon's Gate!

While we haven't blogged for awhile, things have been happening behind the scenes. We now have partial financing, we have spent quite a bit of time practicing with Daz 3D, and we have worked on the manuscript.

It is now pretty clear that while the Alice project is ambitious, we can do it, if we use a mix of 3D graphics and photography to tell the story.

The picture above is from an initial test of a soldier we will use in a scene. It is not a main character, so we are deliberately spending a little less effort on him than we otherwise would.

Now, that we know he works, the next step is creating more of him. Many, many more...

The background scene is a photo from Borgholm Castle, on Öland. It is one of the locations we have scouted. Will we use it in the adventure, or not? Well, that we won't tell you just yet.

Virtual Location Scouting with Bryce

Our very first experiment with Bryce, a 3D landscape generator.

One of the good things about having constraints, limited budget, limited time to work on the project, limited number of people, no SFX department, and oh, yeah, we are making a comic even though no one on the team can draw worth a damn, is that it forces you to be creative.

Many of the problems we are facing this time around, we solved when we made A Rift in Time. For example, we figured out how to create the comic book look we want by using digital postprocessing. We know how to speed up the digital compositing process, so we can have more effect shots than would otherwise be possible. We know how to structure a story and shoot so we can be flexible in terms of time, and how many people we need.

The Alice: Demon's Gate project ups the ante. We want cool locations, horrific monsters, 10th century clothes and equipment...

Sounds expensive, right? Not necessarily. We are looking into using 3D software to create environments, creatures, and even equipment and clothes.

For outdoor environments, we are considering using Bryce, a fractal landscape generator.

Bryce is easy to use, as 3D software goes, and as landscape generators go, very flexible.

For example, we can easily create a forrest, and because Bryce is a 3D program, we can change the camera point of view however we want. This is way faster and cheaper than going to locations, shooting, and perhaps having to reshoot.

There is more to write, but I think I'd better get back to the project.

More news soon.

Alice: Characters and background story is taking shape

Alice will be played by Petra Brewitz

Right now, we are working on characters and background story. We are also working on the overall look and feel.

If you know your Lovecraft, you know what the sign on the sword is. :-)