Some of you know I’m an animation buff (you may have seen my own little mini short I posted). A neat short called Big Buck Bunny was released by the Blender Foundation. Blender is an open source 3D package. Their site appears to be down now due to heavy traffic, but you can view it right here.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

They did a really nice job of telling an entertaining story while showing off what Blender can do. They stated the following goals for the film:

* Developing tools … for editing and rendering hair, fur or grass
* Improve character animation tools for cartoonish motion and deformation
* Test Blender with giant outdoor environments, with large grassy fields and many trees with leaves
* Further validate Blender as a professional animation creation suite

And secondary:

* Create a great and good looking animation short, licensed freely as open content
* Provide content for other artists to learn from or to re-use, including documentation and tutorials
* And of course: Have lots of fun!

I think they did a fine job. I’ve got experience with Hash Animation:Master and Softimage XSI. I have been thinking about doing some things with the strip - like a poster of Asimov’s inner workings - in 3D for fun. I think I’m going to download Blender and give it a try. I’ll post anything I come up with (although it may be awhile).

Speaking of film, if you follow my twitter you may have seen me mention a Marooned trailer for the strip. My good buddy Steve Ogden of Croaker’s Gorge is doing the voice over, which I’m real excited about. I hope to get started on it this weekend.

As some of you may know I’m working on a fun little “trailer” for Marooned. I’m having a lot of fun with it and last night I reached about the halfway point. I’ve engaged Steve Ogden to do the voiceover work (which came out great) and he’s provided some valuable feedback as well. I was hoping to have it done before I leave for San Diego next Tuesday, I’m not sure that will happen. In any event, here’s a little teaser image.

Back from my trip to San Diego (where I got 4 strips thumbnailed out) and just wanted to give you all an update on the trailers… that’s right, trailers. There will be two of them. One by me, and one by Steve Ogden. They will both be similar and yet are done in somewhat different styles. Hopefully you will enjoy both of them. I’m hoping to at least release the first one (mine) next week. Here’s another teaser image to keep you going.

I’m excited to finally announce the completion of the Marooned trailers! I know trailers for webcomics are not entirely new, but I’ve not seen many that were done very well. So I figured I’d try and have a little fun and make one that will be fun to watch and maybe even help promote the comic a bit.

To help me I garnered the services of one Steve Ogden who provided awesome voiceover (hire the man, he does as many voices as Mel Blanc!) - and furthermore, Steve was inspired enough to also provide a second trailer version with a slightly different (my family says better!) take.

I’d love to hear what you think about both of them. If you like it, please help me out by forwarding the link to your friends and family and let them know you enjoy my comic.

The trailer page is here:

http://www.maroonedcomic.com/trailers/

Enjoy!