Easy machinima - now you just have to type to make a movie

Well I guess it was just a matter of time. Now you can make an animated movie just by typing your dialogue. The characters will 'speak' it with pretty good lip synch.

See for yourself at xtranormal.com.

If only they had a pregnant character.

Machinima - now that would be cool.

I am so glad that stripcreator lets me make cartoon strips quickly and easily. But of course, if you'll pardon the cliche, what I really want to do is direct. That is, to make movies based on these pregnancy jokes and cartoons. And I just heard of a technique that could make that feasible. I was listening to Digital Planet on the BBC World Service and heard a report about machinima.

It's a genre based on console games that utilises their sophisticated graphics and the ability to manipulate the characters or avatars. Watch this machinima youtube video and you'll have a better idea of what you can do, plus how to do it.

Making money from the cartoons.

The pregnancy cartoons at Going2b.com are a labour of love. But I wouldn’t mind if they did more than just pay for their own hosting etc. So I’ve started adding a link or two to relevant products that offer affiliate programmes.

There is always something related to any topic at CafePress but I will also look for other products that fit the topic of each cartoon, not just pregnancy stuff in general. The first affiliate link I've posted is on the IVF babies cartoon. If you have other suggestions for making money out of cartooning, please leave a comment.

Better navigation

I've had some positive feedback, as well as some funny insults at the stripcreator forums. I've also had some generous help from a clever friend to make the navigation work better and display on every page without me needing to update every page every time I add a new pregnancy cartoon. She showed me how to use Server Side Includes SSI. I'm getting at least some traffic each day according to the stats provided by my cool hosts. I'm looking forward to adding more cartoons. A milestone would be to offer 40 different pregnancy comic strips. One for each week of the average pregnancy.

Published!

Today I published the first 22 Going2b pregnancy cartoons. I had to change the code by hand (22 times) to make the images show up, but they are finally viewable in their finished form online. I also created a wufoo form for feedback. You can see it all at Going2b.com and you can give feedback here.

I still haven't got the contextual ads included and the navigation list is only on the home page, so I don't have to revise it 22 times if I add a page.

It's great to at least have the cartoons online so that people and spiders can start finding them. If you know a pregnant woman, please send her a link to Going2b.com and if you don't, please stop pregnant women in the street and tell them about it lol. While you're at it, why not rub their belly and say how big they look (just kidding).

1st Preview

I had the GoLive lesson and have set up and previewed the home page. It worked pretty well except that the contextual ads that I hope will help pay for the hosting etc didn't show up. I'll have to look into how to add javascript. I have also optimised all the gifs, so they should load nice and quick for you.

Showing the cartoons to a couple of friends convinced me to spend a bit more time in photoshop making the pregnant woman's belly noticeably bigger. So ther are now 3 versions of her. The she is supplied by stripcreator, a version with no belly bump at all (for the first weeks of her pregnancy) and a third version where she has a big fat belly. I saved the fat versions as tranparent gifs so I can paste the heavily pregnant cartoon lady onto the comic strips quickly and easily.

I have decided which of the first 20 cartoons will go into the first trimester, second trimester or third trimester.

I'm getting there :-)

Making the comic strips.

I now have 21 comic strips about pregnancy created. They were all made at stripcreator.com First I had to review which artists had given permission for their characters to be used outside of the stripcreator website. Then I created the pregnancy cartoons there, mainly using gags I'd thought of over the years. But I'm also thinking of new ones all the time now that i have an outlet for them. I then used the programme called 'Grab' on my mac to make a screen shot of each cartoon. A couple of minutes in Photoshop let me tweak a few details like mouth expressions and even fixing a typo. I have also typed up a text version of each comic strip so that the pages are spiderable. Now I just have to publish my pregnancy cartoons in a website.

Luckily a friend has agreed to help me put one together.