Sauratopia Episode One Available for Download!

SNEAK PREVIEW OF THE GLORY THAT AWAITS YOU:

PURCHASE EPISODE ONE OF SAURATOPIA NOW.

Instructions for DIGITAL Downloads
Cost: $0.99 (ninety nine cents)
Format: PDF; 16.4 MB
Delivery: Download becomes available to you immediately after purchase.

How it Works: You will be redirected to Paypal to pay with your Paypal account or with a credit/debit card – your choice. Once your purchase is complete, you will be immediately redirected to your unique and secure download site. No wait, no hassles, no emails, no codes.
Downloading comics doesn’t get any easier than this! Enjoy!

Please contact us if you have any difficulty completing your purchase.

T Minus 44 Hours To Presentation!

Yes! All pages are lettered as of five minutes ago and, dude, they are looking pretty damned awesome! There’s something magical about watching all the pieces of a months-long collaboration come together, coalescing into finshed form.

All Praise be to Mighty Comicraft for their lettering tutorials. Richard Starkings, you are the man! Sauratopia uses caption boxes, re-shaped captions, and floating text. There’s some speech balloons, and some dinosaur roars rendered according to the Comicraft sound effects instructions. You know, when you start lettering on a wordless page, it’s easy to feel daunted by the task of placing words that harmonize with the finished art. You have to cover up something… but what?! How will the eye move through the page? How will you cram all those extra lines from the verbose script into these little spaces?

The upside of being both scripter and letterer is that I can change the script to fit the space during the lettering phase. Does the picture already tell the story I took 20 words to tell? Then the words may be unnecessary! Or, does one of the lines stick out too long like a sore thumb? Then chop out an adjective or two! Do we need a little extra explanation? Throw it in there!

When we started this Episode, we had a solid idea of the general story. But a lot of specifics hadn’t been nailed down yet. With only me and Brian working on it – and neither of us having professionally produced a comic book story before – we were able to bring in new ideas, revise old ones, and watch the whole thing take shape organically before our eyes. Pretty cool!

Now, off to a fresh cup of coffee and writing up some notecards for our final presentation in less than 48 hours. I expect we’ll have a finished PDF for purchase here on Nov. 30th to coincide with the live presentation. SAURATOPIA FOREVER!

T Minus 72 Hours to Presentation!

Here we are in the final weekend before wrapping up Episode One of Sauratopia and presenting it in our Project Management class. Tonight we’ll be drafting our presentation: an overview of the project scope, a quick review of how it went, and details about what we learned along the way.

This weekend, we spent most of our time lettering the 5 final inked pages Brian sent and designing the interior covers. We even learned a few new tricks in Illustrator as we did the work! We have page 3 remaining to letter, and then the final conversion to PDF for all pages. We’d also like to print a few half-size demo copies to hand out to our class – the first earthlings to hold the glorious pages of Sauratopia in their hands! Lucky sons of guns.

There sure are a lot of steps in producing a comic book story! Some of them we only learned as they came up in production. We’ve had a very valuable learning experience here. Despite some speedbumps, we remain undeterred. Instead, we have caught the comic book bug and look forward to doing it again, and again, and again! Once we realize our original goal of producing our first comic book mini-story, we’ll catch our breath and plan the next steps. We’d like to do a series of shorts, a full length issue or two, and work our way up to a collected paperback.

We’ve also got a second set of ideas for a tangentially related story line, but fleshing that out is going to have to wait until we get a break between semesters. It’s about an interplanetary rock band called The Skin Tight Machine, and we’ve started up a separate site for it. Not much there so far but just wait until we get rolling!

And the Rocket’s Red… er, Black and White Glare!

Final inked pages are coming together this week. We’re so excited we almost wrecked our spacecraft!

Brian asked for another rough of the rocket descent panel from page 2. Our artistically-challenged storyboard didn’t really convey the feeling we intended. Here’s a more dramatically-correct rough in marker.

KaBlooie! More Fun With Sound Effects

Making sound effects with skewed letters was one lettering trick we wanted to master but had not successfully picked up from the Comicraft guide. We went back to the electronic drawing board to see if we could get a clue this time around.

And voila! KABLOOIE!

The font is a free one we picked up a couple years ago called Ultraviolent BB. And no, we don’t really wish any harm on sea turtles. We just had this image on our desktop from our Aunt’s trip to the aquarium.

SHPAK!! …Let the Inks Begin

Sauratopia.

It’s like getting hit in the face with a beer – by a dinosaur!

Beyond the Vast Reaches of Both Time and Space: An Application!

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Sauratopia

Well, here we go. Let’s hope we filled out the trademark paperwork right. Seems to us if we’ve paid money for the Sauratopia.com domain and established a contract with an artist to draw Sauratopia and promoted Sauratopia online, then YES our trademark has been used in commerce regulated by the U.S. Congress. So – cross your fingers (or your tentacles) – we filed the right kind of application.

As soon as we filed, we got a nice automated email about our application. It says, “In approximately 3 months, an assigned examining attorney will review your application to determine if all legal requirements are met. Currently, your mark is not registered and is considered a “pending” application. The overall process from the time of initial filing to registration or final refusal can take 13-18 months or even longer, depending on many factors; e.g., the correctness of the original filing and the type of application filed. It is CRITICAL that you check the status of your application at least every 3 – 4 months and promptly contact the Office if a letter (an “Office action”) or notice has issued for your application that you did not receive or do not understand.

WOW! That’s a long time. Looks like we won’t have results from our trademark application until 2012 sometime. So for now we patiently use the “TM” and not the cute “R in a circle” for Sauratopia. And, we continue to dominate all of prehistory by gearing up for final production of Episode One – and then… BEYOND!