Windosill. Worth a lot more than $3.

While we’ve been working on our cross-platform strategy for The Precinct, I’ve been directed to some fantastic online games from which we’re taking inspiration. Here they are:

http://windosill.com/

Windosill is incredible. You must play it, and you must pay $3 for the full version. It has so much style and personality. It’s as close to a religious experience as you’ll have playing a game.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/danielben/i-wish-i-were-the-moon
http://www.kongregate.com/games/GregoryWeir/the-majesty-of-colors
http://ludomancy.com/games/today.html

Brilliant, and pixelated.

http://sarien.net/

Oh, man. These geniuses have put Sierra games like Leisure Suit Larry and King’s Quest online as multiplayer games/chat rooms. So weird, so great.

And some more old games which you can now play online:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_andrew.shtml

Alter Ego: http://www.playalterego.com/

Legend of the Red Dragon (well, it was always online, but via BBS systems. Now you can play it on the web): http://lord.nuklear.org/

Jones in the Fast Lane: http://home.broadpark.no/~kboye/jones/jones.html

Got any more suggestions?

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I (and our growing team) just spent a few weeks working on an application to Film Victoria’s Digital Media Prototyping fund. It’s 80 pages long. You could injure someone with it if you swung it at their head. I would never do such a thing.

The “future-innovation-online-mobile-media” discussions that’ve gone on around it, and at MEGA, are starting to really do my head in. It’s becoming very clear that I’m not the sort of person who does big, visionary ideas involving technology that hasn’t been invented yet. I prefer looking at what already exists and trying to figure out how we can use it all in an amusing way.

Also, people continue to tell me things like “in the future, you won’t be a storyteller: you’ll be facilitating OTHER PEOPLE’S stories!” Because in the future nobody will watch a TV show or movie without interacting with it. Also, in the future everyone will wear silver jumpsuits and eat Space Food Sticks at every meal.

Never mind. The application we put in (around The Precinct and our “choose-your-own-adventure” thing) may not be enormously innovative technically, but it’d be (i) a lot of fun, (ii) a sweet tool for showing broadcasters the possibilities of COP ACTION as a cartoon and game and (iii) not half as easy, cheesy and token as some TV series online tie-ins I’ve seen.

And I am trying to open my mind to more inclusive, truly “interactive” stuff. As long as I can still make my funny toons.

Ackersley and keytar

Speaking of which, for those who were not at our secret Precinct puppet/slide-show in July, here’s the images we showed telling the story of our 1986 flashback episode! Since there’s no script or explanation, it will be be bit mystifying to most of you. Make up your own story: it’s TOTALLY INTERACTIVE OMG LOLZ

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We’re going to be pitching The Precinct to an audience of INDUSTRY BIGWIGS as the grand finale to MEGA later this month, and are able to make suggestions as to who should be invited! If you know of (or ARE) a switched-on film/tv/online industry person with a sense of humour, drop us a line and maybe we can swing a ticket their/your way.

On Wednesday night our MEGA session was about “Financial Feasibility”.

In other words, we’d spent a couple months chucking ideas around in a friendly playpen, and our fearless leader Justin felt the need to dampen our enthusiasm by dropping some people with market experience on us.

One was the afore-pictured (is that a word?) Brendan Lewis, and I don’t think he’d mind my saying he was clearly there to tear the throats out of our concepts with his serrated teeth and then, blood coursing down his mighty jaw, roar up at the full moon like some sort of entrepreneurial werewolf.

There’s some real good ideas in our group, and there’s some real good ideas that haven’t been thought through from the market/consumer perspective, i.e. “who would pay for this?”

I have thought about this, and am willing to acknowledge that an animated cop-themed Choose Your Own Adventure is not exactly the money-making Killer App the world is hanging out for. But I think there’s an audience for it.

So when Brendan chucked his now famous line, “Where’s the money coming from?” at me, I talked briefly about my interest in locating some companies with senses of humour for sponsorship/product placement action. We’ll make it funny, really!

• The online choose-your-own-adventure game (which I’ve now named The Precinct: Die Trying) opens with a lovely video clip of myself, sitting by the fire at my Norwegian ski lodge, extolling the benefits of SPIRAX brand sketchbooks. “If it’s not a #534, it’s off my desk like a shot,” I purr, as a group of half-naked “Spirax Girls” pout and spray fixative on each other.
• During the series, the characters take frequent breaks at the HOTEL METROPOLITAN in North Melbourne for “fat-arse chook parmas”, hang out in front of the station eating MRS MAC’S Giant Sausage Rolls or HERBERT ADAMS Spinach & Cheese Rolls, and then gulp down bottle after bottle of SLADES brand portello and creaming soda. Then they vomit. But this does not reflect on the quality of the food and refreshments made by these fine organisations!

The alternatives for funding being: looking for investment/grants, teaming up with a TV network and launching Die Trying as part of the series’ marketing, or just starting to write and build the game slowly and maybe attempting to flog some adorable, cylindrical merchandise. The idea of “crowdfunding” has been suggested, but I’d like to try this myself on a small scale before committing to it as a viable idea.

Anyway, I think I made it through the pitch OK, but I was a bit worse for wear afterwards.

sleepy

The one I’ve seen bits of on the web is called TED. Rebecca Clements put me onto it. It’s a big conference they have over in the USA every so often. Smart people (I mean, very smart people) address an audience of more smart people about a wide variety of topics. They film these talks and post some of them on their site, YouTube, etc. Some incredibly interesting talks. A few are “change the way you think” kind of talks.

Try this one. It’s my favourite.

The one I actually went to was a thing called XMediaLab. They describe this as a “digital media think tank and creative workshop”, and that is what it is. They bring lots of experts in various fields (relevant to digital media) to one place for a weekend and a bunch of lucky people with interesting digital media project ideas get to listen to them talk, then consult with the ones they like best to get the benefit of their wisdom.

I went to the Melbourne XML a couple years ago as part of my friend Katrina’s team. Her project “Girl Mechanic TV” scored a place, and I was along as the cartoony/animaty/designy guy.

It was an intense weekend. I was working Friday so I missed the “talks” day, but Sat and Sun were packed out with meetings with an impressive array of people, each with their own particular take on Kat’s project. A Canadian design lecturer (the other Martha from Martha and the Muffins) told her it needed to be more educational. An Indian venture capitalist told her it needed to be completely uneducational (and needed more “freaks”. He was a strange guy).

I guess the point of this post is, “try to listen to smart people talk if you can”. Even better if you can talk TO them as well. They all have their own agendas, of course. As long as you know what those are, you can learn shitloads.

Yesterday we spent the whole day at a MEGA session where we pitched our projects to business/marketing type people.

Some people’s ideas revolve around serving ads direct to your phone. Naturally, they went over well with the ad gurus. Personally, the idea of phone ads makes me wanna ralph. They think they can make it so the ads are so finely targeted that people will actually LOOK FORWARD to seeing them, as they’ll have such a good knowledge of what YOU THE CONSUMER wants to buy, they’ll only deliver ads you’re interested in.

I’m for this in theory, but I suspect it’ll be difficult getting consumers to hand over all this demographic info, and people in the future will probably continue to get lots of ads for Cialiviagrium they don’t need.

I’m personally interested in sticking product placement in The Precinct. We’d make it funny. Anyway, that’s another post.

People don’t quite understand that animation is expensive. Even “cheap” animation. When I quoted the projected per-episode cost of our show, I think someone suggested that outlandish amount would HAVE to be blown on drugs — there’s no way a CARTOON could cost that much!…

It can. It does. The number I quoted was probably a tenth of a Simpsons episode, maybe a third of a South Park (our episodes are half the length).

Drew at Eskimo, whom we’re working on cross-platform strategy with, asked me the other day why I couldn’t just make a few Precinct episodes on my own time. He was being somewhat facetious, but was nevertheless after a serious answer. He wondered how much money I would have to be handed to go ahead and start making the show by myself.

The first answer is, I have just gone ahead and made some Precinct animation — this. I had help from a number of people. They worked, essentially, for nothing. I don’t want to keep asking people to work for nothing. If we can’t scare up enough money to pay people to work on it, maybe it’s not good enough.

The second answer is, I could (and maybe should) be working on just making the show myself. I am doing a storyboard for another Precinct short, but work on this has really dropped off since I started the new day job, and MEGA. In the past, I WOULD just have started animating. I did Herman that way. It took a long time.

But I really think The Precinct needs some production value, and some backing. It’s a nice, commercial idea. It looks cute and could get a reasonable audience if we did it well. Not to say I won’t do some more stupid cheap toons soon… like these.

But all the talk about DIY, cheapness and episode lengths has made me start thinking about another way of approaching The Precinct’s production.

Which is the value of consulting with big-brained people! Thanks, MEGA and Film Victoria, for making that possible!

The same trailer, in Japanese:


I worked on the original series a few years back. As Australian kids TV goes, it’s pretty shit-hot (this means “good”). So Michael V (my deskmate) and I would amuse ourselves by coming up with ideas for exciting new adventures for the occupants of the good ship Valiant.

Glen Clark: we like animating him because he's a doofus.

PS: sorry about the shitty dog pun title. All the first season episodes had them. This is a particularly bad one; I was proud of it.

“Dogs Led Race”
Outline

Act 1

DOGSTAR
Zeke appears in the guise of a philosopher, wearing a smoking jacket and holding a pipe (not owning a tobacco pipe, he has substituted a copper plumbing fitting of a similar size). He has decided that, since “to err is human”, he will prove his humanity by making as many stupid mistakes as possible. He begins immediately with some Jerry Lewis-quality physical ineptitude.

VALIANT
Glen farts, which is very funny. Suddenly, the Valiant is intercepted by a flashy, Funny Car dragster-looking ship. The alien crew of the ship (who look a little bit like Ed Roth’s RAT FINK) are from the planet Pinkschlep. They hail the Valiant and start making fun of the old cargo ship. Captain Glen takes offense and starts making outrageous claims about the Valiant’s awesome capabilities. Having fallen right into their trap, the rat hoons challenge him to a drag race. The loser gives up their ship! To everyone’s shock, Glen accepts.

Act 2

VALIANT
Lincoln attempts to hot up the Valiant mechanically but its limitations suggest they still won’t be able to beat the rats. When Glen farts again Lincoln has a frightening idea: he can synthesize a well known gas (i.e. nitrous) which, injected into the engine during the race, will give them a turbo boost. Simone, however, is against this because (a) it is cheating, and (b) the gas is illegal and highly unstable, and known to cause ships to explode. Unfortunately, this sounds like a challenge to Lincoln, and fun to Gemma.

DOGSTAR
Alice continues trying to talk Zeke out of his “mistake making” but fails. He “mistakenly” opens the cargo bay doors and shoots thousands of doggie toys out into space.

VALIANT
Lincoln has produced the nitrous, and disturbingly, is starting to come off a bit hoonish himself. When the rats appear onscreen to tell them it’s almost race time, Lincoln gives them a bit more lip than they were expecting. Glen begins to wonder if he’s made a big mistake. Gran suggests it’s time to tell Mark and Greta what he’s done.

EARTH (via video link)
Mark, understandably, is not happy. Greta agrees that using nitrous would be cheating, and dangerous, and to Mark’s horror, insists that Glen stick by his word and race unaided. If he loses the Valiant, their search for the Dogstar will be over – something he should have considered before making this foolish bet! Glen gulps and hopes his awesome driving skills will be enough…

Act 3

VALIANT
The two ships line up for the race.

EARTH
Having insisted on keeping the video link open, Mark watches on his home screen, squirming. Greta appears with snacks, wearing a drinky-straw hat and a giant foam “We’re #1” hand. Gran gives them updates on what’s happening in classic race commentator style.

VALIANT
The race begins! Glen does what he can but the Valiant is being soundly thrashed. Gran continues commentating with gusto. Abruptly, the rats’ ship goes kerblooey – they’ve cheated with nitrous and an engine has exploded! Heroic Glen turns the Valiant around to save the rats from their deteriorating ship, Mark yelling at the TV all the while. Finally the rats are safe aboard the Valiant, where they agree to call it a “draw”. All are freaked out when the rats’ mother appears onscreen to bawl out her son for wrecking her ship (the Gemini) which she needs to take her mother to the skin specialist.

Mark acknowledges Glen’s good driving. Glen accepts the compliment somewhat ungraciously until, not having been paying attention, the Valiant finds itself under attack. Everyone prepares for the worst, but the attack turns out to be a hailstorm of harmless doggie toys. Where could they have come from?

DOGSTAR
Alice convinces Zeke to stop his shenanigans by pointing out he is causing his accidents on purpose, and therefore they are not mistakes, but choices he has made. He counters that since humans make independent choices as well as mistakes, this is no proof he is not human. Following this, he makes an unintended mistake and gets hit by something heavy.

THE END

I think it’s a winner! Fast spaceships, slapstick and the farts are TIED INTO THE PLOT! Ah well. If you or anyone you know is making an animated series that needs quality Jewish comedy writing, drop me a line. I can hook you up.

This is my favourite bit of the whole first series. I wish the whole show was like this!

The talks raised some questions in my mind, most notably:

1. how do you interest people in funding an animated cop show when it is not something anyone actually NEEDS (in the sense that there is a need for a digital scheduler, or medical emergency services, or a good-tasting orange)?
2. will Apple’s continued disinterest in supporting Flash on the iPhone make much difference to our approach to mobile?
3. why make “apps” for specific mobiles/operating systems when a web app can (theoretically) work identically on any web-capable device?

In session 3, Brad Birchall spoke about (among other things) venture capital, and suggested VCs might prefer you to sink your own cash into your project before coming to them. Jennifer Wilson gave me a phrase I didn’t know: “on/off deck”, which in mobile terms refers to the “magic portal” your phone provider shows you when you start your phone. They use the “deck” to push their preferred content at you. My “notes”:
In week 3, there were many more concepts to get my head around. I interpreted them on paper but may have missed some of the subtleties:

Other things I found interesting:

• Telcos lose money subsidising iPhones for their customers.
• In the future, telcos hope to be the fat, rich middleman between you and everything you buy (by virtue of their serving up the platform by which you buy it).
• Big time venture capitalists wouldn’t spit in the direction of a project our size (too inexpensive for them to bother with).
• The business model we envisioned for our online choose-your-own-adventure story has a name, and the name is “freemium”.
• Almost 35% of Americans answer the phone while they’re having sex.

What this turned out to be was a live reading of one of our Precinct scripts — “Episode 6: Last Drinks”, otherwise known as “the ’80s flashback episode”, in which a young Sarge, Sandhurst and Ackersley are forced to team up as they try to bring down a noted Drug(tm) dealer.

A pixelated Max Headroom

We showed a series of images (flicked through by tech/fiancee Sarah Howell) which tell the story of the episode. There was also a bit of synthesizer action, ably triggered at just the right moments by tech/never been a romantic partner of mine Jake Zhivov.

In this episode, video games are part of the plot

The reading was performed by myself and co-writer Adam, buoyed to greatness by narrator Thomas Pullar and the excellent Melbourne comedian Matt Elsbury, who took over the role of Sarge at very, very short notice when Adrian Calear (Sarge’s regular golden throat) took ill.

The biggest explosion in the episode

You can perhaps also tell from the pics that we performed a little puppet show to go along with our multimedia antics. Adam made the Precinct characters out of soup cans, and everyone else was played by an array of toys we nicked from the studio.

Adam injects realism into the performance

We put this on for a couple reasons: we thought it would be fun (it was) and we thought it’d help the script if we got some feedback and audience response (it did). When you’re shut away working on scripts for months you start to wonder if they’re funny! We felt good when the kind audience laughed and applauded: if it’s funny as a haphazardly staged puppet show, it’ll be a lot better as a proper cartoon.

Matt and Sarge take a flying leap

I highly recommend prodding actors into performing your works for an audience. Normally you don’t find out your dialogue sucks until you get into the recording booth.

John Retallick shines as Officer Fallon, the Drug(tm) taster

We even called for a volunteer at one point to play Fallon, who tests out a bag of Drug ™ and delivers some startling news to our heroes. Famed comics broadcaster John Retallick gamely took up the challenge, even going as far as taste-testing our prop Drug(tm) bag (which was, cunningly, filled with cocaine).

Left to right: Matt Elsbury, David, Adam, Thomas Pullar

Later, Adam and David drank lots, Adam humped a postbox and, the next day, came down with a nose-bleedingly bad case of swine flu (the two are unrelated). A successful evening. Maybe we’ll do it again sometime!

MEGA is an Entrepreneurship Masterclass series which takes participants from the mobile, digital content and ICT industries through an industry-driven development program to build their creative, technical and business skills for the development of new products and services for global markets.

It was only very recently that I had to look up what “ICT” is. It’s just what they used to call “IT” but with an extra “C” added. I forget what the “C” stands for just at this moment.

Sarah just told me it’s “communication”. Thank you, Sarah.

Since we’re also still working on this Film Vic cross-platform strategy, it’s nice timing. We’re looking forward to lobbing a few of our ideas on people. MEGA runs through November.

We’ve been to the first couple talks (there’s many more to come). This week’s was about “Teamwork!” I took notes. Here’s a few.

We also heard about trademark and patent registration, but my notes on these are a bit dry.

Some people doing MEGA have interesting ideas, albeit ones which are nascent, unformed, which is sweet because MEGA for them will be about bashing out details and figuring out if the idea’s going to work (many of the other ideas are very tech-based; apps for phones and the like).

Since we’ve been working on The Precinct for a few years now, we’re a bit further along. We have a team (and a larger, projected, team for when the show kicks into production). We’ve got a lot of stuff down on paper (and out in the digital ether). We’ve had government funding helping us get the the show “market-ready”.

So for us, MEGA will be partially about figuring out if our show actually is market-ready (not “good”. We already know it’s good). MIPCOM was helpful in this regard too.

MEGA will also be about learning stuff, meeting people and having a larf. And being accepted into a thing like this is great for keeping our spirits up over what has been (and could continue to be) a long gestation/development process.

Luckily, I still like the show after three years and am real happy to sink ever more free time into it. Which is how I’m spending this sunny Sunday afternoon…

Give us an amusing fake name, or your real name if you can’t think of one:

Omar NcNulty
dicks mcbutt the 58th
Zac E. Porn


What TV show do you scramble to avoid?

Any kind of dancing or fat show
Dancing Idle
Home & Away


What’s the most embarrassing DVD/video you own?

Pilates made easy
hot pants workout
Ultimate Fat Burn
the wedge series 1
inside the mind of todd mcfarlane
Power Yoga
Deadly Weapons starring Chesty Morgan
Our Wedding Video (I cried)
fit to strip


If you provided your e-mail address, and are therefore in the running to win a happy fun Precinct picture, what would you like me to draw the cops doing?

Investigating a slaughter on Sesame Street
trying to get a confession out of a sweaty Harold Bishop.
Drunken Karaoke
snorting rack
arresting rove mcmanus
Playing poker like the dogs in the playing poker painting, then getting into a fistfight
Checkers
Riding unicorns to the moon. But! The unicorns should be all gritty and badass. They should totally have battle scars, be smoking cigars, and their horns should be katanas. There should be explosions in the background (maybe a few robots too or something), but it should all look ridiculously happy, with smiley faces on everything a la Super Mario. There should also be some text on the bottom that has nothing to do with the picture (’Keep on truckin’!’ or ‘Hang in there!’ ect). Ooh! And lens flare. EVERYWHERE. Or just draw them looking stupid and doing something stupid. Same thing.

That last one would be interesting to draw because I haven’t decided 100% whether Precinct animals have paws, hooves, claws, etc. or whether they just have stumps like the human characters.

Thanks a lot for your responses so far, they’ve all been helpful, especially those that took the time to be critical! Cheers very much to Brad Giblin at Film Vic and Latauro at Ain’t It Cool News for helping us get the word out about it!

But we need more! Force your friends to do it too: http://www.theprecinctrocks.com/survey/. The more responses the better.

We’ll be assisted by some weak puppeteering and the pitch boards I’m drawing now, which we’re projecting on a big screen. Pitch boards are storyboards like the ones I’ve posted earlier, but fewer drawings: only the relevant “beats” we absolutely need to show the story progression.

Most of them are all grey and scratchy like the Farnham boards, but this one frame I coloured up nice because it’s an EXPLOSION!

'80s flashback: Sarge & Sandhurst escape an explosion. Sarge saves his axolotls.

Bonus link: Go here to read John Kricfalusi’s heartwarming story about what it’s like for a cartoon genius to pitch a movie idea at Dreamworks nowadays.