I'm back, baby :)

Geez... was it really 6 years ago that I made my last post here??

After many years of external issues interrupting my machinima making efforts, lost data, disillusionment, family, birth of a new daughter this year and flirting with WoW again, I've finally ended my self-imposed exile to reconnect with my love of 3d animated movie making.

Sadly, as my one and only PC now has Win 10 installed on it, my days of The Movies are over and done with (as the program won't run under Windows 10, which is a major ball-ache but not unexpected after such a long time).

So, it's back with Moviestorm with a vengeance, it would seem (although I have iClone 5, it's both a little long in the tooth now and I'm no further along with learning it than I was 5 years ago and I don't have the freetime I once had to spend most of it learning how to use it again from scratch!)

Odyssey; well, as much as I'd like to carry on with this, there are a lot of near unsurmountable issues with carrying on where I left off -

1. I lost all the scripts and part finished work on my PC following a burglary a couple of years ago, and would have to restart from scratch... a pain in the arse, but still not completely a write-off (although trying to remember where I was originally going to go with it is a none-starter after so much time!)

2. The loss of The Movies; would mean having to completely redo all the props, costumes etc (which I have little time for, and what meagre modding ability I DID have for MS is loooong forgotten through disuse!), and also precludes some of the alien races as they had specific looks that are probably undoable in MS anyway. Luckily, I have all the original mesh files for the TM props I had, but no way to convert these into MS props, so that's a none-starter.

3. Cast; probably the biggest issue, as most of the incredibly talented cast have drifted away from the machinima scene over the years and are probably no longer interested in spending hours of their time to voice a series that started and never got finished.

4. Time; with a new daughter, new responsibilities and a lot more constraints on my time nowadays, I've got nowhere near enough spare time to devote to filming and writing as I used to, which means a lot less time to devote to such a long term project; again, not a completely unsurmountable obstacle, but one that would delay further production significantly.

So, what IS next for me?

Well, I was toying with the idea of a kind of "documentary" to tie up the loose ends of the Odyssey story and lay out where I envisaged it going over the remains of Season Two and onto Season 3 and 4 to deliver some closure to the project; quite how I'd do it, I dunno (as I lost all the props etc that I originally had on my PC that was half-inched and as mentioned above, without assistance in recreating them, it would be difficult to do without them).

Other than that, I have a couple of other ideas in the fire for movies, just to get my hand back in again after so long, but we'll see what the next project is, as again it would require some specific props I no longer have (and some new ones), and that is something I don't have the time or the skill to come up with these days!

So, I'm back on the doorstep, backpack in hand and looking at the big, open, blank field ahead of me again and wondering what's next; kinda exciting!