The Final Unveiling

Big news today, the final character for the first episode of Cosmic Rage has been unveiled. Today we introduce Marik the leader of the special forces to the Universe. With all of our characters you may be curious as to what will now take place of our weekly character updates. Well have no worries 🙂 Starting next week I am going to share some of experiences I had in Japan.  I want to do this for a few reasons, the first being that I had so much fun that I really want to share my experiences and share what I learned about the culture and such with everyone. Secondly, many of you may have recall due talking about how anime is essentially the only reason I ever got into animation and design. I have been trying to get to Japan for years before this and with that the experiences have easily contributed to new ideas for things and may have started the seeds to new stories and even influences to character designs.

Not only will I be sharing my trip but I will also be sharing other projects that will be wrapping themselves up. As you recall there have been a few production updates that I basically said I didn’t get a chance to work on anything because I was busy with freelance projects and other items such as some projects with friends.

I look forward to sharing experiences on the trip and look forward to a production update sometime early next week with the holiday weekend. 🙂

Production Update 6

In what seems like forever, I am updating you on the production of the project. On the flip side though, not much production was done last week. I caught up a lot of much needed sleep following my trip to Japan. I also had some freelance work I had to finish up for the start of this week, I look forward to sharing that work since it is where I was working before I left for Japan.

I also started a web design book on the trip to Japan so I wanted to finish that up this week as well. It isn’t something that we are going to see immediate payback on in the Cosmic Rage universe, but it is something that will develop on cosmicrage.com at some point in the future and lifetime of the project. There are a lot of things in the works that will pay off later, its a matter of being able to look far into the future instead of just the next few weeks.

The other item of business this week was continuing work on my SGMS presentation that will happen towards the end of September. I am so happy that I picked this topic to discuss, not only since it started with Cosmic Rage but its always interesting learning about the history of animation. I am really excited for this presentation this year 😀

Finally, the secret project that I have been working on has been getting back on track this week as well. The project is nearing its completion, however we need to get back on track this week and get caught up where we left on it. I really look forward to when this project is done so it can be shared as well.

Lots of new exciting things to hopefully be shared before the fall season. With that in mind, make sure to stop back on Thursday to check out the final character unveiling!

Riley: Unveiled

Today a new character was added to the Cosmic Rage Universe, Riley. Make sure to hop over to the character gallery page and check him out. With the addition of Riley, there remains only 1 character left to be unveiled next week. I am closing in on a personal milestone by getting the cast of the first few episodes posted up with small backgrounds for everyone to start learning about. Look forward to next week for the final character!

I’m back!

I have returned to the blog and the states after my 2 week trip to Japan. There isn’t too much news on the Cosmic Rage front this week so far since my traveling put everything on the back burner for a couple weeks. Looking forward to getting some more things done this week and also preparing my presentation for SGMS as well.

Upon my return, we will have a new character up again on Thursday as we look to finish unveiling those. Afterwards, there will be something new to fill the Thursday voids. It’s good to be home and to get back to work!

Lots of News, Updates and Other Exciting Notes

What a crazy/ busy last two weeks it has been. I was recently in Las Vegas for the first time  working with one of my clients on some graphics. I can’t say too much right now but I will be sure to share a link once the graphics go live later this month I believe. It was a very exciting opportunity that I really look forward to sharing. I wasn’t able to take as many pictures as I would have liked of the Vegas area to share but if you checked out some of them on twitter you saw the giant castle hotel I was at. Vegas really felt like a place where time didn’t exist, and the mountains made the city feel really secluded. For sure hope I get to go back and visit again.

Now for the second item of business. This year I will again be presenting at the Schoolgirls and MobileSuits conference or SGMS. Visit SGMS on Facebook here! This is my third year of going to the conference and my second presentation. However, SGMS has been around for a little over a decade and is a great time. Every year presenters talk about a wide variety of issues in japanese animation. This year I am looking forward to seeing one of the keynotes, Dai Sato who is an amazing writer and worked on series such as Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell. I really can not wait to hear his adventures and how he got to where he is. As for me, last year my presentation was on an animated series called Gantz, and how societal issues were interpreted into character design. This year I am working on something a little bit more technical. I am researching and presenting on the use of 3D CGI in japanese animation. I look forward to presenting and hope to see some familiar faces there!

As for Cosmic Rage, I haven’t had a whole lot of opportunities to work on that over the last couple weeks. Besides working in Vegas, I also took a quick trip to visit my sister. Currently, I am putting the finishing touches on a few projects before I head to the next area, which is…

JAPAN!! Since high school and my introduction to anime I have wanted to visit Japan. One of my friends has a big interest in anime and Japan as well and we have been trying to make it over there since high school. It was one of those things where we never could coordinate our efforts at the same time, but that is all over now and we head out tomorrow for a little over 2 weeks. Again, I will be trying to post some pictures every night to my twitter account but I all throw up a few on here perhaps if I have time and internet access. Although the last thing I want to do is spend too much time in front of a computer while I am there 🙂 Some of our stops include the ghibli museum, 2 days of hiking Mt Fuji, a couple festivals, some ocean side hiking, and many more adventures. I look forward to sharing this trip with everyone!

So if I am gone from the blog for a little while no worries, this mind never sleeps and I will have more to share. Also, don’t forget to check out the character gallery for a new character unveiling. Right now there are only 2 characters left to be unveiled.