Chapter X – Finally Complete!

It’s so great to have this for you!

Chapter X Illustrations Complete!

Here’s the 321st illustration for Chapter X!

All that’s left now is to edit the video, which is already partially done!

Chapter X Home Stretch

Chapter X has over 275 illustrations now, and all I have left is “Beautiful Soup.” Then it’s editing  and the chapter will be ready for release. Hopefully sometime in November, but given my poor estimates for September and October, it could be December. It’s almost done!

Chapter X is halfway finished

While I did promise I would have Chapter X finished by the end of September. I’m half-done with it, so it looks more like it will be out by the end of October instead.

Chapter X is coming

It’s on its way

 

I’m dedicated to releasing Chapter X by the end of September 2017. It’s been too long, and I’ve finally figured out how to make it work for me.

Illustration 100 from Chapter X

I’ve completed 100 illustrations for Chapter X. My guess is there will be about 100 more. I’m about halfway through the chapter.

Chapter II Trivia

In honor of July 4th, the day of the boating trip that spawned Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I’m going to run through some Easter eggs and trivia concerning my adaptation of Chapter II – The Pool of Tears.

I of course had to redraw Alice for her embiggened form after tasting the “Drink Me” bottle, and added her toppling of the table and bottle in the process as a little flavor to the scene.

When it came time for the fan, rather than shrink Alice herself, I made the background enlarge for the sake of simplicity. This a raw image from Alice shrinking, with a note to myself that was edited out during production.

This is a “background plate” for Alice shrinking. It was this that enlarged behind her.

Likewise, this image was used as a background for when she dropped the fan. It enlarged with the image of the door, so Alice’s rate of shrinking was consistent.

When Alice returns to the door, I cleaned up the enlarged version. It mayu seem that it would be simpler for me to have made a gigantic version with the door of this size and enlarged it from a “shrunken” version but it would have been tricky for the resolutions to line up. I chose to keep the pixels bulky in this enlarged image, as slimming them would make the door look too normal.

The image of Alice just after she falls into the Pool of Tears is made as an imitation of John Tenniel’s original illustration.

Likewise, the image of Alice swimming past the mouse is also an “imiTenniel.” I’m really happy with how the mouse turned out, by the way.

Finally, a Creeper from Minecraft makes a prominent appearance in the Pool of Tears with the mention of “other curious creatures.” Its inclusion was always intended as a joke, and a way for me to have fun with the project. No one outwardly disliked its inclusion as far as I know, and I don’t think it took anything away from the faithfulness of the adaptation. The Creeper was my way of “modernizing” the story without detracting from it, unlike most adaptations I have seen. If I were to  go back and prepare Project Carroll for a DVD release or something similarly insane, I would of course remove the Creeper.

 

Chapter X is progressing slowly, but it is progressing! I will have more time to dedicate to it soon, and if all goes well, I will have it out sometime in September or October.

Resurgence

Shall we try another figure of the Lobster-Quadrille?

State of the Project Update

It has been just about exactly a year since I last updated this blog, and about 9 months since I worked on Chapter X of Project Carroll.

I will be honest: my enthusiasm for the project dwindled significantly starting in October 2013, and went downhill since. In fact, this is the last thing I drew for the Chapter:

That gives you a sense of how little I wanted to work on it. I like how the snail turned out, to be fair, but…compared to my efforts on other poems like “You Are Old Father William,” this isn’t good enough, and I haven’t had the motivation to make it good enough.

The truth is that Project Carroll is high-work, and low-reward, and became eclipsed by another project of mine: Relics of Hyrule, a mod for Skyrim, which was a year old in August. The two overlapped for a while, but as my life became more stressful because of college and frankly not knowing what the heck I was doing with my life, Project Carroll became a burden rather than a source of pleasure. After working for hours at coursework I didn’t care about for a degree I wasn’t sure I wanted, coming home and meticulously moving pixels around wasn’t appealing. Relics of Hyrule had a fast turn-around. I could make something for it, and see it quickly in Skyrim, and then update the mod and quickly see players’ responses. It was more free than Project Carroll, and was easier to make something I was proud of. Relics of Hyrule helped me work through my stress and depression, for lack of a better term, and after finally graduating, I’m now working in a job I love, doing things I enjoy doing.

I’m approaching a major update for Relics of Hyrule and plan to take a break from it, or at least update it less frequently with smaller bits of content.

That said, I’ve been having the itch to finish Chapter X, and move on to Chapters XI and XII, some of the most entertaining parts of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Every few weeks I think about “The Willow-Tree” and how much I want to read it for Project Carroll. Once in a while I practice my Alice voice, and come up with voices for not-yet-introduced characters. I’ve been getting excited about how I can breathe new life into the Project for myself, like streamlining the “animation” process. For instance, having full poses of Alice ready to be put in place if she is doing something she does a lot, like stand still, walk, or sit. That way, I would only have to use the “paper doll” approach for more specific poses.

Project Carroll is 4 years old today, Lewis Carroll’s birthday (I wrote this post on January 27th), so it felt fitting to give a State of the Project update. I needed some time to re-evaluate it, and I hope to have more stuff out to you in the coming months.

50th Illustration for Chapter X!

I’ve completed 50 illustrations for Chapter X. This one is the first Tenniel echo of the Chapter. It also shows the evolution of Alice’s design, if you compare her to the illustrations from Chapter I in my last post. Her features are smaller and her expressions more subtle. Her hair has also been redrawn since Chapter I to be less big, with more of it covering her forehead. Her arms are also smaller and more consistent, as well as being generally more relaxed in pose.