Hi guys!

I apologize for the delay in posting the latest update, but we’ve got our Podcasts up and running, finally.  That’s the reason for the delay.

Two big pieces of media to upload for everyone.  First, we’ve completed our first video!  You can download it from our media page here or you can watch the video on Youtube here.  This is our opening credits, it’s going to remain so for our entire production run.  This is how we’re leading off every episode, and these credits will appear immediately after a short 3-4 minute teaser sequence.  We chose a stylized animation for the credits, and these drawings were all done by Cristelle Comby.  If the name is familiar to any of you, that’s because she runs www.summer-glau.net!  Will the opening be the same for every episode?  Mostly.  We’ll be changing the episode titles at the end of course, and the supporting actors (such as John Coven, the voice of Sgt. Miller) will also be changing, as those credits will be assigned based on the size of the role in each episode.

Second, our first podcast commentary, on the Pilot episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is up!  Who’s commenting on it?  3 members of the Braintrust:  Mr. Domino, our Sound Manager and the voice of John Connor, Roxy Bisquaint, our Marketing and Outreach head and the voice of Tarissa Dyson, and myself, The Godfather_SJP, Production Manager and the voice of Sikes.  The podcast has a synchronization piece in the very beginning to allow you to start the recording at the same time as the episode.  We decided to use a “Terminator voice” motif for it, though this may disappear if it proves unpopular.  The 3 of us had a lot to talk about, particularly me and Roxy, since we differ substantially in our opinion of the Pilot episode.  There’s also a lot of trivia included about Terminator and the show, because yes we are that obsessive about the whole thing.  We talk almost constantly the entire time, word of warning if you expect us to be quiet.  We’ll be publishing these podcasts about twice a month, and they will be released in their broadcast order.  So commentaries to episodes 2 and 3 will be uploaded next month, at different times.  You can download our podcast for the Pilot below by right clicking and selecting “Save Link As,” which will allow you to download the MP3 file.  Alternatively, you can listen to the podcast using Flowplayer.

Third is a bit more news on our two Convention visits.  We have applied for a Fan Table at Dragon Con, and 4 of us will be in attendance manning it as of this date: myself, Mr. Domino, Roxy Bisquaint, and Aztalanturf.  We won’t get official approval until June, but we’re confident we’ll get our table.  And more of us may show up!  It’s going to be a big gathering of the people involved.  But we were unable to reserve a table at the Philadelphia Wizard Con.  We’re still attending, specifically myself and The Crusading Knight, but we won’t be manning a table.  We will be handing out flyers and, if we can figure out how to set it up, showing a few videos on Saturday June 1st, the same day that Ms. Glau is attending that convention.  We’ll also be handing out flyers about the Save The SCC campaign.

We’ve also had a few changes in membership.  The Crusader is now back writing!  After a hiatus, he’s working on one of our episodes, and no one is happier about it than I.  I’m still the Head Writer (for the moment), but assuming everything goes as planned, Sir Buckethead will be resuming his post as Head Writer.  We’ve also had a couple of CGI users join us, JumPROper and supertails.  Both are Blender users.  Supertails, at the moment, is texturing and rigging our HK VTOL model (made by S. Silard).  JumPROper is looking into a very, very important item for us, which was suggested to us by one of our fans, MMM.Mind in the public forum, and which we’re following up on.  So our last news item is this: we’re looking into using the Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas scenery for our project.  This is what JumPROper is investigating.  All the files are available for incorporation into Blender using Niftools.  This is a very handy open source project that allows Blender, Maya, and 3DS MAX users to use the Fallout 3 game engine for videos.  Since Fallout 3 is set in a nuked Washington D.C., there’s a lot of scenery we can use.  As you can imagine this would significantly reduce the work needed for our project.  We’ll keep you posted on the status of this, and we’re also reaching out to the Niftools community for help.

Finally, as always we do take donations for the project.  Your donations pay for our bandwidth usage, but we’re also looking into buying some software and models (which cost several hundred dollars).  We need your help to do it though.  Next month I’ll be listing in detail the kind of things we hope to buy, which will allow us to produce our first episode that much faster.

In the mean time, stay tuned for next month.  Peace, love, and No Fate!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hi guys!

Sorry for the delay in updating you all, but we had a very important board meeting last week where we laid out our plans for this coming year.  So, this entire post will be about what we’ll be doing.

First, we are going to finish several videos, all portions of the first episode.  We plan on having two videos finished before June.  Remember all the “under the hood” stuff I mentioned about modeling?  Well, we’ve got rigged models for John Connor, Cameron/Alison Young, and a T-800 now.  Which means we can animate a couple scenes in our first episode.  You’ll see one of these scenes, and we believe we’ll have another with Derek Reese ready to release to the public, but we still have to work all this out.  Plus our opening graphics for the show (our title theme is actually complete).  Will the first episode be completed?  No.  And it’s too early to tell how much will be completed (because things take that long when you’re doing CGI).

Second, we’re attending at couple of conventions!  That’s right, you can meet us in person at two different dates and ask us any questions you want to.  We’re be manning a fan table at both locations, we’re we’ll be presenting videos, posters, handing out flyers, handing out copies of our script pages, and recruiting anyone who wants to help.  We’ll also be taking pledges for donations.  The two conventions in question?  First up, Philadelphia Comic Con 2013, presented by Wizard World.  I’ll be there on the weekend, June 1st and 2nd (and perhaps longer if the stars align), and we’re working on getting other team members there.  If the convention sounds familiar, it’s because Summer Glau is guesting there.  The second convention?  Dragon Con!  Labor Day Weekend, 2013 (i.e. the first weekend in September).  And we’ve got 4 team members already confirmed for it: myself, Mr. Domino, Roxy Bisquaint, and Aztalanturf.  We also have a new promo graphic to share, which will be one of our posters at the Cons.

Our New Promo Graphic

And, finally, we have another new piece of media we’ll be adding to the site.  Since we’re all such big fans of the show, a lot of us have pretty strong opinions about the different episodes.  Which makes for very entertaining commentaries.  And that’s what we’re releasing, commentaries for each and every episode of TSCC, in broadcast order.  We’re going to have 3 to 4 members watching each episode together, and the only filter?  No profanity over a TV-14 level.  So anything goes.  For the pilot episode (which we’re recording this Tuesday, the 12th!),  the commentators will be myself, Roxy, and Mr. Domino.  Now, we still need to polish the recordings prior to public consumption, but any commentaries which are finished will be published on a monthly basis.  Of course, I’ll let you know which ones are done via Tumblr.

So guys and gals, I hope that gets you at least a little excited for 2013.

Peace, love, and No Fate!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Yeah, I know, a few days late, but something tells me most of you wouldn’t have read this News update if it was on Christmas Day.  This post is going to be a little different than usual; it’s going to be a bit of whimsical fun.  Specifically, what I would buy each member of the Connor Family for Christmas.

First up, Sarah Connor.  Now, I could do something silly and slightly mean, but in this case I think it’s time Sarah received something that addresses a serious deficiency in her skill set.  She can take apart any weapon, she’s expertly trained in guerrilla warfare, but there’s one area which we know she’s absolutely no good:  COOKING.  Seems like all she can make effectively is pancakes.  So, for Sarah’s gift, I’d get her a cooking class.  And I don’t mean just one either, I mean a class which covers everything from basic knife skills to preparing a saute.  Should take 6-7 weeks, 3 hours a week, gets her out of the house.  I think she can make time for that.

Second up, John Connor.  Here we have a teenager with seriously deficient social skills for the dating world, and a crush on a robot (okay, fine, Cybernetic Organism).  How to remedy both issues at the same time?  Reading material!  John gets a collection of books to improve his love life, since I’m not such a cheapskate to only get him one.  The first book is “Love and Sex with Robots” by David Levy.  Yes, this book really exists!  And, to cover all the bases, because I’m assuming like most typical teenage males John knows nothing about making a relationship last, he’s getting something more generic, “The Relationship Handbook” by George S. Pransky.

Third, Cameron.  What do you get for a cybernetic organism designed to kill?  I doubt she’d like a reprogramming job that removes such desires, but it’s Christmas so I can’t be too violence-oriented in my gift either.  This is something of a poser.  But… we do have an apparent interest in military history as revealed by Self Made Man.  Just so happens Military History is something I know quite a bit about, and since this is also a cyborg attempting to learn more about “The Human Condition” I think I could come up with a few things.  Not a book though, maybe books on tape (so she could listen to them while pursuing…other activities), because if there’s one thing Cameron is good at, it’s multi-tasking.  So, I’d get her “Battle Cry of Freedom”  by James McPherson, the definitive work about the American Civil War, and “John Adams” by David McCullough.

Finally we have Derek Reese, who ironically is the easiest person to “gift” for me.  Derek’s a baseball fan if What He Beheld is any indication, and since he lives in LA, he’s therefore a Dodgers fan.  Since I’m also a baseball fanatic, I know just the thing: a baseball autographed by every member of the 1988 World Series winning Dodgers team.  In an airtight vacuum sealed giant case of glass, 1 foot thick, and lead lined.  Because, you know, Judgment Day is coming.  I’d want the thing to last.  Otherwise what’s the point?

Feel free to send us your own gift ideas on Tumblr or Twitter.  We’ll put them up!

And now, on to the News!

First, if you’ve been following our Tumblr blog, we’ve had a  big staff change.  The Crusading Knight has stepped down as our Head Writer, though he’s still voicing Sergeant Miller.  I am now the Head Writer, in addition to Production Manager.  We’ve had 3 new members join the project.  First, Ross Cooper, an excellent writer (whom I’ve also mentioned in a previous Tumblr post) is now our number 2 writer on the staff.  We’ve also had a couple of CGI “recruits,” Nathan Ferguson, who’s going to rig our finished character models for Blender (so we can use either Blender or Maya for animation), and Kenneth Fletcher, who’s doing a lot of modeling for us (he’s finishing up the HK VTOL and making scenery for us).  As always, we can use any help with computer graphics or artwork, so if you think you can help us, contact us at tcc.no.fate.productions@gmail.com.  You can also Donate to help our project, which will allow us to purchase software and models for use in the project.

Second, we’ve got a Christmas Gift for everyone who follows us at this site, on Twitter, or on Tumblr:  Sample Scenes!  That’s right, everyone, we’ve prepared a list of scenes from finished scripts that you can download here or on the Media page and read for yourselves.  I’m not going to say which scene is from which episode, there is some mixing and matching going on, but every one of them is a scene from a finished episode script and something you’re going to see in our episodes.  Guaranteed.  Like what you read?  Then by all means tell us!  Spread the word!  Because we might just share some more scenes next Christmas…

Peace, love, and No Fate!

I’ve written quite a bit about the Future War.  As spoiler free as I could make it, of course, but there’s much more you guys know about what’s going on in the Future than what’s happening in the Present.

The Future War, John’s involvement in it, that’s the A story of our season.  For those of you not familiar with the terms, these come from descriptions of episodes with more than one plot.  The “A” story is the primary focus, what the majority of an episode’s time is spent on.  A “B” plot sometimes is an ancillary story, a humorous one, one which reinforces the A story in some manner, or a plot which doesn’t get as much screen time as the main one.  For example, in Self Made Man, Cameron’s plot in the Library is the A story, while John’s adventures at a party are the B story. Sarah’s story is a B story for our season not because it’s any less important to us, far from it.  It’s a B story because we decided that the main character of our story was going to be John, and we were going to keep Sarah in the Present and not have her survive and appear in the Future.  That’s one reason why we decided to change the name of our production to Terminator: The Connor Chronicles.  So as a result, Sarah doesn’t get as much screen time.

So why is Sarah not getting the same focus as before?  We, the writers, sat down and discussed at length how to incorporate her into the story.  We didn’t want to arbitrarily jump back into the past whenever we felt like it, we wanted to connect her to John through a device.  I’m not going to say what it is, and the two aren’t actually speaking, but it’s a mechanic we use to “allow” John to learn what’s going on with his mother in the months after he has jumped to the Future.  He’s finding out what his mother is doing and why.  And we chose the method we’re employing because it allows us to directly tie in Sarah’s experiences with what John is going through in later episodes.  But we had to take time to set all this up.  First we needed to do a couple of episodes of John establishing himself in the Future, so we’re focusing on him for the first 3 episodes. So, FYI, the first Sarah-heavy episode is Episode 4.

What Sarah is doing is hunting down Danny Dyson, where he’s disappeared to, who has him, why has he fallen off the grid.  She’s not alone in this, she has the aid of James Ellison, although at this point she doesn’t trust anyone fully.  In fact her mistrust is going to make her even more of a loner than we saw at the end of the second season.  You’re not going to see a crazy Sarah like you saw in T2 either.  Instead, you’re going to see a Sarah who believes her son has died, and unless she does something the machines will win.  Think about that for a second.  Sarah, quite literally, is a woman with nothing to lose.  She knows the world’s going to burn unless she stops Judgment Day, she has no friends, and her only family is dead as far as she’s concerned.  That makes her a very dangerous, unpredictable woman.

But she’s also holding on to a mountainous amount of grief.  Her whole life has been about raising and protecting John, but now her son is gone.  And she can’t really process the grief.  She’s never lost someone she’s loved so much; even with Kyle, that was someone she only knew for a few days.  John’s been the focus of her very existence.  But he’s also been her moral compass in a very real way.  Remember the scene in T2, when Sarah can’t murder Miles Dyson in cold blood?  Sarah tells John she loves him, that she couldn’t go through with it.  Well, the reason she says those lines right then is because killing Dyson would have meant living with herself, and living with how John would view what she’d done.  She’s seeing John when Danny looks up at her tearfully and begs Sarah not to kill Miles.  She couldn’t kill Dyson and have to face John because in a way John is her conscience.  She won’t cross a lot of lines for his sake.

But now there’s no one to hold her back.  Add that to a lot of grief and rage, and you have a recipe for a character about to hit rock bottom emotionally, mentally, and morally.

So, on to the News.  We don’t have any media releases again this month, because we’re still working on getting a draft video.  We do have an audio advertisement finished, and two of our models are now fully rigged (John Connor, Alison Young/Cameron).  So we think we’ll have a video ready, perhaps a minute or two, for you guys to view in the next 2 months.  We’ll also have more concept art next month and we should have another episode completed writing for Christmas.  We also have another new hire, a modeler named Mateoz555, who is building scenery for us.  Lots and lots and lots of ruined building in streets.  Because, you know, it ain’t a Future War unless you’ve got a lot of rubble.

Stay tuned for the next month, gang, and as always feel free to donate to the project to help us out!

This will be a shorter news update than normal because life is interfering once again.  In this case, specifically, I’m moving to another city for a job.  So the “4-5 paragraphs of writing/cgi/something else” is going to be missing from this months update.  Sorry, guys.  Next month will be a normal news post, as before.

There’s no new media this month, but I do have a couple of pieces of good news.  As I mentioned in a Tumblr post a few days ago, I am enormously pleased to welcome back Arfert to working on the project.  Arfert had been missing from our ranks for months because of a stroke, but now he’s come back and I couldn’t be happier.  Most of the artwork you’ve seen is his (and that’s why I haven’t posted much concept art or storyboard images in the past year).  Yes, he’s been missing that long, and yes, we’ve kept his spot open for him because he’s one of the founding members of our group.  We thought we owed it to him.  By next month, he should have some new concept art finished for you to look at.

Secondly, we’ve found our rigger.  Desert Mongrel also does a lot of rigging for Maya, so he’s taken over this task for us.  He’s completed rigging the T-800 model for us in Maya, and now he’s moving on to the other models we’ve finished (the John Connor model, and the Summer Glau models, yes there are two, one for Cameron and one for Allison Young).  In the next few months we should have some demonstration videos finished.

As usual, we are always looking for help.  Our voice cast is almost filled, at this point, though we do have a few minor roles available.  We can use all the modeling, texturing, and animation in CGI we can get, so if you can help us out, or know someone who can, let us know at tcc.no.fate.productions@gmail.com.  You can also follow us on Tumblr.  And, of course, you can donate to our project as well, which would help us buy some of the models and scenery we need.  Next month I’ll be providing an example of the kind of thing we would use donations for.

Hi gang.

CGI is a lot of work.  So I thought I’d use this update to tell you what the state of things are at the moment.  Yes, we’re still here, hard at work, and it’s taken a bit of doing to get all the cylinders firing again.

Now, I know many of you want to see some finished video.  And I’d love to show something to you, but we don’t have a video yet.  At the moment, we’ve got two people cranking out character models, another two making models and scenery, and two animators…who aren’t doing any work for us at the moment.  The reason for this is simple: we have 3 character models that are finished, but none of them have been rigged.  What’s rigging?  As I understand it, it’s the “skeleton” of a character model, which allows an animator to easily manipulate the character or object.  The problem with rigging is that it’s not transferable.  You can make a model in one CGI program, like Blender, or 3DS Max, and transfer it relatively easily for others to use, but you can’t make a model in Blender then transfer the rigging, to, say, Maya.  And both our animators use Maya.

That’s the big hold up right now.  We’ve got finished models and objects, but we don’t have someone who can rig them for our animators in Maya.  So I’m beating the bushes constantly for someone who can do this.  It may come down to actually paying a company to rig character models for us, depending on the price, but that’s something I’m not going to try for a few months as I’m moving to a new job in October (but don’t worry, posting will continue uninterrupted).  But until we find someone who can rig, we’re stuck in the animation department.  This, by the way, is one of the things we would use donations to pay for.

Right now, the plan is to have a trailer finished in Fall 2013 and the first episode completed in 2014.  That is a long time, but CGI animation really does take this long when you’re starting from scratch (and you’re an all volunteer production).  For the record, I’ve known for a long time that it would take very long to get any kind of finished product out.  This is not a simple matter of writing a story and hiring someone to draw it, it’s much more complicated than that.  Thankfully, as I kept mentioning the production time for later episodes becomes progressively shorter as we finish more.  Why?  Because we’re reusing everything.  Once our models are rigged, that’s it, we’re not going to redo them for each episode.

But, it’s time to move on to the News.

First, we’ve got several new members on the team.  Joker5974, he of Deus Ex Machina fame, has joined us as a writer/reviewer.  At the moment, he’s reviewing, because he’s got to read all the finished and late drafts of scripts that we have.  Second, Linkalos has joined as another modeler, he’s produced the cabinetry you see as part of a media update.  At the moment, he’s fashioning a bunch of scenery and models (and he put these out in a couple weeks, damn fast work).  Clockwork_Dahlia is our second Maya animator (she’s the animator I met at the Shore Leave Convention I talked about on Tumblr).  Finally, DesertMongrel is joining us as a CGI and storyboard artist.

As I mentioned we’ve also got a few models that have been made by Linkalos in just the past few weeks.  This is just to give you an idea of the kind of scenery we’re talking about.  It’s just one kitchen countertop from a ruined home.  Linkalos has made 2 more variants of these.  One with a sink, another with doors that open sideways.  This is just one example of a model we’ll be using in any kind of ruin.  So you’ll see it throughout the series.  It’s not quite finished yet (Linkalos has to but a “burned” texture on the formica top), but you get the idea:

Finally, we’ve finished a 30 second podcast audio advertisement and we’re working on the other right now.  We’ll be discussing whether to release these next month to you, as there is some thought that a video accompanying the adverts would be better.  You’ll hear more about this during the month of September.

Have a happy Labor Day if you’re in the States.  Otherwise, peace, love, and No Fate!

Most screenplays are written, filmed, and then edited for a final release.  First the director, then an editor, literally sits behind a film projector making notes, then cuts and splices all the film reels and assembles a finished product.  The original film has to be trimmed to fit an established time limit.  For example, a finished film may be 49 minutes in length before edits, and the producers have to trim some 6-7 minutes of it to fit their running time.  They can pick and choose what works in the episode after they see it on screen.

We don’t have that luxury.  Every piece of animation we do is something that has to wind up in the final product.  We’re a fan production, so we can’t very well bring someone in, tell him to animate a 3 minute scene with a lot of facial expressions (which any CGI artist will tell you are a pain to do), then say “Oh, sorry, we can’t fit that into our episode,” and then drop the whole bit.  It becomes wasted effort, and we can’t afford any of that.

So we do most of our editing at the script stage.  How do we account for time?  By using an age-old Hollywood estimate that 1 script page is about 1 minute of screen time.  Is this exact?  No.  But it’s the standard we’re using for the length of each episode: 30 pages for 30 minutes.  Now we don’t actually have a “30 minute run time” for each episode as a hard limit.  It’s not like we’ll be broadcasting these episodes on TV, we’ll be releasing them via Vimeo.  So, some episodes will certainly be longer than 30 minutes, some will be shorter.

We cut all our scripts down to 30-32 pages in length just to get them around the 30 minute time frame for each episode.   This is another reason why it takes so long for us to complete scripts, as we have to get the cuts right.  One of the episodes I wrote, episode 6, actually had a long scene explaining Cpl. Thomsen, his backstory, how he got there, all in a bonding moment with John.  We had to cut it to get under the page limit, even though all the writers thought it was a very, very good scene (myself included, and I was the first to propose cutting it).

And now, on to the Monthly Update!

First, our John Connor model is completed.  Here’s a sample image:

John Connor model by OpalEyes-Angel

Second, we have added several new members to our voice cast list.  John Green Sr. is voicing Mr. Ellison now.  Darius Green (no relation) is voicing Danny Dyson.  And, finally, Roxy Bisquaint, of SavetheScc fame, is joining us as the voice of Tarissa Dyson.  Personally, I can’t wait for our next rehearsal now.  Ellison and Tarissa were among the last 2 major roles still uncast, so most of our voice roles are taken.  We only have minor ones available now.

Third, we’ve received official recognition from the IRS that No Fate Productions Inc., is a tax-exempt organization under Section 501c(3) of the US Internal Revenue Code.  We’ll have the approval letter up on the website for everyone to view publicly.  What that means in English is that you can donate to us and  it would be considered officially tax deductible.

Next month, we should have at least one audio advertisement finished for you to hear.  We’ll also be starting a marketing campaign to raise awareness in June.  We still need a dedicated rigger for our models, as now we’ve got 4 finished characters with another in the works, and an animator who specializes in Blender.  We’re also looking for another concept artist.

Stay tuned!