Tag Archives: sketchbook

DTWT sketchbooks arrived!

May 2, 2008 – 11:17 am

Woo-hoo! Nice way to start a Friday. Our limited edition Draw the World Together Sketchbooks - full of City of Heroes characters sketched by some of the best artists in the biz - arrived today. Behold the ‘exciting’ unboxing!

They look really rather nice, and the print quality is really ’sketchbook-like’ if that makes sense - not as slick as a newsstand magazine, but not like a cheap photocopied fanzine either!!

As have a strictly limited initial run we decided we’d hand-number each one… well, after we had a good flick through of course….

Overall, I’m sure happy with ‘em and I hope everyone who donates a mere £5 to EveryChild to get their hands on one will be too. Remember, they go on sale at next weekend’s Comic Expo!

Speaking of which, I guess I better throw my £5 into the charity tin to get things started!

By Rockjaw | Posted in Pimpin', Teaser, Work-related | Also tagged , , , | Comments (15)

Right then, Friday is it?

April 25, 2008 – 10:22 pm

As I mentioned yesterday, starting my week on a Thursday after a West Coast US-South Coast UK transition threw me for a bit of a loop, so much so that I was convinced it was Monday for a while. Today I didn’t think it was Tuesday, but naturally it didn’t feel much like a Friday either.

Again, slowly getting back up to speed today. One thing that’s been making that whole process feel a bit ‘different’ is this:

iMac

Yes, it’s an iMac, which I am now (as of yesterday) using completely as my primary work machine, as opposed to the screen I turned to when I needed to do a nice presentation, or perhaps check my receding hairline (it’s very shiny, you see, like a mirror). This has meant that I’ve had to re-learn how to do my email (I’m using the built-in Mail app, not Outlook) and even how to use Word .docs too. So that’s been a bit slow. Thank God the web works the same, wherever.

What did I get up to today, though? Mostly email catch-up, and I also spent quite a bit of time writing this and this.

Yes, we’ve finally announced what we’re doing at the Comic Expo in Bristol this year, and it’s quite exciting. First of all, I officially announced the first ever Draw the World Together Sketchbook. It’s 32 pages with a colour cover (black and white interiors), and I saw the final proof today. This thing is rockin’. We are so happy with how it turned out, and at a measly £5 (all going to charity) I seriously think it’s going to be the steal of the show.

The second thing I announced, which was really the big surprise, is that we’re going to colour sketches - both new and existing ones. No, not with crayons… digitally, by professionals. It’s a pretty cool development and I really hope people like yourself are going to love the results. Heck, I hope I love the results - you don’t think I’m going to miss out on an offer like that, do you? In case you missed it, here’s an example of what a sketch might look like coloured, courtesy of Jason Cardy:

Jason Cardy - colouring examples

Pretty damn nice, I say. And that all happens in… eep… two weekends. Before then though, lots of stuff. So I better go and get to doing it!

Talk to me people! I crave comments!

By Rockjaw | Posted in Day Today, Pimpin', Work-related | Also tagged , , | Comments (3)

Tick-tock Thursday

April 3, 2008 – 11:23 pm

Today was the kind of day where I just seemed to get distracted every other moment. Tick, tock, tick, tock - like a metronome….

  • Start the day in the unofficial second office with coffee, and a good ol’ fashioned brainstorm. Haven’t done one of those in a while….
  • We’re talking Christmas party. Yes, this is part of what we do. Yes, we’re talking about it in April. IT WILL BE THAT BIG. Maybe. Possibly. Come work here and find out!
  • Satisfied that we have a corker of an idea, we come back to the office to find that apparently, someone has sent me a brick through the post. “Perhaps it’s a note… wrapped around a brick… sent in the post. It’s the genteel way of making a very serious point,” I wonder aloud.
  • Actually it turns out it’s a stack of fliers for the UK Games Expo, which we’re exhibiting at, and which we’ve said we’ll pass around at other shows. Unfortunately they didn’t arrive for the MiniCon, so now I just have to tell you; we’ll be at the UK Games Expo. It will be excellent.
  • As I sit down, I notice that people keep disappearing into the meeting room near me and coming out looking happy. Then remember: it’s massage day! And I have a half-hour slot booked at 11:45! Woooo!
  • Crack on with the artist bios spread for the sketchbook, which still needs to be fully edited and is still missing a few bios and pics. Andrew’s provided a couple overnight, but there are still holes, and our designer is needing to get the page laid out…
  • Work on that until - yay! Massage time! In case you’re wondering, a local company sends a masseuse around to our offices every couple of weeks. The company subsidises it, so you get a cheap massage if you want one. Boy, did I.

…. Imagine half an hour of blissful massage here, accompanied by strange techno-chanting music….

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Sketchbook Wednesday

April 3, 2008 – 12:15 am

Three days left in the office. Errr, two… things for breakfast. One thing on my mind: sketchbook*.

  • Toast and coffee to start the day. Mmmmm.
  • Decide to nail the sketchbook as best I can today, so start things rolling when Chris and Spaff are in, by getting each of them on to tasks to help finish it up.
  • Not long after, Chris gets an email which throws a fairly large spanner in the works with the Bristol Comic Expo, and one particular planned… thing. (I can’t reveal because it’s a good surprise.) Still, I move to fix it.
  • Email four of the CrewNC Sidekicks about their Forum titles, which we forgot to do by accident. Sorry folks!
  • Some general chit-chat about April Fool’s, which we’re all agreed can run the gamut from very clever and funny, to extremely lame and not funny at all. I blame the lawyers. But basically, you can’t do an April Fool’s on April 1st and expect anyone to actually be fooled… so now it’s just a sort of ‘April Joke’. Which is often not funny.
  • Having said that, we all agree the Guild Wars stick figures are really cool.

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Is it Wednesday?

March 12, 2008 – 11:11 pm

I’m losing track. Time’s sliding all over the place. This won’t be as concise as usual. Hence it may be more entertaining. Let me know.

The morning was mostly spent wrangling €400-odd of t-shirt ordering, which involved having to tell my bank that no, my credit card had not been stolen and that yes, I did need it ‘unblocked’ so I could keep ordering blocks of t-shirts. The provider we use, while generally very good, has installed a hidden “If you order above this amount, you have to pay by bloody bank transfer” feature which would have been nice to know about before I piled my shopping cart high with custom t-shirts and pushed it towards the virtual checkout.

There was a lot of coffee drunk today, but mostly by accident. Twice I was just handed coffee and expected to drink it. Hence I sort of sped through things like I feel like I’m speeding through this, and now feel like I’ve crashed into a fatigue wall.

What else.

Oh yes! Our iMacs turned up, which will warrant a separate post at some point no doubt. It doesn’t warrant a full glowing report right now because we only got to play with them for about 15 minutes, and when I say ‘play’ I mean ‘take them out of the box and turn them on so we can do the setup sequence’. Then we had to give them to the IT boys so they could install special ‘fun-leeching’ software on them, or something.

This mean I spent the rest of the day telepathically beaming the single command ‘Install your stupid software on my iMac already’ at IT whenever I walked past. Sigh.

Lunch in a new Mexican place not far from work, which is sort of half-way between a takeout place and a restaurant. It’s also been empty - as in, just the guy behind the counter - the two times I’ve been in so far. This worries me as I love Mexican and this one is like three minutes from my house, so I really want it to stay open. It’s called Las Taquitos. Or Los Taquitos. Anyway it’s good.

Sketchbook officially expanded by four more pages today. And might go higher. We got one new sketch in (Lord Recluse - our first of him!) and got hi-res versions of others we’d been waiting for. It’s coming together nicely.

Had a meeting after lunch with everyone working at the Omega Sektor MiniCon, and boy, did that reinforce how much we still have to do, so no point in dwelling on that.

Some other stuff happened but it wasn’t as fun as singing my lungs out on Rock Band after work. God, I hope the practice pays off.

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Tuesday. It comes after Monday.

March 11, 2008 – 9:52 pm

As Rorschach might say, “Huurrrrmmm.”

  • First thing, some emails about finalising the sketchbook. We have a few more due to come in, so we’re going to up the page count. Awesome.
  • A day late, I pick our ‘CrewNC Sidekicks’ from the application. We were thinking about going for four, but go with five in the end. You can never have enough gophers…
  • Decide today’s the day to announce the final artist line-up at the MiniCon. Finally I get to publicly confirm that David Nakayama is making the trip over to join us - David was the official artist for a lot of issues on the City of Heroes comic, so we’re really excited to have him coming.
  • Lunch is in our new staff room - Monkey Ranch - and is officially ‘band practice’. As in, Rock Band. And someone (Me) needs practice on vocals; Nirvana’s In Bloom starts me badly. I get a bit better during a Clash song, quite enjoy My Sharona, and then actually do pretty well on Wonderwall - but that isn’t saying much.
  • Nip out for coffee and more player meet planning. Already we’re giving the Sidekicks tasks.
  • Have to get back for a 4pm conference call, but it gets pushed to 4:15pm, which gives me time to…
  • Check out some lovely videos of Aion: The Tower of Eternity, which our community guys have captured and want to use as part of a ‘demo-on-video’ for the MiniCon. Dang that game looks good.
  • I look at a slide Spaff’s done for the Big Secret project. It involves Ghostbusters, as many of our references do. Everything in life is better with Ghostbusters. Therefore said slide is awesome.
  • Caffeeeeeeiinnneeee kicks in from the coffee, just as the phone rings. I talk with a US colleague for about 45 minutes about Dungeon Runners and what we can do to promote it; we have the same thoughts on lots of stuff, which is great.
  • Get off the phone at 5pm knowing lots more than I previously did about DR… quickly resolve a couple of queries about Draw the World Together with Chris.
  • Check out some of the responses to the artist announcement - specifically the reaction to David coming. One particular response is worth quoting: “Ohhhhhhhhhh I think I just wet my pants”. I do, in fact, LOL.
  • Design t-shirts for the MiniCon. The Sidekick ones are pretty cool but seriously, we want to own the TaskForce: Omega t-shirts that we’ve got for winners. They are, in Spaff’s exact words, ‘dope’. (They may also be ‘fly’.) Consequently, Chris and I design TaskForce: Omega crew shirts just for us, because we can.
  • I start to checkout and buy said t-shirts aaannd… my password disappears and suddenly I can’t log back in. ROCKJAW ANGRY. ROCKJAW SMAAAASH!

Ahem. Which necessitates a trip to the gym and some aggressive exercise.

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First Monday back

March 10, 2008 – 9:56 pm

Told ya I’d be busy.

  • Have a caffeine-fuelled start to the day. I finish off a hazelnut instant coffee tin that Amanda stuck with me with last year which I love but she hated. One last cup. Sniff.
  • Wade through emails. Most of them were read on holidays but all need to be filed and most acted on. Inbox Zero, Inbox Zero…
  • Turns out there were a load of new sketches that came in during the week that I hadn’t seen. We’re almost full up for the page count we have projected. Wooo!
  • Very last thing I did before I left the office was send out loads of briefs to our Creative Services team. They’re almost all done, so I nip over to our other building to see the last few, and of course, change a few things.
  • Have a non-meeting in our new staff room - Monkey Ranch. It’s lovely (the room, not the meeting, although it’s not bad either).
  • Out of that and into our regular Monday all-staff meeting. It’s packed. We have something like six new starters - I lost count.
  • Back at our desks, I go over our Big Secret presentation with Spaff. It’s 50 slides long, and probably needs to be 150, but the 50 we have are good - some, exceptional. They’ll need to be for what we’re asking for….
  • Considering we have so many sketches I decide to start planning the sketchbook properly. This means a flatplan, which is basically a layout plan for what will go on what page.
  • I realise I’m too jittery from the super-strong coffee I had in the Monkey Ranch, so venture out into the rain, high winds for a sandwich. Bread calms me down, weirdly.
  • See an email from a player with feedback on our first podcast, and realise then that it must be live….
  • After eating, work on the flatplan the old fashioned way - on paper. Six pieces of A4, folded in half, equals 24 pages.
  • Work on wording for MOO cards which we’re using to distribute trial codes at the MiniCon. Not much space and lots to say on those puppies.
  • Regretfully pull out of a weekly meeting I was supposed to attend, but have missed for a variety of reasons for about a month. I can’t keep flaking out so I pass the torch.
  • Make decisions on what stock to bring to the MiniCon; we’re taking more than we ever have. People better buy it!
  • Put in our final orders with our printers for a couple of things for the player meet - posters and a sticker sheet.
  • Then realise I need to order a sticker to go on said sticker sheet. Whoops. After this, glance at the clock, see it’s 5pm. Where’d the day go?
  • Last thing: read a CV I got sent last week for a freelancer who has loads of pen and paper RPG experience. Huge lightbulb goes off above my head; we can use this guy. Possibly.
  • Play with Spaff’s iPhone. Slowly but surely I’m starting to think I’d really like one. How long can I hold out?
  • Feel energy seeping out of me, so go home.

Tomorrow, back for more.

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I am so outta there

February 29, 2008 – 7:57 pm

Last day in the office for a week. Three weeks until the MiniCon. Holy crud do we still have a lot to do.

  • Started the day in the coffee shop, trying to power through the schedule a bit more. We’ve had to divide the busiest days into half-hour blocks because we’re trying to fit so much stuff in.
  • Back to the office and straight in to trying to knock down my to-do list before I go.
  • Chris/Aero finishes the final, final mix and cut of the first podcast episode; fingers crossed it’ll be live next week, while I’m away and can’t hear people laughing at my voice.
  • We make it out to lunch and talk over what we still have to do; it’s a lot. I make calls on the way back to the office and apologise to answerphones that I sound like I’m in a wind tunnel.
  • Get a nice sketch from Andrew Wildman for the sketchbook; he must have been picking up my mental projections… Chris reminds me that we still need plenty more, but we’ve got a month.
  • Struggle to finish the official announcement story for the MiniCon. Four days of ’stuff’ can be hard to shovel into one story.
  • Have a quick phone chat with Andrew over secret stuff, where I use the phrase “I have a million things to do and have to go” twice before I get off the phone… I can feel panic rising.
  • Catch up meeting with marketing and community at 3pm. I find out that several people are unaware of several big things, including the MiniCon, so fill them in. Grab the road atlas we bought from our store cupboard for use tomorrow.
  • Have to leave the office for a doctor’s appointment, and lose all of my momentum; appointment’s at 4:20pm but I don’t see the doctor until 4:54. I’m out with prescription, I kid you not, at 4:57pm.
  • Because of the delayed appointment and all I have left to do, I have to miss the grand opening of our new staff room, which is packed with goodies and gizmos and games galore. I’ll catch up with it when I get back.
  • Blitz the last few things and put the official announcement live at just a shade before 6pm. Leave at 6:30 or so after a few hurried emails.

I’ll be sending a few more before sleep tonight, too.

So tomorrow the wife and I go to Devon for a week, where I expect I’ll be pretty much off the grid, while getting cosy in a cottage, and taking bracing walks around Exmoor.

Back around the 8th with full exciting commentary. Unless I find a wifi hotspot.

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And breath…

February 28, 2008 – 6:56 pm

Fast, fast day. For some reason listening to a 32-year old interview with Gene Roddenberry (I don’t even like Star Trek… but hey, I like my pop culture trivia) has made me slow down.

  • Get another sketch in first thing… well, ’sketch’ isn’t really fair, it’s more of a painting. Al Davison continues to impress!
  • I joke with Andrew Wildman via email that he now needs to ‘raise his game’ - he hasn’t done a sketch for the sketchbook he’s really happy with, yet. A conspicuous silence.
  • Straight into a meeting with my boss and our Biz-Dev manager at 10, in which I manage to get said Biz-Dev manager squirming when I suggest that we should do something for no money “because it’s good for the community”. I actually feel kind of sorry for him… but I also win the argument. Yaaay!
  • Bounce emails back and forth with Andy at Omega Sektor, and chat on the phone with another Stephen, the ‘Omega Sektorian’ about his presence on our official Forums.
  • Start working on the inevitably large announcement story about the MiniCon for our official sites…
  • … half way through, get an email with Melissa Bianco’s flight details. She’s going to have some early mornings but I know she’s a trooper. At least… I hope she will be.
  • Lunch is at our local coffee haunt, where Aero/Chris and I start hacking out the mammoth schedule for the entire weekend. We have something like 24 hours to fill and it’s not easy when we have multiple ‘tracks’ of activities, but we make progress. Somehow we decide having Hamidon raids on all four EU servers in the same night is a good idea.
  • Back to desk. Expenses, really overdue. They expand into a massive pile of paper as they leave my wallet. As usual I wonder where these all came from. Worry about how I’m going to use the Excel sheet I have to use on my incoming iMac (Google Docs??).
  • We get quotes for the two vans we’ll need for the MiniCon - one long wheelbase transit and the other a minibus for staff. Together they’re… very expensive. It’s the damn Bank Holiday weekend - we have to rent each for five days.
  • At 5pm, sit down to re-record sections for the podcast, as we needed some extra bits and time has moved on, making some earlier takes irrelevant. I realise half-way through why professional voiceover types do their job in a sealed room without anyone else present. Somehow when you have to speak properly, and someone’s watching you, it gets harder than usual.
  • Later, I listen to Chris laugh as he hacks my lengthy bloopers down into a usable form. It takes a while. We maybe use 20% of what we recorded.
  • Amanda calls at 6pm to remind me I don’t have to leave until we have dinner later. Glad she called, I’d forgotten….
  • Talk to Melissa at NCNorCal about the MiniCon, her flights, etc. She is, as I thought, a trooper about it. Phew.

Right. Plenty to do and miles from home….

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How did it get to be 6pm already?

February 25, 2008 – 6:16 pm

One of those days.

  • Spent the morning tweaking and adding photos, photos and then more photos to a presentation I have to give at Sussex University on Wednesday. Didn’t finish. Finding the right image takes too bloody long sometimes.
  • In the middle of that, get the image I mentioned earlier. Jaw literally drops and hangs open for about five seconds. Stunning….
  • Lunch with Jen where we both vent about different things… and talk about this blog, as it happens.
  • Back to finalise and post details about the ‘Hero Pass’ for the MiniCon, then I duck into a meeting about said MiniCon. As the words come out of my mouth I keep thinking “So much to do, so much to do, so much to do….”
  • Get back to my desk to find Forumites frothing about not being able to get ahold of Hero Passes, as the phone at Omega Sektor is ringing off the hook. Try to calm them down.
  • And suddenly, it’s 6pm.

“Day ain’t over yet….”

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