Zoe 20-10
So Zoe got a taste of what she’s been craving…
So Dreams is coming soon (spring) I am going to try my best to get into the early access even though I missed both betas (3rd times the charm). Once I get in I will start learning it and practicing pages. I probably won’t reboot the comic till at least 2 months after I start fiddling with Dreams so that I know it well enough to make something really good. The point of the reboot is a consistent quality throughout. I have deleted close to a 100 pages or so of this comic due to the artwork being too shitty for me to look at, and I think that has hurt the story a bit. With doing it in 3d I hope the art can look amazing from day 1 (and if It has issues it would be far easier to go back and fix things instead of scrapping them completely).
I will probably not be drawing on the computer too much once I move to Dreams, mostly using that for a while. VIXI will be done with normal drawings (though first done in 3d to get lighting and backgrounds just right for tracing)
Vixi is my serious Vampire story and tonaly it will be very dark. The art will have a very high contrast Noir look. It will be violent and take a much darker look at vampires as what is common in the post Twilight era. I first wrote it as a screenplay back in college and started doing Zoe and my other webcomics so that someday I could build an audience to make Vixi as a 4 part movie series (first was going to do a low budget movie called Where the Shadows Lie, but when I tried kickstarting it I only got a single dollar…) My comics never rose to popularity and I have put any hopes of becoming a great filmmaker on hold (but Dreams is giving me hope I can someday get to that point).
There are a lot of stories I really want to tell before I die (hopefully won’t till I’m like 80-90) Vixi is one of the top ones I want to tell. I think the story is strong. Douglas, the main character, becomes a bit of an anti hero who decides to hunt only killers for his needed blood and I picture it being a bit like a darker Batman type character. There are 4 main stories; Vixi, Bathory, Hunter, and Plague. With Dreams I think I can make these. I’ve started them as comics a few times in the past (the pic is from one such attempt) but my ability as an artist is just not up to snuff for what I want the comic to be. I have a lot of weak areas as an artist and Dreams could greatly help with those. I can build everything in 3d then trace it and fill in the shadows. My hope is to have VIXI done within a year of getting Dreams.
Second I want to use Dreams to make a tv pilot that I can send out to try to get picked up (long shot I know). I’ve been running ideas through my head for what the style of the show would be and think I am narrowing down on its tone and characters. My first attempt at it was a epic failure. I chose to make a stop motion film without any understanding of HOW to do claymation. I had 2 days to film it and quickly found that lighting the scene heated up my dining room (where I was filming it) too much to where the clay models got soft and started falling apart and became impossible to pose. It got to the point where I was literally holding them off camera like action figures and doing the scenes that way.
Years have passed and I’ve had time to reflect on it and I don’t think it makes sense to make a direct parody of Monsterquest anymore. The show hasn’t been around for like a decade by now and it wouldn’t make much sense to strictly follow a format of a long forgotten show like that. Instead I’ve been looking at what shows appeal to me and why they appeal to me. I want to make the story have strong characters instead of dumb caricatures. I like the heart of Futurama with the strong supporting characters of the Simpsons.
Once Dreams starts coming out I am going to start experimenting with ideas and doing little vignettes of funny concepts I have for the pilot as well as try to build a bunch of background characters that can elevate things. In the student film version I did I didn’t bother with any of that and each character was just tossed in due to need for a particular joke. I know I am not all that funny. Most of my humor would be classified as cringy puns(which I personally find fun) but I want to make something that is better than my normal humor. So it probably will be a year or so before I have the story for the episode set in stone as I explore a bunch of jokes and physical comedy to get it to a place where more than just me would find it entertaining.
3rd I’d like to fully embrace my cringy sense of humor with a youtube channel dedicated to making dumb little funny animations. Back when I first started Zoe I had a second comic series called randomness (also one that came later that was sort of an evolution to the idea but focused solely on metal gear solid)
I’d like to take some of my past comics as well as some of the many ideas I’ve had in the years since and make little 30sec or so shorts and post them online. I am hoping Dreams can be fast enough of a tool to allow for one every week but I’d like to make at least 1 a month.
These are all things I hope to do with dreams, but I think most important to you guys is what I want to do with it in regards to Zoe. If I reboot with Dreams I could expand things and make a story that doesn’t jump around quite so much. I also could use it to animate all the sex scenes. I am thinking that I could use that as a fun reward for Patrons once I eventually get a patreon going again. As long as I don’t advertise it there, they’d have no idea about incest when Zoe has sex with her mom or uncle. Currently they completely are for porn, just not for incest… though as we saw with Tumblr that could change.
