Zub Tales

Friday morning, early…My head’s still fuzzy, but I’m doing pretty good overall.

I had to pull some insane hours on Tuesday night which ran through to Wednesday morning. We’ve been doing animation designs for a couple of Alliance/Atlantis projects that are being pitched as TV shows and the producer decided that they needed some color added to the sketches we’d done. Everyone else was way too busy, so I hit the frontlines and colored the stuff until 4am to get it done. This would be something worthy of praise, except that most of the guys work until the wee hours almost every night. They’re strange night owls, starting at 1:00 in the afternoon, breaking for meals but otherwise working until the sun’s getting up. I’m not used to it though (and I don’t intend to change over to it), so it’s thrown my sleep schedule out of whack and I’ve been struggling to get back to normal sleep since.

It’s an odd week for promotion and/or obscurity…

Remember how in my last Newsletter I mentioned that I’d seen the TV show I’d drawn backgrounds for when I was at Helix? I turned it on again and this time I recognized it as the second episode our studio had worked on. The show was still bad, but at least I could recognize all the different elements and got to see my own work up there. All that would have been neat, but then when the credits ran, they didn’t credit any of us for layout, not even the studio. Helix did something like 18 out of 22 or 24 episodes and they’ve credited the guys who did the other 4-6 for every show. It was disappointing to see, but I guess that’s the way stuff goes sometimes.

Then, picking up Gala from school on Wednesday, we stopped in at a comic book store and I had another weird moment. The first book of The Chronicles Of Conan was right there, new this week. I coloured the cover on it and there it was. It looked pretty good, cropped quite a bit, but good for what they wanted. Flipping the book open, you guessed it, no credit at all. I’m going to end up some sort of ghost artist. I’ll be telling all these wonderful stories and everyone’s going to think I’m a raving maniac who’s making all this stuff up. I’m pretty sure I’ll be credited in Conan Volume 2 for the interior stuff I did, but my batting average on this sort of thing hasn’t been great so far.

I laughed the whole thing off. I was actually surprised that it didn’t bother me. When I first started chatting with the guys at Udon about seeing their stuff in print, they said they usually didn’t read it and barely looked at the complimentary copies they received. I was shocked. Weren’t they proud of it? Didn’t it give them some joy to finally see the stuff out there? I’m getting a better idea of how that works. When you’re up to your eyeballs with things to do, you’re not worried about the printed product. That’s out and done. The most important thing is the current project that’s on your plate NOW and all that entails. I’m still going to be giddy about seeing my first RPG book stuff come out (who knows, maybe the credits get screwed up), but the other side of the coin makes sense too.

On the flipside of that, I got some extra promotion for things I’m barely doing at this point. I had conducted an interview in March for one of the bigger comic-based websites on the net called The Pulse. I had always wondered why it never ran, and when the woman who interviewed me contacted me again I asked her if we could update the interview, because so much has happened since. It’s up on the site this morning and you can check it out here:

http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=36&t=001430

Reading it over, there’s a whole lot of stuff there that I summed up pretty well about this journey I’ve been on for the last couple of years. So much is glossed over, but the little comments trigger memories of all sorts of different things, reminding me about how much has been happening.

Gala’s trying to get her work schedule figured out so we can go to Thanksgiving at the cottage with my family. I haven’t had a Thanksgiving with my family in 5 or 6 years. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but it has. If Gal ends up working Sunday, then I may have to bow out of this one or go without her. I haven’t decided which way to go in that case.

Okay, time to grab some breakfast and get to work.