Animusic 3 - Newsletter Info

September 2008 Newsletter

From ANIMUSIC director Wayne Lytle

Here at ANIMUSIC we’re truly feeling some pressure to get ANIMUSIC 3 completed and shipped. Fortunately, it’s the good kind of pressure.

People are asking things like “Where is it?” and “What’s taking so long?”. Some direct quotes:

“Where is it?”

“What’s taking so long?”

OK, so we made those up. Here are some real quotes:

“Did you guys go out of business?”

“Are you guys millionaires who decided to retire, or what?”

Well, alright…we made those up, too. My point is this: people are wondering all kinds of things. Mostly having nothing to do with ANIMUSIC. But just in case anybody was wondering…

Yes, we’re working on ANIMUSIC 3, as close to full-time as we can. There are always side projects like producing ANIMUSIC ads, and other PR like our YouTube Channel, and getting some stuff on iTunes, PR for the release in Japan, etc., but mostly it’s ANIMUSIC 3. More specifically…The Production Pipeline.

For those of you not familiar with the computer animation industry, a production pipeline is basically a set of software and hardware that could be thought of as a digital assembly line. One issue we have here at ANIMUSIC is that the same guys design and build the assembly line, then run it, break it, fix it, change it (which means breaking it again)…trying to get it just right.

We’ve had the luxury of being able to tweak our pipeline to the Nth degree, which in hindsight we’ve done a bit too much of. Way too much, in fact. And while I feel really badly that we’ve taken this long to build our new shiny set of tools, it feels good to be able to work so much more effectively on the virtual instrument models, music, and animation. But like anything this new and ambitious, there’s a lot of adjusting that’s still happening in the midst of production.

Have we ever wondered if we should have stuck with the old production pipeline? Yes. Yes, we have. But we’re way beyond the point of no return, and having tasted the new stuff, we could never go back.

So thanks for prodding us in such a nice way. We really have gotten a ton of email which in turn prompted us to send this newsletter and update some news on our web site. Which, by the way, threw off the schedule even more. It’s going to be 27 minutes later than it would have been. Don’t feel too bad; I’m just saying.

Anyway, have a nice Fall (my favorite season, personally),

Wayne