Of8.com

I discovered deviantart.com a few months ago… It has since become the most valuable website I’ve ever come across.  It is THE place to find artists.  Over the last few months I’ve worked with artists for pretty much every project that I am working on right now.  A bunch of concept design artists for Of8, a new logo for kicksandsnares.com (it’s not up on the site yet), ads for my store &  I even hired someone to do a sexy piece of Naruto fan art for my office. It’s replaced youtube as my #1 wasting time site, even though I’m never really wasting time on it.  Three cheers for deviantart.com!

Note: I’ve since learned that Deviantart is a well hated website among many artists on the net. I guess from a non artist perspective, it’s great… but as an artist, apparently not…

This guy is not lying…  I’m about to email this to a few people and save it to email a few people who aren’t ready for it yet…

Went over to Best Buy and picked up the Lord Of The Rings Extended Blu Ray set (aka The Infinity Nerd edition) today.   Very handsome looking set, boasting a ridiculous 15 discs total.  In all, an absurd 26 hours of special features… Can’t wait to get through them again. Looks like they kept the original appendices DVD’s intact and have an extra DVD of special features for each flick.

On a side note, I rewatched the LOTR trilogy with my brother in non-extended format for the first time since seeing the extended.  Why the hell would Sauron take his eye off of Frodo to concentrate on the army OUTSIDE the gate of Mordor?!  How did I not question this when I saw it in theaters the first time?!

PS I get bonus nerd points for the Naruto OST Import CD in the background of this pic.

I just came across an article online, which supposedly has a transcript of a commonplace book written by none other than HP Lovecraft. There are definitely some Lovecraftian elements to Of8, so this is quite a nice treat for me and may be rather useful…

This reads like an HP Lovecraft commonplace book, but I haven’t seen any information anywhere on where it came from or the authenticity of it… hmmm…. I almost feel like there would be more fragmented ideas floating around in it.  But then again, I didn’t even know what a commonplace book was before today and have never seen anyone else’s other than mine.  Either way, it’s a good read and will surely spark some ideas for you creative types out there.  To answer the call of Cthulhu, click “read more”

Read More >>

I’m about to get into some more armor/clothing design.  So I’ve been debating on whether or not to include zippers in Of8.  I really don’t want anything with too much of a modern feel, but zippers were actually first patented in the 1800′s…  Not sure where I’m gonna go with this one.  Decisions….

Berserk is one of the creative properties out there which I truly consider as one of the fathers Of8.  Berserk creator, Kentaro Miura has created a unique world with a great mythology and placed one of my favorite characters (Guts fka “the 100 man slayer” aka “it’s not a big deal for me to slay 100 men anymore, so stop calling me that” ) right in the middle of it.  Enjoy a picture of Guts cutting a few people in half.

There is no character in the history of storytelling that deserves to get his revenge more than Guts.

Me

I randomly came across the news that they are bringing the Berserk anime back in full force.  Apparently they are releasing a full length movie some time this year, which will be followed by a television run.  They are rebooting the entire story from the start, which makes sense considering they left out some major manga only plot elements in the original Anime.  I really couldn’t be happier about this.  I completely wrote off any chance of Berserk ever coming back in anime form.  It’s been almost 13 years since the anime ended.

Here are the 5 all too short commercials for the new manga, which I’m assuming have clips from the new show.

http://www.younganimal.com/berserk/cm/index.html

Open up a new web browser and type in ANY random 3 letter and/or number combination with a .com at the end of it.  Try the strangest combinations you can.

Notice how most of them have some strange looking website on them?  There is a reason for that (I’ll explain a little further down).

OF8.NET

OF8.ORG

OF8.INFO

OF8.BIZ

All of these domain names were and probably still are available to register at Godaddy.

But that “.COM” is so easy to remember…  It’s so official looking… it looks so pretty…

Apparently OF8.COM was already registered by someone else.

Curious as to who was making use of OF8.COM, I went to my browser and typed it in.  All that was there was a basic wordpress installation with no posts, no content whatsoever, nothing at all.  So I started imagining  some guy somewhere who used to play semi pro baseball, Oliver Fratelli #8.   He probably just gave up on setting up his baseball blog when his rotator cuff gave up on him.  Oli would gladly sell me OF8.COM for a couple hundred bucks at most.   But this was not the case.  The site was owned by some guy named Gurhan, who lived in Turkey.  Gurhan is a “domain baron”.

A domain baron is someone who buys domains and sits on them until someone like myself comes along and actually wants to use them.  Naturally they overcharge for them.  So I hit Gurhan with a 300 dollar bid…  Gurhan comes back asking for $3500!!!!  After some thinking and a real gut check, I decided that I’d hit him with a $2000 bid and see if he went for it.  He did.  I was pretty nervous about buying something from a guy overseas, so I hired godaddy to facilitate the transaction.  They charged me $270 to essentially do nothing, I ended up doing all the work anyway.  Then escrow.com, took a cut too, which brought the price up to around $2500.  At this point, $2500 seems like a lot of money just so I can place a “.com” at the end of my site… but I think in the long run it’ll definitely pay off.

Side Note: After the transaction went down and I finally owned Of8.com, Gurhan sent me this message…

You could get 1 more 3 char. Domain,for example i sell 0uy.com only $300.

Thanks Gurhan.  If Of8 doesn’t pan out, I at least know I can begin my next fantasy epic Ouy and save two thousand dollars on the domain name.

I’ve always been a man of the “why not?” persuasion.     So I sent an email over to Wayne Barlowe, to see if he’d be available for some creature design.  Mr Barlowe is quite an accomplished and talented artist/writer.   He’s worked on a bunch of super high profile Hollywood flicks (Avatar, all of Guillermo Del Toro’s recent stuff, etc) and has managed to create a very interesting and unique universe of his own.  I’ve been a fan of his work, so I thought I’d give it a shot.  He was nice enough to write back.  He’s busy out in L.A. and wished me luck with Of8…  I probably couldn’t afford him anyway at this point (probably what he really needed and/or wanted to say)… but it never hurts to send a polite email for free.

I have a great imagination… but I draw like a 3 year old.  So I need to hire talented artists to work with me on all of the design work that is needed for Of8.  About a month ago I began my quest to find some talented artists.

I’m not big on collaborating creatively 100% over the internet.  So initially I placed an ad on craigslist with the hopes I could link up with some local artists.     I got about 50 responses.  The responses came from a bunch of artists who span the entire experience and talent board.  Out of all of them I reached out to one artist.  We are currently working on a character design, but I still wanted to work with multiple artists.

After some googleing I came across the website conceptart.org.  I have since found out that this is THE place to go if you are looking for up and coming concept artists…  I posted up an ad on their forum a couple weeks ago.  Since then I have received over 400 applicants!  Besides the forum, they have a list of their top artists (rated by popularity on the site).  If you find yourself ever in need some some design work, CA is definitely a great place to start.

I posted up an ad on craigslist a couple weeks ago looking for NYC area artists to do character design work for Of8.  I got about 50 something replies from across the talent and experience spectrum.   Today I did lunch with one of those talented artists, Warren.

We had a nice discussion over lunch.   It’s a little funny, in an unprofessional way, that I figured I could go into a meeting like this and be able to reel off character details and ideas from the top of my head.  Apparently I’m not too good at that.  I need something visual to work off of.   Also funny how I’ve never NOT been early to a meeting before, until I’m the one putting money up…

I asked Warren from a scale of 1 to 10 on how prepared he thought I was for the meeting.  Warren rated me a 3, which probably means a 2 or 1 in reality.  Still, we managed to work out the rough details of what I want for one of the main characters and we will tighten the design up during the revision process.  This should be quite interesting.