I haven't worked on Nellie for over 10 years, and yes the graphics from back in 1999 are really crude (not bad since at first i was building my own figure models from scratch without access to any good modeling software) -- but the worst thing, is now after a decade i have to get back to snuff on my multimedia apps.
I need to at least create scenes for slides for all the tracks, and many of the scenes and characters back then were built and animated and rendered on software that doesn't run on any computer today. (Much of it was rendered in Strata Studio Pro). By the time the second album was in progress, I had moved everything over to Poser5 and Lightwave 7, but the Slaughterhouse itself and all the accoutrements of a 3D epic that was never made, might as well no longer exist.
What pisses me off even more, is that some of the stuff I did was only rendered in the form of Quicktime3D panoramas and movies, which were darn cool at the time but now are an outdated file format that cant be read by anything.
That's all probably just as well. Now I'm equipped with PoserPro10 (still not the latest), good old Lightwave 7.5, and am going to be experimenting with Blender, to see if i can continue my work with something that costs less than $3,000.
I just want to be able to really do what I wanted to do back then, but desktop computers just weren't big or fast enough and drives weren't big enough (4GB?) Just one Nellie song takes up over a GB of space with all the workfiles.
Speaking of which, that goes for the music too! I "drew" my musical arrangements by hand in a sequencer called MidiGraphy, written by some crazy Japanese guy for Mac Classic, and it was never upgraded, even though it had powers that nothing else to this day has. I collected soundfonts, and with QuickTime 7 i was able to play and bounce MIDI files rendered with soundfonts of my choice, and you could pick the instruments in the Movie Properties box! God, do I ever miss QuickTime! And Nellie's singing (and the final arranging) was done in VocalWriter (a MIDI editor/sequencer with text-to-speech), also a unique piece of software written for Mac OS9, but DID get upgraded to an OSX PPC version. So i can still use that! And i can still use Band-in-a-Box and MOTU Digital Performer, but now i can render my MIDI tracks with Garriton Personal Orchestra.
I'm looking forward to the sweaty and frustrating business of learning all the new(er) software, so i can come a few steps closer to my dream of Hand-Made characters playing Hand-Made music.
What's available to a regular working class shlub like me today, is both better and worse than what existed 10 years ago. So many clever little applications like SoundEdit II just have no equivalent today, but what does exist is so much more powerful. All I have to do is learn it.
Oh yeah, and write the music. That, too.
