Tyler Gibb - Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

07-JA-09

This is a cake I received the other day from Tara, (the voice of Bellona in Minushi). The card on top reads: “Congratulations on Completing Minushi!”

Thanks Tara!

I had my cake and ate it too.

And yes, it’s true, Minushi is in the can! So in the coming months you won’t have to wait for intermittent log updates about how the production is going, you’ll have to wait months for intermittent updates on how the search for a distributor is going.

The plan is this, my friends: Minushi is currently being submitted to a select bunch of Film Festivals and I am set to begin production on a series of short “Making Of” documentaries which will be launched online on this site over the coming months. And with any luck I’ll also be getting the word out there to people who are fans of Minushi but just haven’t heard of it yet. I’d also like to release all those goodies I’ve been promising, like Minushi wallpaper, downloads and mp3s of music from Minushi. In the meantime, we’ll be finding distribution for the feature length motion picture so that you out there can enjoy 94 minutes of Minushi like you’ve never seen it before as well as see how it all turns out in the end!

Until then!

06-DE-11

Last week I finished the last animated portion of Minushi! Still a way to go with sound work and then i get into the mind boggling world of video transfers and such.

That’s over three years spent just animating, 9 to 5… Good times!

06-OC-04

Done! Well, not done done but done drawing. Yesterday I put down the pencil on Minushi for the last time. There’s still a few months of animation left to do but the last of the 8 1/2 X 11 paper drawings has been completed. The pile of 1,700 sheets stands at 4 and a half inches tall, usually with two “shots” to a page.

It’s pretty exciting to be hitting this kind of milestone.

This image here is a scan of a very special blank 8 1/2 X 11 sheet of paper. See I work on a drawing table which has a smooth but hard surface and I like to have just a little bit of cushioning beneath my pencil to get the line weight I’m looking for. To achieve this I drew Minushi with a single sheet of paper as a backing beneath each page. This image is a scan of that piece of paper. Three years old, and the impressions of every image drawn for Minushi imbedded in it, not mention a fair bit of my blood, sweat and tears. I think I’ll buy a frame for it.

That’s the jet. Have I mentioned the jet? I’ve made it no secret that Minushi’s third act is going to be ridiculously epic but what I may have neglected to point out was that only recently (as always, relatively speaking) I returned to the original storyboard for this finale and shall we say, aggrandized it a little. Among those improvements was the jet. A POV shot of a fighter jet weaving its way through a stand of giants. Why? For you. If you’re still here, still reading, still waiting; you deserve it!

So on the “business” side of things, things are strange. I find myself entering uncharted waters in the search for distribution for Minushi but fortunately I’ve met some new allies along the way which is always great. But my focus right now is wrapping up production. It has to be, because if the project doesn’t get finished up, then all the rest falls apart, right? So no news forthcoming on distribution except this: Minushi will be released online in its full 19 chapter glory. It may take a while. It may be well after you’ve bought the Minushi DVD, watched Minushi on your favourite science fiction channel, gotten the free Minushi action figures in your Happy Meal but it will happen eventually. Just wanted you to know that.

I’m going to go collapse now. I’ve been working for 12 hours straight and haven’t eaten much. The most recent chapter of Minushi to be put in the can had somewhere in the vicinity of 200 individual sound effects packed into 5 minutes. Usually I can bang through an episode’s sound fx in a day - this one’s taken me three.

All I hear are lasers.

06-SE-05

When you’ve put three years of your life into a project and you can finally just about see the finish line certain things start to occur to you. For one thing you wonder what the hell you’re going to do with the next three years. But then you’d only half planned the previous three, so hey, it’ll probably work itself out on its own; so that’s no big deal. The other thing that does come up quite a bit is that it occurs to you more and more that all this time and work you’ve devoted yourself to can fit onto one tiny, flammable hard drive that is really just about the most delicate thing you own. And when you really let that sink in your body swells with a kind of sheer terror that quickly develops a very paternal instinct for a little bundle of silicon wonder and all it’s little backup-copy siblings.

But then you realize you’re just tired after putting in another long day of tracing and animating and just really want to get some sleep. The end is close gang… Relatively speaking. But close.