Moving to new Tumblr
- I am and will be moving over to a new tumblr, mainly to get a newer start and such. I won't delete the tumblrs either I'll leave em up just for the hell of it. Anyway new blog is
- Http: //n7-dantecrossing.tumblr.com/
Mystery Skulls Animated - Ghost is now a year old.
As of this writing, the video stands at 11,536,280 views, which is roughly 9 million more than I was honestly expecting from it.
Since day one, a fanbase not only formed from a 4 minute and 35 second music video, but is still active to this day. At this point there is an uncountable amount of fan content, ranging from art to writing to videos to music and more. It is an honor to have made something that so many people could draw inspiration from in so many ways.
As we reach year 2, it is my hope that me and my team can come up with additional content that will help this fanbase thrive for as long as we can manage.
While I have stated the goings on of the next project in the new versions of the character puppets, I wanted to take this 1 year mark to provide some more specific information about the next video and what I have in mind going forward.
The original Ghost video started production last year in December. After 9 months of development, the video was released last year. There were no plans to make anything beyond this initial video, so none of us was really prepared to think of what happened next in the weeks after release. Due to the overwhelmingly positive response though, I went to work plotting out what would happen next in the story of Ghost. While everything hasn’t been written down and set in stone, I think it’s safe to say that I have what I consider to be the “initial story arc” more or less finalized in my mind. Content wise, this “arc” would take place around 5 or so additional music videos, all stemming from various Mystery Skulls songs. Ideas have shifted pretty wildly, additional characters have been thought up only to be removed or changed, and the exact nature of characters have been reworked to better suit this longer plot compared to the first 4 minute video. Among all this, I have kept fan input and desires in mind, and I think I have a good handle of what all is going to happen at this point. Even then though, things have shifted around mid-production of this current video, so it is an on-going process. While I can’t 100% guarantee our ability to WORK on said 5 or so videos, that is at the very least what we are hoping to ultimately do, one way or the other.
As for this current video, for reasons I will likely never be able to go into, production was only able to properly start this year in April. While we certainly had ambitions to have something released by today, various technical and personal reasons have hit virtually every team member that have bogged things down some. Unfortunately, we are a team entirely composed of people that can only afford to work on this on the side so our ability to work on Ghost content 24/7 is a bit on the impossible side. We don’t think it will take the same 9 month period as last time though, and we hope to have something released before the end of the year. That said, I *REFUSE* to make any specific release date announcements until we are both finished and approved by Luis (Mystery Skulls).
Once this next video is released, I will be looking into restarting talks about official merchandising, as I believe that would be best way to assist me in funding my team for their hard work. While I have pondered the idea of crowdfunding to pay for the work for additional Ghost content, I will likely opt to avoid this. I feel like that would simply be too risky for little actual benefit, as the odds of me, say, quitting my current day job to work purely on this stuff is just not going to happen any time soon. Merchandise feels like the more convenient way to go for now, and will hopefully be able to get some fan interaction with contests and stuff.
Anyway, I think that just about covers things for one post. I will see if I can make time to answer some user questions this week, so stay tuned.
To help tide everyone over, here is a .gif of one of the first shots of the video, just now polished up by our super talented Special Effects Artist, Patrick. It is still WIP, mind you, but this shot is pretty much 95% done by now.
Again, thank you to each and every one of you for sticking with us. We are doing what we can to deliver as high a quality videos as our little rag-tag team can manage.
-Mystery Ben
