It's that time again...

Time to update the blog.

First off, lots of things have evolved recently. Believe it or not, while in my last blog I was complaining about riding the bus, I can now announce that I shall no longer do so. Finally, Alex has got a car. It all happened pretty quickly, and quite conveniently actually. Here's the whole story in short: my grandparents used to have two cars; however, they decided to now have only one. So they gave one of their cars to my aunt, who in turn gave her car to me. And voila. That's about it. So we've kinda just been trading cars within the family, which of course is a nice thing to do. So, from this point forward, I won't be complaining about riding the bus anymore. From now on I'll just complain about the enormously high gas prices.

With a car I'm saving quite some time. As you might remember it used to take me pretty long to get to work and back. Now it takes about 25 minutes. Half an hour when there's a lot of traffic. So things have greatly improved in that area.

On Horizon we're working on the final few episodes of the season. Mike finished his first draft of "In Times of Despair", which is looking great. That will be kind of this season's calm-before-the-storm episode. We'll be having some nice character moments in a more quiet (but quite interesting) episode right before the big finale. "In Times of Despair" will see the return of some familiar faces, and we'll be picking up on a relationship that could have seemed almost forgotten. We'll be taking an in depth look at how two characters have/might/perhaps will again some day feel about each other.

Then, we'll be having the two part season finale. I'm about to finish the first draft of "Preemptive Strike", which is looking great so far. Lots of things will be going on, and we'll be seeing our team going on a joint mission with some familiar faces. I must say that the scale of this year's finale will be quite enormous. There's a lot going on, so much that it will be a challenge fitting it all into two episodes. I'll be starting the outline for "Revolution" tomorrow, and... I really can't say anything about it. It would be a shame to spoil all of those surprises.

I'm also quite pleased with the progress we're making in our visuals department. Here's an example of how our incredibly talented art department works. Today I was working on "Preemptive Strike" while a lot of us were on msn, which kind of makes it seem like we're all in the same "virtual office" with the doors open, as we can talk to each other whenever needed.

So I'm working on this episode, and I get to this particular scene. I pause, take a moment to think about something. Then I head over to the guys and gals, and I say something like: "So what do you think an Enoly space station should look like?" Then we talk about it for a few moments, and I outline the rough idea I've had in mind for the design. We talk some more, and I head back to write this scene. About thirty minutes later, one of our new designers, Michael, shows us all this wonderful sketch that he's put together. And let's just say it's an amazing looking design. Very alien, very Enoly. And there it was, an Enoly space station.

We all loved the design. And Nick, our CG artist who's designs for Horizon are just looking amazing already, has assured us that he's confident he'll be able to create a CG render of the design hopefully on time for the episode's release. So, keep an eye out for that.

I know so far we haven't had too much to show when it comes to visuals, but things are about to change. We have people working on Horizon, others are working on designs based on one or two specific episodes, and a very talented artist named Travis is working on some nice looking costume designs. In addition, we've just hired an additional concept artist by the name of Beth, who'll be focusing on creating alien designs, starting with the Draque and the Enoly. At the very latest when Season Three rolls around, we should have made a lot of progress. It only took us two seasons, but dare I say it, it should turn out to have been worth the wait.

We've also gotten in touch with another enormously talented individual. But I don't want to give any more away just yet, since it would spoil the surprise. I'll just say we're all very excited about the fact that this person is interested in joining our team.

Well. I'm about to call it a night. Tomorrow night we'll be having the great 24 two hour season finale. I can't wait to see how this will end. Season Five has been great! Really great! In my next blog I'll give you my overall view of the season finale - completely without spoilers of course.

I'll be back soon with another update. I promise not to wait too long this time.

Until next time,
Alex