Post #4199

It’s a little difficult to work out exactly what’s going on in Week 318 because THERE IS SO MUCH. (“Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” It feels like that.)

Projects that are on the go or bubbling up again this week include:
Chaco x3
Dimensions
Barry / Weminuche
Suwappu (with Dentsu London)
Schooloscope
SVK
Here and Then

All Hands on Tuesday morning was a little head spinning as fourteen different people reeled off all the things they were working on this week. Most folks have their hands in more than one project at a time. Simon and Matt Webb, because of the nature of their jobs, are each trying to pay attention to at least five different projects over the course of the week if not all in one day. Lord bless ’em.

A major project on the boards this week is a Chaco presentation which Matt Jones and Jack will be bringing to New York at the end of the week. Alex and Timo are both contributing their respective talents to that along with Matt and Jack.

In addition to that, Timo is working on creating films about the different Chaco projects. Every now and then he points his camera at something for a while, moves some things around and points his camera again. And then goes back to his computer to make it into magic. Joe is helping out by contributing animations.

There’s plenty of ongoing work on the various Chaco projects. Nick is tweaking software so that it can be shipped and just work. (Seems like a worthy use of time to me: I like it when things just work.) Andy and Simon are both doing a lot of liaising with our external collaborators some of whom are literally on the other side of the world.

Now that Shuush is in the world and getting some attention, Alice is working on making some tweaks to that. Most of her time is being spent on Barry, though, so she has temporarily relocated to Statham 2 which could also be called The Barry War Room. Also working on Barry / Weminuche this week are Alex, Denise, James, Nick and Andy.

Tom and Alex are pushing Dimensions closer and closer to a deliverable thing. Tom has swapped places with Alice for the week and it’s been very nice to have him in the main room. He’s a lot more talkative than I thought.

And the Suwappu project with Dentsu (carrying on from this) is kicking off this week. That’s another project where we have third party collaborators. Just keeping track of all the external collaborators is a job in itself around here – mostly down to Simon.

Schooloscope has been a tad neglected of late due to available hands to work on it, but it’s getting a bit of a polish this week thanks to James.

And now that SVK is in the world and, for the last week, has been landing in customers’ hands, we’ve moved on to the Customer Support phase – which is how I’ve been spending most of my week with lots of help from Simon and Matt Webb. (They are angels, really.) On the one hand, it’s frustrating that there are glitches and things need remedying, but on the other hand, most requests for customer service are accompanied by exclamations of delight at the comic itself, the packaging, the overall product, etc. It’s very gratifying to hear from so many people who really, really like a thing we did. (Note: if you didn’t manage to grab a copy during the 48 hours that it was on sale before selling out, add your email address at getsvk.com to be notified when the second printing becomes available!)

Phew! I’m sure there’s stuff that I missed, but I think that’s probably an adequate summary.

It’s Thursday morning and it’s actually kind of sunny outside and Matt Jones is playing Django Reinhardt on the studio stereo. Happy Bastille Day!