Well we’re back… sigh. Here’s my two little ones before we set off all ready in their High School Musical gear!

And we’re off from rainy England

to sunny Mallorca!

A swimming pool is much needed in such a hot climate of course.

And a place to rest in the shade.

Not to mention a nice view from the balcony of your room.

A short visit to the beach nearby…

…and a quick splash afterwards in the pool!

There’s something about those palm trees that is so luxurious!

But alas, the time is almost up.

Don’t you worry – straight back to work!

This is an overhead shot of the marketplace of Act IV. It’s the most complicated set so far. We’ve put the bright pink lines to make it easier for us to work with the set. We’ve still got a bit of way to go.

Oh, another thing, I’ve put the picture I used for my birthday (which happened in January) party invitation card for this year in my About page. Take a look and see if you can work out my age.

Ok, there’s no denying it we have been very busy! We did have a major problem in that our main animation program was really originally created for PC, not Mac and the graphics card for our macs which are built in (they’re imacs) don’t work well with the program. Eventually we had to organise with our technician to get high spec PCs (high spec especially as regards graphics card) for us to work with. But the problem with shadows, which you might have noticed in “From Blog to Niche” has been solved.

Film I Creating Your Blog
Intro & Act I Land

The rough version (what we call the skeleton) for the first 5 we have finished. Let me introduce you to some of the different characters. Here I am: smiling to the camera in the Introduction of the Creating Your Blog films.

Let’s move onto the first scene where I’m buying land (website):

Act II Hosts

Here is the group of hosts introducing themselves to me:
And I am very impressed with the houses (templates) they present me with:
You might have noticed the pictures on my screens from my studio were of a barn, tractor and tree. The macs editing and exporting the objects and the pcs importing them into the scene of the animation. Here is a better view of them (which are a house/template of agriculture):

Act III DNS & Email

Here’s the postman sorting out my DNS after a bit of a rude awakening:

Act IV Clickbank

Right, off to town to look for the marketplace. I’ve just found it and and am driving in:

There is the marketplace (still to be filled with people buying and selling and products on the tables, as well as some more buildings) and there in the background is the bank (that’s the one we struggled to import when we only had Macs to work with; now with both, I’m glad to say it was much easier!):

Act V Upload & House

Now I don’t know about you, but to have two rude awakenings in a short period of time with only one’s car to sleep in, is not my idea of fun!

And it took me a while till I knew what this guy was on about:

Sometimes it helps to get out of the box (or car) to really get what someone is going on about:

…and be singularly impressed! Uploading! But no normal vehicle!

But upload to what you may ask. There’s no building there. Perfect timing for my architect to arrive:

Right, time for the control panel:

Now why do computers, no matter who is the user, at the most awkward of times have a mind of their own and refuse to work:

Ah well, problem solved and voila!:

And am I impressed!:

Well, that’s about all for now. Time for… holiday! Time to close the company for a week and take my family for a well deserved holiday in Mallorca (I like to use the original Spanish spelling)! All included! Now you might say that it’s a crazy time to go overseas, and I would partially agree with you. But sometimes you need a holiday and all included at least makes sure that you’re not going to overspend on food and drink when you get there!

I know a lot of time has passed since my last post. Very exciting times, often worrying times and Very Busy Times! We’ve finally decided exactly what we want to do with our working lives! Animation with Music! (About time! lol) Our big decision has been whether to become a Business (and buy the business name) or start a company. I know that I am quite a cautious person but by contrast I do like to go the whole way rather than in stages (impatient). Some of the best marketers have recommended to start a busines, if nothing else from the side of simplicity. What we have liked about starting a company is that it is a separate entity so if we run into any legal trouble, it remains within the scope of the company. It is more official too, and sometimes a company is respected more. Ours includes music and animation which is more complicated as regards the legal side than pure text and videos.

The name of our company is CompoZanimA Ltd. (There are elements of Composer/Composing/Composition and Animator/Animating/Animation within the word.) About a month ago we worked hard at the logo – logo in film format, that you’d get at the end of a film. It is a different form of animation to what we’re doing now for the ebook involving 3D shapes. The C, Z and A are gradually drawn throughout, the letters o, m, p, o as forms of written music and the a, n, i, m and the big A as little animated stick figures. It is still far from finished (still more animation to do, and we haven’t even started on the music), but here is a picture of it developing on the screen:

I’ve finally put some information about me on the about page, thanks to the advice and request from John Kelly and Susan Owen-Thursfield .

I hope you enjoy it!

Oh, and I’m very busy with the animation for my first ebook at present. It’s going well, and I will put some snippets soon on my blog.

Two days after “From Niche to Blog” animation we started working on our big project – our eBook! The topic above (whose name we might change later) is divided into 3 sections – we call it The Trilogy! The animations will help people who aren’t accustomed to Internet Marketing or computers by using metaphors that relate it to the physical world.

We will come out with each of the 3 eBooks separately. By the end of my children’s holiday we had finished storyboarding the first eBook – Creating Your Blog. There are 11 parts to it (and at least 11 animated film clips). The storyboarding we do with pencil and rubber on A4 pages.

We are intending (maybe a bit ambitiously) to have finished the first eBook by the 17th of July. We have set ourselves the goal of trying to finish two film clips per week. When we say finished, they are still quite a long way to go – only finished as regards the setting of the scene, the characters, the choreography, the lip sync and the camera positions choreographed. The main character will not be too difficult to get hold of to record as it’s me. Some of the other characters though, we hope to employ some of the employees/bosses of some of the companies I’m recommending people use.

After that composing the music and editing the film (and doing a lot of tweaking!).

We have finished the first act in rough (we refer to the film clips as acts) which includes the introduction. We are halfway through our second act, and must get back to work on it. See you later!

Wow! It’s been great the response! I highly appreciate the positive feedback from Mandy Allen (and putting a link to it on the forum), Svenja (and for putting a link to it on your domain page), Steve, Martyn Boaden, Colin, Brian Ripley, Mostafa, John Kelly, Ken Biddle, Keith Blackburn and to all the others who write up after this post. You’ve all been great, and given me a lot of confidence! Many thanks!

I have seen some of your sites and I will get around bit by bit to visit them all and give you feedback. I have a lot of busy weeks coming up preparing my ebook! I hope it’s not going to matter that I’m going to be later than everyone else – the work I’m going to be doing is going to take a very long time!

Thank you again people – you’ve been fab! It’s a great community that I’m very happy to be a part of.

Finally, the animation is finished! It has been 3 weeks now. The last part of work has been composing the music for the beginning, middle and end, and the final editing. I hope that you enjoy it, and relate to it! It is just over six minutes long. Well, here it is:

From Blog to Niche from Benedict Hickson on Vimeo.

Well to keep you up to date. As you know, Monday was a public holiday. Great, but needed to spend more time with the family (and less time with my project). Nevertheless, I have finished the soundtrack of the movie (including the sound effects and writing and recording the voice over). I’m onto the final part to add to the film – I’m composing the music for it now. Once I’ve finished that it’ll just need to add the credits and some tweaking with everything to fit it into a short animation sketch. Today I was working as fast as possible (working against my perfectionism) because tomorrow and the Friday I’m working (Noooo!) and I’ll be away from my project (except for each early morning and late night – Yeah!).

I won’t make any promises, but it’ll be soon, soon, soon. I’m making a lot of progress every day, whenever I have a free moment (from my family/my other work). So hang in there, people. The more time, the better I can make it too. Back to work…

Thank you to everyone for your support, especially Mandy and Svenja for your lovely comments. My animation sketch should be out very soon! I’ve finished the animation side (the sets, the characters, the choreography, the cameras, the lip syncing, etc) and am now finding the best format to transfer the file to edit it, and then will be adding the sound, voiceover, and composing.

I do hope that you’ll enjoy it. I will fill you in a bit more about the animation sketch when I publish it (hopefully within a day or two). Suffice to say that it is a depiction of what I and probably you have been going through in that big decision (often on more than one occasion) – which niche should I choose that will be both enjoyable and profitable for me. Well not long now. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the studio to finish it… See you soon!

My apologies for not making a post for such a long time! I went through that process I’ve been through so many times – trying to find my niche. The right kind of niche, suitable for me, but even more important, suitable as regards traffic.

I am a composer, and I love composing, but new classical/film music is a narrow niche. I enjoy teaching people how to read and write music, but I don’t think there is much demand. As you will have noted I have a great interest in Second Life and it’s use for Education. But I went to a conference the other day in America and it was how universities even in America were finding it hard to take it seriously as a form of lecturing, training and student displaying for local students and international students. I’m still keen on that one, but the demand for that at present is low. I’ll put it on the back burner for now.

The niche I’m choosing is something that I’m not that experienced in but very keen on too. I’ll inform you a bit more of that in my next post.

I’ve decided to do a quick animation sketch representing the process of finding one’s niche. I’ll try and finish it as soon as possible and will put it on my next post. Here is a photo from it: