October 7, 2010: Keeping or Changing the HA6S Release Date?

Hi all,

Happy first of October! In a week, it will be October 7, 2010 (aka Hey Arnold's 14th anniversary)! This was our planned release date, and I am impressed and inspired by everyone's hard work, time, and effort they put into this project. We have made *strides* with this project. Several well-developed episode ideas have been made, we have a several gag comics at hand, and have made a lovely number of fabulous and beautiful webcomic pages. Give yourself a round of applause, HA6S staff members, because you are the best. Seriously. We couldn't have done any of this without you.

Although we have several comic pages at hand, we need to address whether or not this is enough to release them to the public. Our pilot episode is not finished yet, although we are about 1/3 done.

So, we have mainly two routes to take with this project.

1. We can go on to release the comic pages. We can start with releasing our gag comics until we have a comfortable amount of buffer pages for the real comic episodes, and then start releasing them. Good thing about this is that we're on time, but bad thing is that we may eventually run out of comic pages and be forced to go into a hiatus (in terms of releasing comics) until further notice (i.e. when more pages are made).

2. We postpone the HA6S release date, preferably by a year. We will need to edit our current advertisements to change the release date, but hopefully, we will be adequately prepared to release our comics by then.

Please express your thoughts and opinions. It would greatly help!

Tendra

------------------------------

Edit: Here are some info that may help with your decision.

1. We have ~ 5 complete pages of the pilot episode. The rest (we're have 8 pages in total) are in progress.
2. We have 12 gag comics ready at hand.
3. If we decide to do so, we can substitute actual updates with fanart (given the artist's permission), and "sneak-peeks" of upcoming episodes.
4. We still need to build our official website for which to release our comics.

Hm...on one hand, I see the benefit in post-poning...but on the other...how many gag pages do we have?

I'm not sure how to vote. Have we got a comic ready for release for Oct 7th?

I can't decide. Preferably I can do background but I'm not sure if the lineart would be done on time. Could we post some gag comics and lift the veil of our three projects, share plots? And also I think it could interesting to make the slides how the pages were done

I think Postponing it would be the responsible thing to do, on the other hand the viewers might get restless and give up on us.
I don't know what we should do.

We could put small gag comics, one each week, BTW how many do we have?

Inuyatta wrote:Hm...on one hand, I see the benefit in post-poning...but on the other...how many gag pages do we have?

We have 12 gag comics (i.e. those actually in comic formats). I don't mind posting up fan-art as well (I have those saved to my desktop as well), given the artist's permission.

Ok, how about we postpone and post up one gag comic per month just to keep viewers aware that the project has not been abandoned and that there is something to show for the wait?

I think Inuyatta has a good idea. We could post one gag comic per month (or even one every other month if the selection gets too thin).

I think we should try to release something on October 7...even if it's just some advertisement telling people that we've postponed the release date. A gag comic would be better, though.

I can't believe it's already October

Awh, I feel bad for not working harder ^^; I agree with Inuyatta, though

I'm also with Inuyatta's idea.

Go Inuyatta!!!!!!

I really don't like the idea of postponing the release date, I think it would make people believe that we will never get it done (and that is not true because we DO have some pages of the pilot episode ready to be shown).

The thing is, we don't have to release the whole episode at once.

Maybe we can go for... I don't know, one or two pages a month + extra comic gag from time to time. I mean, I noticed that most of the people that display their webcomic (okay, our project isn't exactly one but anyway) release a page from time to time with a little note to the readers so those will know what is going on and the reason why the artist couldn't draw faster, etc...

Comic gags are great, really, but... if I were only a reader and that I couldn't see the work that have been done for the 'real' 6th season comic, I won't take this project seriously. I mean, I'll enjoy the comic gags but I would only see it as random (but great) fan art like those we can see on DA.

I really think we should give fans the proves that the 6th season is in the making BUT that we have real materials, we have serious work done and ready to be shown and artists who are still working on the other upcoming pages so they'll know that we intend to keep this project alive.

Aww, Inuyatta stole my idea! D:

LOL,

Pie01: Yeah, I see where you're coming from. It is important to show the fans that we are working on the episode progress and do have some things done.

I get a little annoyed when a web-comic posts up filler comics, but more so when they do it in the middle of a story-line. The story becomes hard to follow.

What about, in additional to the gag comics, we occassionally put up sneak-peeks of the actual episode projects and of course some sort of written comment on how far we are on our episode projects?

That sounds like a good idea, tendra!

Shall I post something on the facebook page?

Another idea is to post things like artist/writer/editor commentary. I know that idea has been proposed before, but we could try to do something like that.
It will let people know what we're doing, how we're doing it, and most importantly that we are actually doing it.

lilistories, I can make you an admin to the HA6S facebook page if you're interested in making facebook updates. That way people will only see HA6S when they see the post, rather than your profile.

Sure

Okay. Probably the best thing to do would be to send a PM to either me or Tendra and let us know what your facebook profile name is so we can be sure that we're admining the right person.

I agree with the idea of releasing gag comics, bonus content, and sneak peeks to tie viewers over until we are able to release actual episodes. We've really gotta crack down, though!

Also, I would love to write editor/writer comments on the episodes I've written/co-written/edited for. I could go on forever. XDXD

What if we opened up the website by this Thursday? Is that possible to do?

It obviously doesn't have to be perfectly spectacular since we don't have a lot of content to post onto the website yet. But we could post some gag comics and maybe a little bit later we could start putting together commentary.

If it's too short notice for the website, we could also just post something onto facebook.

lol Yes we are supposed to release the comics this Thursday. Hence, I'm a little nervous (haha).

I have sent an email to DestineyJen, asking if she is free to quickly whip up a simple website, but I don't know if it'll reach her in time. If not, then yes there are multiple other directions to go. We can post it up on FB, or we can post it up on the HA6S wordpress site, make a temporary Wordpress blog site and post the gag comic there, etc.

If it's Facebook, then I'll set up a new sub-forum to indicate the order of the gag comics to be released, I guess. I have all the gag comics saved onto my desktop

Posting something onto Facebook sounds like a great idea. I'd also be willing to write a Note or something for the Facebook page, giving a Sneak Peek of all the upcoming episodes. =) I'll PM you my Facebook name if you want me to do something for the page-- just name it. ^_^

I think at the moment, facebook would be the way to go (unless we can get a simple website by tomorrow). We have quite a few followers on facebook, so I'm sure that no matter what we decide to do, we'll want to advertise on facebook anyway.
I think that posting the gag comics onto the wordpress site and then later onto a different website with the rest of the full length comics will be confusing. I guess we could post it both places...facebook and wordpress.

Meganium, I can also make you an admin to the facebook page if you send me your facebook profile name. I would suggest holding off on the note until Thursday, though. Actually, I would like to be able to read over whatever you plan on posting first.

I think that I will make a new thread in the advertising section so that all of the facebook admins can coordinate with each other about facebook posts.

Personally, I don't think it would be impossible to release the comics as scheduled.
If we have 5 pages already ready and release 1 per month, that gives us 5 months to make a few more pages and so on. I think five months is a substantial amount of time to crank out some more pages, then again it is important to remember that the artists have lives as well and it may not be so simple.
I disagree with just releasing gag comics though. I think I'd be more professional to just wait with the whole thing.
My idea though, is what if there's a separate section on the website for gag comics? That way if you guys DID want to release them with comments to tide viewers over until we have more progress it wouldn't be part of the actual episode updates? Because if I was a fan and saw "Hey Arnold Season 6 has been updated!" And it was all gag comics for a year straight, I'd be a little angry. We don't want that.
I can help a little with fine-tuning the website if need be. I also think it would be a GREAT idea for us to have a Twitter account. This way all our followers could get instant one-line updates on our status even from their phones.