View my Website.

[ILoveMRHMWogglebugTE]

I was never wanting you to do any redesigns for me in the first place. And no, I don't have any of what you just mentioned, except to help me pay for my second illustrator who illustrates my novels which are very different from my picture books altogether. I almost got him paid off.

The amount I owe my illustrator of my picture books at the moment is about a quarter of the amount I set the goal of my indiegogo campaign for. I set it for higher to pay for more in the future.

The reasons I owe him so much are as follows: My rent keeps getting raised. I pay a second illustrator once a month also (through physical checks). I've been spending much of the rest on getting more to improve my movie making program for my animated movies which are meant to go with these books.

[Exian]

I can see that I need to choose my words carefully with you. I never thought that you wanted me to do redesigns. That was meant to drive home the point that I would have felt bad charging you for the character design that you ended up with. It's quality work, but it's still children's book work.

I'm having a real hard time understanding you. It's very rare that you'll find someone with a vision for a children's book/cartoon who isn't also an artist. Makes me question your motives. The idea behind one person handling both the design and writing is that the material (subject matter and line/color work) is so simplistic that it isn't an overload. Do you have artistic abilities other than writing? I know that you're animating the 3D models, but I can't imagine doing that with no drawing ability.

In fact, the short comings of your product thus far are starting to make sense...

[Iroscato]

I appreciate you want this thing to take off Woggle, but if this was featured in a show along the lines of 'Dragon's Den', you'd get a hearty "Ah'm oot!" from Duncan Bannatyne.

Speaking as a web designer, your website is just objectively awful. I don't know who designed/coded it for you or if you did it yourself, but damn, that would look sub-par in 2004.

I see you animated the videos yourself. I really don't want to crush your dreams, but they look horrendous - very glitchy, with the wogglebug character model appearing to step through the text and exhibiting extremely bizarre movements, at least on the intro vid.

The logo is erm...well I don't think it's a *terrible* basic concept, but the execution is very, very poor. The wogglebug being off-center inside the heart sticks out the most I think and is annoying to look at. But then there's the rest of it, so...

Also, wouldn't there be some heavy copyright infringement from using a character from Baum's work? I imagine his estate wouldn't look too favourably on you (ab)using their intellectual property in this manner, assuming there is some kind of trademark on it. I wouldn't know if there is, or how the fuck any of this works.

The 2D drawings are actually quite nice (though need some refining), I recommend you expand on them and focus on it, instead of the apparently Satan-powered 3D animations. They are really that bad, I'm sorry.

Then there's the question of why you signed up here in the first place. Now I'm obviously not a mod or an admin, much as I'd like that level of power to bolster my ETERNAL WAR AGAINST THE COSMOS, but you've made less than 50 posts and seem to have built your whole account around promoting your work. That's somewhat frowned upon, I think, and there are other far more effective ways of advertising than doing it this way, if that was your goal. Ever heard of social media?

Overall I'd say you need to overhaul a MASSIVE amount, from top to bottom, to have even a chance of getting noticed. I know you just wanted people to look, but there is no way in hell I would go near this if I was a parent.

[ILoveMRHMWogglebugTE]

Well, for the record, this character like all of Baum's works is public domain. I'm sure I'll have no trouble in way with such as you mentioned, or else so many other authors and filmmakers would have so many times for years before.

And, I know I still need to work on the animation. It's just it's hard and complicated, but I'll try my very best before I release anything to DVD.

And, I need to remind you again I cannot concentrate on the picture books until I can pay off the debts I owe my illustrator and if I can't he might not illustrate for me anymore. And the quickest most effective way is the Indiegogo campaign. I do have social media, just not much of it. And I plan to purchase a deal from KickStartMyAds except I can't afford to until December.

[SteelCurtain]

Well, speaking from inside knowledge of a successful $200K Kickstarter campaign, without swamping social media, you have no hope of completing an Indiegogo campaign. Not a chance.

You also don't have a chance with the video you have selected for your proof of concept. I'm sorry, but no one is going to donate money to a project that looks like this. You need to bust your ass animating 1-2 minutes to perfection and then spend the money in hiring professionals. Because the VO work and the modeling is unbearable.

I feel like you need a lot of people to tell you this: the relationship between the Sylvie character and the Wogglebug is overtly inappropriate. It may just be your inexperience with blocking and animation, but there are clear sexual connotations that are hard to ignore. Alarms are going off in my head the entire time I am watching the videos. It isn't good.

[Exian]

As a parent, I would never introduce my kid to this. Not that I would have to worry about her taking to it.

[KevinM1]

I couldn't watch the Flash video on the home page because I'm on the PS4 browser, but I was able to watch the video on the about page. Yikes.

It has some serious flaws:

Characters and objects cast shadows sometimes, other times not at all.
Characters seem to hover over the ground.
The bug guy slides into position very obviously.
An overreliance of camera panning.
A complete lack of knowledge of anatomy judging by how the characters move.
Low res background objects and textures. I'm talking late 90's, PlayStation 1 textures.

It needs to go back in the oven at least another year, with you spending a legit 8 hours a day on it. Presumably, that's your best work since it's on the site. It simply won't cut it. College students in animation programs output far superior work than that on a regular basis, and the general public is used to a minimum quality of CG given its ubiquity in movies and children's cartoons.

Like Iroscato, I work on websites. I'm primarily a programmer, but I often have to work on the design aspect as well. I agree with their assessment - the site looks horrible. More than that, the entire endeavor looks cheap. Boring sans-serif font, inexplicable dark rainbow gradient background, images to books that aren't links to Amazon where people can buy them, and a main 'logo' that looks like it took about 20 seconds to slap together, and you couldn't even bother to center the guy in it.

And you expect people to pay money to bail you out of your inability to pace your ambition with your skill level? Not gonna happen.

I'm not trying to be mean, I'm really not, but you need to realize that this whole thing looks to be the children's book version of Phoenix Games, hastily produced, unlicensed knockoffs of poor quality. I know that's not what you intend for it to be but that's how it's coming across at the moment, and perception is reality when it comes to things like this.

Like I said, the whole project needs a ton more work and polishing. A ton.

Good luck.

[Iroscato]

There are hundreds of services that can provide cheap, or even free website templates for you, that are mobile-responsive, have a clean design and will look roughly 78 million times better than your current one. Even the most basic of basic ones will be a huge improvement.

People are honestly trying to help you, you would do well to take on board some of the advice in this thread. Stop begging for donations, which is how you're coming across, and take some time to actually get your business up to something that looks semi-professional.

[ILoveMRHMWogglebugTE]

I actually was always using website templates all along from a service provider that I pay a yearly fee for my domain for as well as for pro features. Seriously, if you didn't like the new template after all, I may as well now revert back to the old one.

And I think in total I must have worked on that video on the About page for more than 8 hours. The program I work in is complicated and slow when a lot is in one scene especially, and it took months to complete. I think I may have worked on it at least 16 hours total, maybe 20.

And another thing, I doubt any of you could help me in the animation process since you more than likely have no experience in the program I use. I only know as much as I do because I've been working at it for years to get better at it already.

[KevinM1]

I actually was always using website templates all along from a service provider that I pay a yearly fee for my domain for as well as for pro features. Seriously, if you didn't like the new template after all, I may as well now revert back to the old one.

It looks like you just switched back to the old template.  Somehow, it is worse.

I think you're getting fucked over by your service provider, as those aren't professional templates.  Not in the least.

And I think in total I must have worked on that video on the About page for more than 8 hours. The program I work in is complicated and slow when a lot is in one scene especially, and it took months to complete. I think I may have worked on it at least 16 hours total, maybe 20.

And they need more work.  Sorry, but it's the truth.

And another thing, I doubt any of you could help me in the animation process since you more than likely have no experience in the program I use. I only know as much as I do because I've been working at it for years to get better at it already.

It doesn't take intimate knowledge of the program you use to notice that Wogglebug clips through things, or that sometimes there are shadows and sometimes there aren't, or that Wogglebug slides from place to place.

It seems like you simply want a pat on the back along with free money.  Neither are going to happen.  I stand by my earlier criticism.  For as much work as you may have put into this so far, it's no where near close enough to generate money.

Now, I'm not saying that you should give up.  It's just that you need to really, really work on making this whole thing a professional effort.  That means:

A professional looking website.
A professionally made trailer (which, if you're going the crowdfunding route, should include footage of you describing the project, as well as talking about the risks and what you'll do to address them).
Giving the public a clear idea of what this is outside of your particular fancy.

All that said, going by your reactions on Amazon to the criticism of your books and your defensiveness here, I doubt you'll accept what I and the others have told you.