Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus TRAILER!

Steampunk Holmes trailer from live2contage on Vimeo.

Gerald Price is our Narrator of Steampunk Holmes

I'm very excited to announce that Noble Beast has contracted Gerald Price to narrate Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus! Although I was originally looking for a younger sounding narrator, Gerald Price's audition was so good I suddenly found myself unable to decide.

After a long period of consideration I finally gave up and decided to do two different audio performances; a straight narrative by Gerald Price, as well as a dramatization by a set of younger sounding voice actors. Gerald Price's narrative will ship with the product, and the dramatization will be an optional download for readers. Of course this increases the expense of production, but the truth is not everyone likes a straight narrative and not everyone likes a dramatization, so why not give readers both? This is digital after all; we don't have to settle for one approach when both are great!

I'll have more to say about the cast of voice actors I'm hiring for the audio dramatization later, but for now take a minute to listen to Gerald Price's reading of the first couple of pages of Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus and enjoy his deep, English accent, the wonderful rhythm of his reading, and the very slight but effective change of voices from narrator to character.

Intro Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus by Noble Beast, LLC

Good-bye, Steve Jobs

Now I know why my mother cried when Elvis died.  If it wasn't for Steve Jobs my company Noble Beast would not exist and the book app, Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus would never have been conceived and my life would have been less than it is today.  Because of you, Steve Jobs, I have found passion in the creation of art for the sake of art.  Thank you for everything ....

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.   

-- Steve Jobs

Steampunk Holmes: A Preview of the Trailer

It's been a while since our last post but we've been very busy preparing the trailer for Steampunk Holmes: Legacey of the Nautilus. The trailer will help to promote the project when it's launched on Kickstarter.com and to give people a little glimpse of what is to come.

We have a long way to go on this project. The trailer will take a couple more weeks at least, and then we will launch the Kickstarter.com project, and at the same time we are working on the story, a large number of illustrations, animations, and coding the software for the iPad. I'm focused on a release in early Q2 of 2012.

In the mean time we will continue to share our adventures and art with you on this blog. Today we are sharing the first few seconds of what we hope will be a killer trailer. The trailer is being done by Daniel Cortes - the illustrator for the project. Enjoy and stay tuned!

Steampunk Holmes: The Black Widow in Action

I've spoken a couple times about the Black Widow, Sherlock Holmes' super-chopper, in our story Steampunk Holmes: Legend of the Nautilus.

I announced the intent to use Mikky's design and to even manufacture the bike for purchase back in July and then about the addition of the side car and the Gatling Gun in August - the Gatling Gun will not be included in the real bike we are going to manufacture.

Now I get to show Holmes and Watson riding the Black Widow in a big shoot out toward the end of the story. Holmes is driving and Watson is shooting the Gatling Gun. Daniel has outdone himself on this one!

I won't tell you what he is shooting at just yet, but I have included a excerpt from earlier in the story about the Black Widow and Watson's apprehension riding in the side car. Here is the excerpt written by P.C. Martin - Enjoy!

“No; a telegram from my sister Mycroft,” replied Holmes, “which promises to be of exceptional interest. Mycroft never sends for me except in cases of the most baffling nature, and I thought you might rather accompany me.”

“Certainly I would,” cried I, leaping from my pillow and splashing my face from the basin in the corner.

“Very well, then; have some coffee before we go. I'll get my coat and start up the Widow.”

I winced at the prospect. Holmes' enormous motorized bicycle, the Black Widow, was his pet hobby, and so enamored was he with its power and terrific capability for speed, he could not keep his enjoyment of the vehicle to himself. As I had shown great unwillingness to ride pillion on the monstrous machine, Holmes had contrived a marvelous side-car in order that I might share in the excitement of the Widow's adventurous sallies in what he called perfect safety. I had been flattered by this excessive kindness on my friend's part, until about ten seconds had elapsed on my first ride in the Widow's side-car.

In defense of my own courage, I have been shot at and stabbed, seen my own arm torn from my body, and witnessed the wanton butchering of my companions-in-arms upon the hostile battlefields of India and Afghanistan, and yet none of those terrors compare in my estimation with that of driving through London with Holmes at the helm. After that momentous and traumatizing inaugural ride, my mistrust of the vehicle had grown to a positive terror—less for the vehicle's sake than for my friend's tempestuous and unbelievably reckless driving skills.

As you can see P.C. Martin is an excellent writer and we are all working hard to match plot, to story, to art. I'm really excited about the whole project!

Steampunk Holmes: The Nautilus

It took two weeks of trial and error but Daniel Cortes and I are proud to present the final design of the Nautilus for Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus project. I want to thank Daniel for his patience and for re-conceptulizing the Nautilus many times until we got it just right.

As we work on this project I'm getting a very good idea of what it must be like to produce and direct a movie. You have an idea that you share with talented people, and they work their butts off to make it tangible. I imagine that this must require as much give-and-take as Daniel and I have done when working on characters, scenes, and gadgets. The same kind of back-and-forth I have with P.C. Martin about the story. Truly wonderful things are not built in a vacuum; they must be the result of passionate collaboration among peers.

To the left you see the final design for the Nautilus. This is a mechanical drawing that will be featured in the book along with Doctor Watson's Arm, the Black Widow, and other gadgets yet to be announced.

The Nautilus design went through many variations as we experimented with one idea after another. We have, after all, very big shoes to fill. If you look at the design of the Nautilus by Disney in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", a steampunk masterpiece, or the versions done by other adaptations such as "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" or many of the animated takes on the story, you'll soon agree that the design must rise to meet the merits of the story. We knew we had to get it right, and I think we did. Click on the image to above and judge for yourself.

The Nautilus sinks many ships in the original story by harpooning them to create a great hole in the hull that fills and sinks the ship. We needed a big-ass pointy thing on the front and Daniel gave us one. I also wanted to make the ship look somewhat organic, but not like a fish. Look at the curves and I think you'll agree that Daniel delivered on that request as well. I wanted the Nautilus to reflect Nemo's Indian heritage - Something Daniel took to heart, adding beautiful India-like decorative designs. Finally, I wanted the Nautilus to be HUGE! Check out the "crew" label next to the ship.

Steampunk Holmes Technology: The Black Widow's Gatling Gun

As I wrote in the blog entry "Steampunk Holmes Technology: Mechanical Drawings" one of the Steampunk Holmes book enhancements is to provide more information about the various gadgets that Holmes, Watson and others use or encounter through out the story. Above is the mechanical-like drawing of the Black Widow which runs on a H2O2 steam engine and sports a Gatling gun under the hood of the side car.

I did a little research on the design of steam engines and ended up combining two designs available at the time into one. The Black Widow uses a two cylinder (or compound) engine for quick acceleration and power and a steam turbine as a second stage for sustained speed and long distances.

The Gatling gun fires 300 rounds per minute. At that time (1885) Gatling guns could fire much faster but there would be a problem with storing ammunition, so I chose a slower rate of fire but instead of being driven by a hand crank, as was common, the eight barrels turn and fire using the kick-back for the previous round (aka Recoil-Operated). The ammunition is a smaller caliber .303 Lee-Metford bullet of lead encased (jacketed) in copper to improve accuracy (lead tends to warp its shape when fired distorting accuracy).

I don't know if most readers will appreciate all the work we put into these designs, but I know we are having a total blast developing the story, gadgets and art work. Stay tuned as we are currently working on the design of Captain Nemo's Nautilus!