Cafe Insomniac - from Moviestorm animation to novel

 

Cafe Insomniac - from animation to novel

A popular Moviestorm animation titled Café Insomniac has now been officially released as a novel that is available for download on Amazon, Kobo and the iBookstore. This is the brief story of its journey from Moviestorm animation to novel by its creator Mark Capell.

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Discovering Moviestorm

"I remember coming across Moviestorm just after I'd finished directing a TV series. I needed a fresh creative outlet and thought about making a live-action short film, but I didn't want to have to deal with the logistics.

Then I came across Moviestorm — animation software that didn't require traditional animation skills. I could just concentrate on making the most of my directing skills. I couldn't believe my luck.

The journey

I started with a couple of short films. After that, I started thinking of ideas for series. That's when I came up with the idea for Café Insomniac. I wasn't sure how it would develop, but I was enthralled by the mystery of the original premise — an insomniac gets lost in the space between dreams and reality.

In the spirt of experimentation, I didn't plan anything. I wanted to make the series as surreal as possible. No idea was too wild. And I was lucky to find some great voice actors among the Moviestorm community.

The response from people who watched it was overwhelming.

A couple of years on from the last episode of Café Insomniac, I wrote a novel, a thriller, that shot past The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo to reach the top of the Amazon crime and thriller charts. I was committed to writing.

And after finishing a couple more books, I rooted around for my next idea. A little voice suggested that Café Insomniac wasn't finished, that I'd only touched on the surface of Justin's strange world. Café Insomniac became my next novel. 

Story development

Has Café Insomniac changed since those experimental days? Well, yes, quite a lot. The storyline is different. There are new characters. In some ways it is stranger than the original series but also makes more sense. If you read it, you'll see what I mean.

And in the novel, the story of Café Insomniac is told entirely from Justin's point of view. This allows the reader to get inside his mind, to feel his fear and confusion, as events unfold and become ever more strange.

Why Moviestorm?

But the guiding slogan from those Moviestorm days has remained the same: "I don't know what's real and what isn't. And which is most dangerous."

Without the Moviestorm version of Café Insomniac, I don't think I would have had the courage to attempt a full-length story with such an outlandish premise. It was thanks to the software and the positive reaction from the Moviestorm community that I could embark on writing the novel, thinking, hey, this might just work."

Cafe Insomniac is now available for download from Amazon, Kobo, and the iBookstore. There is a special promotion on Amazon for the first few days at 99p.

Further links

More about Mark Capell

Official website

Buy Cafe Insomniac

Other books by Mark Capell

I'm bad, I'm bad, you know it, I'm bad

Now that the Streets bundle has, erm, hit the streets, the next pack going into test* is Criminals, who compliment the kindly, friendly, law-abiding policemen in the Law and Order pack. We've shown you a few sneak peeks before, but today, we've got a first look at the new faces.

Now, as everyone knows, bad guys are always disfigured (except when they're suave British villains played by Alan Rickman), so we've introduced some new morphs. Which means you can give your perps broken noses and the like. Cos then everyone will know they're bad.

*When it's ready. Did you really need to ask?

Whaddya mean, stereotypes?

So you've got the Law and Order pack, right? (Right?) And now you have lots of upright guardians of the law to deal with the foul miscreants who populate our streets. But who are those evil, drug-dealing, gun-running criminals they're going to be arresting?

Step forward, Luther and Mark, who will shortly be making an appearance at a Moviestorm store near you. Or in a jail cell. Or in a music video. It's up to you.

Work in progress shots from the desk of Chris Ollis. More outfits to come, more texture variants, and, oooh, other stuff. When it's ready...

The man in the Moviestorm hat is dead

No, not that man in the Moviestorm hat. I'm still very much here.


The long-awaited Law and Order pack is getting closer by the day. It really is, honest...

(For the avoidance of doubt, this pack has nothing to do with the Law & Order TV show. They have an ampersand, you see, and we spell the whole word. Whole different thing.)

Be wery wery qwiet - she's running for Vice President

Not content with staging a lightsaber battle in the Oval Office, the elusive HappyToast has created an Elmer Fudd cartoon staring everyone's favourite gun-toting potential Vice President Sarah Palin as the eponymous hunter.



HappyToast has sneakily managed to acquire a preview of some of the new shotgun animations from the forthcoming Law Enforcement & Crime content pack[1]. Combined with the Sarah Palin lookalike from the US Election 2008 pack it makes for a very effective satire.

[1] When it's ready.^© Well, honestly - what did you expect?

Back to work, minions!

The guys and gals have had a well-deserved half-hour off after getting 1.0.4 out the door, and we even kindly gave them a celebratory packet of chocolate biscuits (apart from twak who's not allowed human-type food). While they were out enjoying our phenomenal largesse, this is what we wrote on the whiteboard for them to do next.

• Complete overhaul of camera system
• Mark's sexy walks
• Make the men look as good as the women
• Face morphing
• Character shop redesign
• Improve the improvisor (Or is that improvise the improver?)
  
• Better facial expressions
  
• XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (That one's still a secret, sorry! We have to have some surprises up our sleeves!)
• Crime (That's a content pack, not our new business model. Probably.)
  

That should keep them busy and out of that nasty sunlight for a while!