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Post by BraveSteelDragon on Jun 13, 2016 4:37:03 GMT -5
Ok, let me say it here: as 'fandom' i mean the overall awareness and interest that surrounds, in this case, Dragon Booster. As such, this topic i decided to start in this section, not because i picked the wrong one, but because i'm talking about the fans, not the show.
So, i've just passed a good hour and half trying to piece together what i could on the state of the fandom, and i've come to a mildly disheartening conclusion: It's letting out a last breath, as it struggles to be anything more than a shadow of its former self. Looking on youtube yielded very few results worth of note besides the episodes themselves. DeviantArt is similarly poor in content, but i'll go into more detail below. I am not daring other sites (FurAffinity, FurryNetwork, Weasyl, Tumblr) for the sake of my already dwindling sanity. On facebook there's hundreds of small 10-20-30 people closed groups all over the place. I do NOT want to know what they're doing.
DeviantArt - What's the situation?
If we exclude this site and Dragon-City.org (and it's own attached, but inactive, forum), then DeviantArt is the only place where there's any semblance of an active fandom.
So far, and much to signify the magnitude of the situation, the currently active (as in, posted any kind of journal within the span of a year at the time of this writing) groups on DA are:
- DragonBoosterRP - RP group
And that's it.
And let's not mention all the artists that have seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth, or that did Dragon Booster fanart as a do-and-forget kind of thing (which i can totally understand).
What's the plan?
Well, as far as it goes, unless someone extremely popular does something of particular nature to attract some attention on the series or its fanarts (and fanfictions), i hardly doubt we'll see any new developments any time soon.
I'll be honest. I keep mentally kicking myself for not having my 3D art skills up to the level that would surely allow me to do something even remotely 'original', let alone something based off someone else's work. I have a whole bunch of ideas that would work, but i have no artistic skill to back them up with.
Nor i know anyone that could. For as talented as some people seem, there's no point in pushing this matter up to them if it's not in their priorities or interests.
It is sad, but unless something happens and someone manages to pull off a lot of eye-catching stuff about Dragon Booster, then the series and the things that relate to it will be destined to disappear in the depths of the surface web in a much similar fashion to Gromada: Revenge, the 1998 movie Lost in Space and many other things.
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Post by Bluesonic1 on Jun 14, 2016 7:13:34 GMT -5
I believe you missed a couple of dA groups: DragonBoosterAcademy and Dragonboostergroup. I can't find where the upload statistics are for them but I follow both and see regular submissions. There's been a few super amazing artists even still making DB art here, here and here. People are even still commishing artists to do work on their OC racing dragons. And that's kinda the idea I've been trying to get at by creating this forum to fill in the fact that the Dragon City one no longer takes new registration- I want people to come together in a group effort to show the show's creators that the fandom is still petitioning for more DB. I did originally have all the episodes up too, which had views in the tens of thousands each- sadly Youtube took them down with copyright claims (though if they filed copyright claims for it, it seems someone higher up is now aware that the fandom is still alive)- someone else told me they were going to upload them and then pass the links on to me. I know that the DC forums have had some recent activity too from past members. The wiki even gets occasional editors passing through. The people are all there, but I feel like many of them take the same disheartening attitude that you do and as a result, no one does anything, which inevitably leads to the result you mention in your post. I don't think it has to end this way, as a "last breath", especially if we take a positive attitude and start asking "what can we do for the fandom?" as opposed to commenting how it's all crashing around us. |
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Post by BraveSteelDragon on Jun 14, 2016 11:00:43 GMT -5
Thing is, group members, are active. The groups however offer very little activity by themselves. As for the single artists. Yes, i've seen them all. Ghostwalker, (which i actively follow already), is busy with other themes. She likes the series, but not to the point of making a recurring theme. The other two, AimiSeni and wanlingnic, are on the same league. Appassionate, but interested into keeping themselves in the loop of things. I did a search for 'Dragon Booster' on both DA, Google and Facebook. The results are those. Top results on google were Dragon-City.org's pages and forum (like it's natural for it to be: it's been around for much longer than this forum). On facebook, like i mentioned, there were several closed groups of 10-20 people in them. Some of them i believe non even related to our Dragon Booster. On DA the results were a very confusing mix of things that fit and others that didn't. (I honestly stopped looking after i reached half-way through the results when things began to be from 2010 and earlier) I did have a couple of ideas to pull something up myself, but the idea in itself requires more than i can do, or know to do, by myself. The idea was similar to what was proposed here, except with shorts taken from people's fanfics. A bit outlandish as it is, but always worth to dream about. |
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Post by Bluesonic1 on Jun 16, 2016 4:41:23 GMT -5
Yeah, that's kinda why I wanted to try and group everyone together in one place  As a fandom we seem to be quite scattered. And yeah, those FB groups are pretty sketchy, many of them are used to advertise stuff or post random things unrelated to DB despite using the fandom name. Hmm I wonder why that big one never came to fruition? I feel like there's 2 major avenues we can go down- try to put a team together ourselves and then approach Rob, or as a group show Rob our determination and help him to bring the fandom back to life with general support or donations. Personally, I've been working on the latter because the only skill I could contribute to the former is voice acting, which to be honest isn't that helpful. |
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Post by BraveSteelDragon on Jun 16, 2016 6:07:13 GMT -5
Yeah, that's kinda why I wanted to try and group everyone together in one place As a fandom we seem to be quite scattered. And yeah, those FB groups are pretty sketchy, many of them are used to advertise stuff or post random things unrelated to DB despite using the fandom name. <OT> FB lets those groups thrive in their off-topic, and then removes people's profile which do not match a 'real person' or a 'fictional character' with proper personal information... so much for coherence. </OT> Hmm I wonder why that big one never came to fruition? I feel like there's 2 major avenues we can go down- try to put a team together ourselves and then approach Rob, or as a group show Rob our determination and help him to bring the fandom back to life with general support or donations. Personally, I've been working on the latter because the only skill I could contribute to the former is voice acting, which to be honest isn't that helpful. I think that the major issue was the lack of 3D artists in general, not to mention the very heavy-handed price for the original software used by Nerd Corps (SoftImage). The software itself has been discontinued in 2015 by Autodesk, and now one has to choose either 3DS Max or Maya, both of which (in legally acquired copies) cost at least $200/Month each. And since, in order to have a completely functioning and compatible software suite, you need both, it makes it a $400/Month cost. Not the best, as you can see. Then, let's not forget that DB was indeed a 3D rendered show. EVERYTHING in the show (except the text on signs) is a 3D model. Every dragon, piece of gear, drag-way and so on. To make something even remotely similar, one would have to reverse-engineer the way the models were made and animated by looking very closesly at each and every episode, frame by frame. And that's just the model. Then you need the textures, too, which require another artist to take things in their own hands once the model is finished. Eventually, you must render the episode, as well. Depending on the scene's complexity, a single frame can go from a couple of minutes to entire hours, or even whole days. Which is why you need a render farm (SEVERAL computers connected to a centralized network) to speed up the process (with network rendering, each computer elaborates a different part of the same frame, starting from the same scene, hence cutting down quite a lot on the overall production time). The whole thing died when people realized just how actually complex and time-demanding the production pipeline was. |
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Post by Bluesonic1 on Jun 19, 2016 3:55:46 GMT -5
The whole thing died when people realized just how actually complex and time-demanding the production pipeline was. Hence my original thought of rounding the fans together and supporting the original creators of DB in finding a company who can do this and continue the DB legacy :3 |
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Post by BraveSteelDragon on Jun 19, 2016 10:12:58 GMT -5
The whole thing died when people realized just how actually complex and time-demanding the production pipeline was. Hence my original thought of rounding the fans together and supporting the original creators of DB in finding a company who can do this and continue the DB legacy :3 You know what i just realized.... Audiobooks. No need for full-on episodes, but narrating some of the fanfics through even just the means of a few voices and some sounds would be great. And a big step ahead. |
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Post by Bluesonic1 on Jun 20, 2016 3:30:38 GMT -5
Hence my original thought of rounding the fans together and supporting the original creators of DB in finding a company who can do this and continue the DB legacy :3 You know what i just realized.... Audiobooks. No need for full-on episodes, but narrating some of the fanfics through even just the means of a few voices and some sounds would be great. And a big step ahead. That's a really neat idea. I had settled on the idea that if the show creators had truly given up on DB, that they could still release to us the episodes made so we could at least get to read them and have our questions answered. An audiobook wouldn't be too hard to do  |
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SmaugTheGolden
Racer In Training
A great HERO makes a story interesting... But a great VILLAIN makes it a legend.
Posts: 94 
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Post by SmaugTheGolden on Jul 5, 2016 6:44:07 GMT -5
(Heh, I'm still alive here, apologies for my disappearance, I'm in the middle of Grade 12 and it's pretty hard to come online right now with all my studying)
I agree with you both. Audiobooks would definitely be a step in the right direction. If we could generate more interest, and perhaps rekindle old fans' love of the fandom then we would have a much more sturdy base on which we could build. I did a little bit of research within my own friendship group. When I asked them about their favorite shows when they were younger they listed off a whole bunch of them as expected, but when I mentioned DB, they all exclaimed, "Oh I loved that show! What happened to it?" and other things along those lines. It is obvious enough plenty of people loved the show, we just need to regain their attention.
Referring to your previous statement, I also agree that we need to group all of us remaining DB fans into the one place. It will do no good if we are all scattered about in unknown pockets here and there, we need to find a way of reaching out to other fans and steering them in our direction so that we might band together and come up with a feasible plan.
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Post by Bluesonic1 on Jul 7, 2016 2:52:07 GMT -5
Yeah I've had that reaction with some of my friends too! Honestly, I just feel like to get any of these ideas going, we need DB's creators to notice that we're trying to hit the road running, hence why I'm trying to re-group the fandom and attract some attention this way. The original petition was a really good idea in this sense, especially getting over 14,000 signatures. It's just sad that the site it was hosted on got closed down  |
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SmaugTheGolden
Racer In Training
A great HERO makes a story interesting... But a great VILLAIN makes it a legend.
Posts: 94
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Post by SmaugTheGolden on Jul 9, 2016 2:36:26 GMT -5
Indeed. I was more than annoyed when I found out the site was taken down before anything could be done with the masses of signatures we had already attained. I'm pretty much certain that even if we did start up another petition we would have no where near the amount of signatures as before because there would be barely any way to spread the news of a new petition and a lot of people will have lost interest again.
Perhaps we need to continue the search for other fans, to at least spread the word of this forum. I recall on a site called Chicken Smoothie, there were quite a few DB fans, as I used to role play DB on there, and we had fair few people. There are still plenty of people willing and interested, it's just a bugger to track them all down XD
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Post by Bluesonic1 on Jul 11, 2016 2:41:38 GMT -5
There are still plenty of people willing and interested, it's just a bugger to track them all down XD Tell me about it :/ It's sad to see everyone separated and having gone their own way, though after this long I kinda don't blame them. |
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SmaugTheGolden
Racer In Training
A great HERO makes a story interesting... But a great VILLAIN makes it a legend.
Posts: 94
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Post by SmaugTheGolden on Jan 13, 2017 19:55:31 GMT -5
Phew, been quite a while since I was last on here.
As of late, I've made a few very good friends on Tumblr who are artists with a fairly large following, and I made a post about the petition on my blog. I've asked if they could reblog it to try and spread the message as far as possible to try and weasel out a few fans from the masses. I've already managed to get two more people to sign, and hopefully more soon - just need to hope that the post spreads like wildfire. I'm also going to hopefully be drawing more Dragon Booster related art and try to spread the word further. Hopefully this will be of some help.
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Post by Bluesonic1 on Jan 14, 2017 8:06:48 GMT -5
That's fantastic, it's so amazing to see we're almost at the 500 mark! I both can and can't believe that 10 years down the track and there is still such a decent following behind this show It would have so much success in today's modern world, I feel like DB was very much ahead of its time. |
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SmaugTheGolden
Racer In Training
A great HERO makes a story interesting... But a great VILLAIN makes it a legend.
Posts: 94
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Post by SmaugTheGolden on Jan 14, 2017 21:59:17 GMT -5
Yep, we're slowly edging closer and closer to the target. A number of times I've heard my friends say, "Oh I remember that show, what I shame it was cancelled", and I showed it to my younger brother and now he's quite happy to get behind the show. He's only 11, so it's obvious that kids would still enjoy the show even if it's 10, technically 11 years old as of this year as you say.
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As a fandom we seem to be quite scattered. And yeah, those FB groups are pretty sketchy, many of them are used to advertise stuff or post random things unrelated to DB despite using the fandom name.
I wonder if the forum should host a DB server? Not sure how lively that would be haha