Woof. I have been meaning to post here about the new trade paperback collection of my long-running webcomic, The Utopian, but have been really, really distracted (mainly by promoting it elsewhere), but I figure I probably should, so here we are. The new book, The Utopian, Vol.2: Foundation, is a 102-page paperback edition collecting 176 strips from the webcomic, plus five pages of back matter, all wrapped in a new cover, and it is now available for pre-order from the Pop! Goes the Icon website (or Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.).

The actual thing that’s been distracting me from whole-hog promoting this book’s release is the other projects I’m in the midst of, specifically of the filmmaking kind. I’ve been shopping around two TV pilots (one of which that made it to Round 2 of the ATX Television Festival Pitch Competition), plucking away on a few screenplays, and shooting/gathering material for a feature-length documentary that, yes, I have kind-of talked about but only in broad strokes.

A big chunk of that latter project involves shooting a lot of sit-down interviews, and although I’ve already knocked out several, I’m always trying to find ways to improve on composition, lighting, etc. That means I’ve also been spending a lot of time thinking, researching and experimenting along those lines, which brings me to this video:

Instead of my usual YouTube “talking to the camera” approach, I shot this in a more traditional documentary/news style (there’s even a version I made for PGTI in which I “interview” myself), mainly so I could get in some good practice shooting and editing for the aforementioned documentary.

I recently revamped my “official” website, making it more of a portfolio for projects irregardless of format (comics, films, articles, whatever), which is another reason I haven’t been posting over here: I’m at the point again where I’m updating multiple sites/blogs (oh yeah, there’s that filmmaking one, too), which obviously becomes kind of cumbersome. I’m considering nixing this one, and just folding everything into pjperez.com. The Bleeding Neon brand just, well, doesn’t really fit as well anymore; plus, I may use that for something else. I don’t know. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ll try to be better about keeping this site updated, even as I am about to dig into yet another filmmaking-related project that is in its infancy, but which hopefully I’ll be able to share before the summer is over. And hell, it’s just begun!