The third short story is out!

I am happy to announce that a new illustrated short story set in the world of Heroes of Bronze is now available!

"A Pathetic Piece of Freedom" is focused on Penelope, the wife of Nikephoros, and the narrator of the Heroes of Bronze The Memory short film.

This might be a hard one to swallow for some. The lifestyle of Athenian noblewomen in ancient Greece was very restrictive. They spent the majority of their time indoors, managing the household, raising children, and knitting. Anything beyond that was frowned upon by men...

I've chosen one such (not so) ordinary day in Penelope's life to narrate my story...

Young Penelope

An excerpt:

The two men stood facing each other – Nikephoros calm and composed, but bleeding from the forehead, arms and legs. There was a deep gash on his right thigh as well. He seemed to ignore all that, though. His eyes were locked on the stranger.

The slave was breathing deep and hard, battered and red in the face. He held the shiv in front of his body, sticking it dangerously close to Nikephoros’ face.

“Look,” he gasped breathlessly, “Nothing happened here, alright? I didn't do anything – just a bit of fun, eh? I barely even touched her.”

Nikephoros didn’t react. He just wiped the blood from his face. It left a long red smear across his cheek. Looking at him, Penelope had to shudder. She could almost see the furies, spreading their wings behind his back...

Hope you'll like this one, and don't forget, there are 2 more short stories waiting for you at my Gumroad page, or they are free to download for all my Patrons!

June News - The Crew of Persephone, Zeus Horkios and the last stage of the process

Phew, the time flies when you’re having fun! And I certainly had fun these last few weeks, not only with the new tool I am using - the Character Creator-IClone pipeline - but also with Blender procedural landscapes. I was able to learn a lot about landscape creation and you can be sure I will be sharing my knowledge in the near future.

Firstly, I was able to finish up upgrading my hero models for my film, so now, the main crew of Persephone is more or less done and ready for the battle of Marathon!

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The Crew of the trireme Persephone, from the left:

Nikephoros - the main hero of the story, an aristocrat and landowner from Attica, also, the Trierarch of Persephone, the blue trireme on the right. He is husband to Penelope and father to Alkaios, through whose eyes we will view the short film. He is one of the (fictional) heroes of Marathon.

Aegeus - Taciturn Spartan exile. He left Lacedaemon after his family fell into disgrace, leaving for the open seas to find a new life. Instead, Egyptian slavers found him. He was saved by Nikephoros and his crew and now serves as a captain of marines.

Chalcon - Carefree and merry Kretan archer who joined the crew mostly because he was terribly bored of his life in his hometown of Phaistos.

Bias - Nikephoros' childhood friend, son of a freed slave serving on his estate. Due to his tough upbringing, where he and his father had to flee Aetolia when their hometown was sacked and survive on their own for many months, he learned many outdoor skills. Now he servers as a scout for the crew.

Hermogenes - a mercenary from Boeotia, likes women and drink and often wears the archaic bell armor of his father to battle. When it comes to fighting, he likes to plough through the enemy lines as directly as possible.

Also, I started updating some of the older shots, so I’ve completely redone the intro shot of the original teaser, to have it make more sense. In this version, I added Nikephoros and he is now actually kneeling before the statue of Zeus Horkios, swearing he will uphold the rules of upcoming athletic competitions. This something each athlete needed to do before competing in the Olympics.

Finally, I continued playing around with lots of environmental stuff in Blender, using nodes to generate procedural landscapes. Putting together various tutorials from Youtube, I was able to finalize my ocean shader and desert shader. I’ve shared setups for both of these on my Patreon, and broke them down in my livestreams, available there as well. Hope you like!

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With that, I am pleased to say I am finally entering the final stage of making this short film. Now, it will be all about shot assembly and animation. Lots of work ahead of me, but I am positively brimming with excitement. I was looking forward to this stage for so long it’s now almost surreal to get to it :-)

Let’s finish up this thing!

Chairé!

Martin