Dale Johnson Productions

"A BRIEF HISTORY OF DALE JOHNSON PRODUCTIONS"

by Dale M.A. Johnson
3/30/05

Dale Johnson Productions started out as an idea in late 1999/early 2000 to create a personal web site to show of my drawings and stories and whatever else I felt like uploading at the time. My skills at the time where not that great as I was still getting a feel for the internet, and I wasn't the greatest artist around (I'm still not, by the way). I tried several different site layouts, but nothing worked, and I didn't have anywhere to put the page online, anyhow.

The Beginning

At last, in the mid to later part of 2000, I was able to secure a small amount of free web space on my dad's internet account. And so, Dale Johnson Productions was born - Only then it was known as Michael Johnson Productions, since at the time I generally went by my middle name.

There wasn't really much there to speak of, with the exception of a few screen shots of (soon to die) game projects that I was working on in QBasic. The site also functioned as a sort of hub for my freelance web design work. Needless to say, I didn't get a whole lot of clients, and I didn't make a whole lot of money.

Eventually, however, I settled with the design pictured above, of which little remains. I didn't bother to archive anything I made, so for the purposes of this article, most of the images had to be remade. There were several pictures I used on the site using a very ancient version of Lizy the Lizard which regretably I could not find. I do recall, however, a cute picture of Lizy holding a giant envolope which was shown along with my contact information at one time. It will be sorely missed. So, in the end, though nearly all the orignal HTML was found berried deep in dark corners of my hard drive, I had to substitute later pictures of Lizy from the LizVenture to recreate the image. In any case, this image now provides a permenant record of the basic feel of the original website, if nothing else.

I consider the true birth of "Dale Johnson Productions" to be Saturday, April 7, 2001, which was when the LizVenture was at last completed and uploaded. The LizVenture was an on-line "Choose Your Own Adventure" clone with some background music and pictures of the characters. (Interesting fact: The LizVenture was originally going to include sound effects, but I couldn't find a good way to impliment them, so the idea was scrapped.) At the time, I thought it was revolutionary, but in truth, it didn't catch on a whole lot. It proved enough to spawn a three-part comic book series, however, which was hand-inked and painted.

The Lizy comic book series, though fun to make, proved to be a lot of work (thanks to the amount of time was spent painting each panel by hand, mixing the paint, etc.). So though I had planned to keep them coming, I stoped at three. Ideas for new comics danced in my head, though, as well as simplier design schemes. Thus, the Lizy comics would later serve as the insperation for "The Shadow Warrior" comic series.

The First Golden Age

Soon after the release of the first comic, a new site design was implemented. I had just gotten ahold of a freeware graphics program called "Embelish," which is sort of like a scaled down, watered-down version of Adobe Photoshop. Yet, it was a world better than the jagged graphics of Microsoft Paint, so I decided to redesign the site to be both more update friendly, and more friendly on my guest's eyes. And so, the design pictured to the right was launched on Wednesday, October 3, 2001.

I also began actually finishing games at this point, and so I entered the indie programming landscape with "Block Drop," a horrible, repetitive game that started out as a Tetris Clone, and ended as a mess. Fortunantly, I didn't dwell on it, and got to work on a new puzzle-action game, "The Pickles." At the same time, I continued working on Lizy in a new story, "The Adventures of Lizy the Lizard," which featured hand-inked and painted illustrations to go with each chapter of the narrative. Though still difficult to get around to, single images were easier to do than the pages and pages of panels required for the old Lizy comics.

I consider this time the first golden age because, to my surprise, people were actually coming to my site. I was getting actual fan e-mails, and people began posting in the site forums (then hosted on EZBoards). Site updates were common, and I had plenty of ideas and time to work on them.

The dream ended in May of 2002. I had been homeschooled, and at that point I was definantly a high school graduate. A little hard to explain, but anyhow, I began looking for something to do with my life (I couldn't spend it all sleeping on my parent's couch, now could I?). I began looking into my life-long love: animation. But I didn't consider myself a great artist, and besides, animation was a lot of work, and college cost a lot. I looked into several prestigious animation schools in New York and California, namely places like CalArts.

I eventually ended up being accepted to the Art Institute of Houston in June. Though it wasn't my first choice (I wasn't sure I wanted to be a computer animator), I don't regret it to this day. The downside was that my time for working on my own side projects dropped considerably. The upside was that I wouldn't starve to death.

My first quarter at the school was slow and allowed me to adjust, and it gave me time to finish my second freeware game, The Pickles, to critical acclaim, on November 2nd of that year. Chapters of Lizy the Lizard were still going up semi-regularly, my next game, a platformer then-called "Ace Foxworth and the Omega Sphere" (later "Ace Foxworth and the Book of Dreams" are released as "Ace Foxworth and the Mountain of Fire"), and ideas for simple comic book series were dancing around in my head, just waiting to get started and uploaded to the site.

The Dark Ages

The golden age ended, I think, Janurary 20, 2003. There were a total of five site updates that year, and nothing was completed. To make matters worse, I lost my paints and was unable to finish The Adventures of Lizy the Lizard, which stopped abrupty just a few chapters from completion.

But there was still some notacible steps forward. The Ace Foxworth game continued to progress slowly, piece by piece, throughout 2003, and on July 2 of that slow year, the current name of the site was adopted: Dale Johnson Productions, which used the name I had become accustomed to in college. The general idea for The Shadow Warrior was also born durning this time.

The Renaissance

Things suddenly came back to life on July 6, 2004, after over eight months without an update. A new, sleeker , more professional design was introduced to add color, and like all previous designs, make it easier to update. In this case, the design was made to be compatible with Macromedia Dreamweaver and its templates, so changes could be make quickly, and would be reflected on all pages. The number of pages was also reduced so that each "world" only had one page (one for Lizy, one for Ace, etc.).

And, at last, the site was moved to a new resting place as a sub site to my professional web site at www.dmajohnson.com on August 21, 2004. The site still yearned for its own domain name, but its current state would prove to be just fine. To top it all off, after graduating with an associate's degree in September, time was finally set aside to kick off The Shadow Warrior, which began Friday, December 10, 2004. Since then, the site has continued to grow, and updates have become more frequent.

Most interesting of all , Dale Johnson Productions is now also an official company, or at least a subpart of. On September 28, 2004, I started my freelance business, Dale Johnson Animation and Graphic Design, which Dale Johnson Production unofficially runs under to this day.

Who knows what the future holds for Dale Johnson Animation and DJPro? Only time will tell...