Greetings, Key Fanatics! Clannad Man here with an update & invitation.

Later this month from May 24th through 26th, anime fans will gather from all over to attend Anime North in Toronto, Canada’s premier anime convention and one of the largest in the Americas. I will be moderating a presentation on Key (the studio [...]]]>

Greetings, Key Fanatics! Clannad Man here with an update & invitation.

Later this month from May 24th through 26th, anime fans will gather from all over to attend Anime North in Toronto, Canada’s premier anime convention and one of the largest in the Americas. I will be moderating a presentation on Key (the studio responsible for Kanon, Air, Clannad, Little Busters!, Angel Beats!, Rewrite and others), and will be joined by a panel of Kagikko including Doki VN’s jakeman95, Aieon, and even Key15th.com founder Cloud668′s plush Botan! Several project supporters will also be in attendance at the convention, and we’d love to talk with you!

Our page on the Anime North forums can be found HERE.

In case you happen to miss us, don’t worry! We will also be present at the Nominoichi event, where several rare Key collectables will be on display. It will be difficult to miss us.

In other news, submissions to the Key15th Anniversary Letter Project are officially closed. Submissions may still be processed, but there is no longer a guarantee they will appear in the published book. However, there will be a final opportunity to offer submissions personally after the 「key15th」 presentation at Anime North. We hope to see you there!

Hello amigos! This time it won’t be Cloud668 making an update post (Thanks for all the hard work so far!), but just another Key fan from Finland! I got asked to write a little post from the project I’ve been working for. As the pictures above show, I’ve been working on a small wooden [...]]]>

Hello amigos! This time it won’t be Cloud668 making an update post (Thanks for all the hard work so far!), but just another Key fan from Finland! I got asked to write a little post from the project I’ve been working for. As the pictures above show, I’ve been working on a small wooden starfish as the submission.

After the Key15th anniversary project got (un)officially announced, I had been thinking that what should I make for the project. What could I make, which would properly show my gratitude towards Key? I got my answer during rewatching some of the series from Key. In one of the series there was a certain Legendary Starfish Manipulator, who handed out star-shaped objects in attempt to reach out to people. What else could be more fitting as a submission than a handmade wooden starfish?

If the starfish gets accepted by the project staff, I’ll have it sent to Key with the Key15th Project book. I hope that it will make its way to the headquarters of Key, where it would remind the company of all the fans around the world.

The whole album and more comments from the project can be found _here_

I’m also looking for finnish Key fans for a possible panel/lecture in a convention during the next winter. If you are interested, add me as a friend in Steam.

To start off, I am very happy [...]]]>

Juhachi just informed me that it’s Komari’s birthday today! To celebrate the occasion, I decided to make a new, short project update post. However, since there doesn’t appear to be any Komari-centric submissions (;_;), here are fan arts of Sasami by bekicot and Kyousuke by VictorLightly, respectively.

To start off, I am very happy to say that, thanks to everyone’s efforts, we have received a total of 148 letter and short messages submissions. We are now past the deadline for untranslated letters and messages, which was three days ago on April 1, but we will still accept letters and messages on a case-to-case basis (submissions with a Japanese translation provided, for example). On that note, we are still accepting fan art, cosplay, and other submissions until April 27, so mark your calendars if you are working on something!

On other news, we are exploring the possibility of printing additional copies of the letter/art book that we will be sending to Key and relevant publications, at cost, to anyone who is interested. Please note that we do not hope to earn anything out of this project, and this is just to see if we can possibly get a better quote when we order the books. We do not know how much printing the books will cost yet, and this is merely to gauge interest (and might not even happen at all). Regardless of whether this goes through, we will provide the PDF of the book on here and on DeviantArt. If you are interested, please leave a comment or drop by the IRC channel. We are also planning to host a panel at the upcoming Anime North convention in Toronto in late May, and we will announce more details later on once we have everything laid out.

As a minor update, the wiki now makes use of semantic properties of Semantic MediaWiki. What this means is that certain details on the submissions (such as Name and Location) can now be easily sorted and accessed on the wiki, which will help us when we compile everything together into the art book.

Lastly, happy birthday, Komari!

For those who are unfamiliar with the project, the Key 15th project is a fan-coordinated effort to reach out to Key with a collection of fan messages, letters, and illustrations to showcase international fan support of their works and to commemorate their fifteenth anniversary.

Update 2: The submission wiki is currently a bit unstable (Someone needs to give me a lecture on properly configuring php-fpm, I think). It is highly recommended that you save your text on your computer first before submitting it. We will give a bit of a leeway for letter/message submissions if this [...]]]>

Update 2: The submission wiki is currently a bit unstable (Someone needs to give me a lecture on properly configuring php-fpm, I think). It is highly recommended that you save your text on your computer first before submitting it. We will give a bit of a leeway for letter/message submissions if this is causing any trouble.

—

Hello, fellow Kagikko! It’s again been a while since our last post, and there are several announcements that I have piled up, so here’s a short, new status update!

First, we will now impose a deadline of April 1st on letter and messages, and a deadline of April 27th on images submissions to the Key 15th Project. I notice that this announcement is a bit of a short notice, but we decided to create this deadline in order to allow our translators enough time to prepare for the translations of the messages and letters, as well as to give our designer adequate time to design the layout of the yearbook. Please note that since this deadline is created for submissions that require translations, image submissions will have a bit of leeway.

I would also like to announce that we have received our first batch of DeviantArt submissions from the #Key-Visual-Arts-Club. Thanks to everyone’s contributions and the relentless effort of Dafoose (one of #Key-Visual-Arts-Club’s co-founders), the batch of more than 90 fan art has brought us to over 210 submissions! Featured above is an illustration of Kanade by Karuma-chan, another co-founder of the club. These submissions can be found here.

I am running out of things to say for this post, but we will have another post soon (probably later this month) to discuss some ideas that we have been cooking up. Until then, please continue working on your submission if you haven’t submitted yet!

Edit: Following discussions with other staff members, we will stop accepting letters and messages on April 1st; this is also the “preferred deadline” for images. The stated April 27th is the deadline for images.

For those who are unfamiliar with the project, the Key 15th project is a fan-coordinated effort to reach out to Key with a collection of fan messages, letters, and illustrations to showcase international fan support of their works and to commemorate their fifteenth anniversary.

Since it’s been a month since our last update, it’s time for another (and this year’s first) project update! First of all, I would like to thank all of the individuals and groups who have participated in spreading the word of the project. Thanks to everyone’s effort, the Key15th Project saw a [...]]]>

Since it’s been a month since our last update, it’s time for another (and this year’s first) project update! First of all, I would like to thank all of the individuals and groups who have participated in spreading the word of the project. Thanks to everyone’s effort, the Key15th Project saw a huge boost in the number of submissions over the holiday season, and we now have over 80 submissions, not including those that are submitted to one of the participating groups over at DeviantArt (shout out to #ClannadClub and #Key-Visual-Arts-Club)!

On the more technical side of the project, we recently redesigned the submission form to make it look (hopefully) easier to navigate and more intuitive. I am happy to announce that this new submission form also supports uploading multiple attachments without the previously-used Upload Wizard (which probably confused a lot of people since it didn’t add the files to the submissions directly). For an example of a submission having multiple attachments, please take a look at CuteMichiyo’s cosplay photography submission. In addition, we also added a contact form for any questions pertaining to the project or submission; you are still welcome to ask questions over at the IRC channel.

On other news, I am also very happy to pass on the news that Planetarian, the kinetic novel by Key, is now available in English on iOS, and that the complete English patch for Rewrite has been completed by the fine folks over at Amaterasu! I would like to encourage everyone to give these visual novels a try, and send in a letter or a short message to express their gratitude. To coincide with the completion of the Rewrite translation, we are featuring RandomDesu’s wonderful Rewrite fan art submission as this post’s accompanying image.

We have some exciting things planned for later this year. Until then, please stay tuned for more updates.

- Cloud668

For those who are unfamiliar with the project, the Key 15th project is an effort to reach out to Key with a collection of fan messages, letters, and illustrations to showcase international fan support of their works.

With today being Christmas and the end of the year inbound, I felt it would be appropriate to write a new post for an update on the Key 15th Anniversary Letter Project. For those who are unfamiliar with the project, the Key 15th project is an effort to reach out to Key [...]]]>

With today being Christmas and the end of the year inbound, I felt it would be appropriate to write a new post for an update on the Key 15th Anniversary Letter Project. For those who are unfamiliar with the project, the Key 15th project is an effort to reach out to Key with a collection of fan messages, letters, and illustrations to showcase international fan support of their works.

Ever since submissions opened this past August, a number of dedicated Key fans from different parts of the world have sent in short messages and letters to express their appreciation to Key. These submissions represent fans from a variety of locations (Brazil and Vietnam to name a few) that are not within the official reach of Key and Visual Art’s, and reinforces our goal to display the cultural diversity among fans who share a common gratefulness for Key’s works and their effects on our lives. I am also pleased to announce that a number of translation groups and individuals have given their support to the project by helping spread awareness of the project, and that the number of new submissions have risen as a result of their efforts.

Nevertheless, to better represent the influence and reach of Key’s works and the proportion of their fans, the Key 15th Project remains in need of more submissions. With the holiday season ongoing, I would like to encourage fans of Key’s titles to participate in the project. If you would like to participate, you can submit a Key-themed artwork, image, letter, or even just a simple, short message expressing your gratitude; project volunteers will do their best to translate these contributions. You can also help by simply spreading the word about the project to your friends or even just republishing this post. Participation in any form will be much appreciated.

To end my post, I would like to conclude with a short quote from Tomoyo After that I think reflects the project’s aims quite well—

Before I realised it, a lot of people had gathered in the kitchen to make sweets, and they were all smiling.

May everyone have a happy Christmas.
- Cloud668

For more information, please visit the about page. Submissions can be made here.

It’s been a little more than a month since the project was announced, and even though it took a little longer than I expected, I am happy to announce that we are now taking submissions! As reported in our last post, we were deciding between using MediaWiki or Shimmie, and [...]]]>

It’s been a little more than a month since the project was announced, and even though it took a little longer than I expected, I am happy to announce that we are now taking submissions! As reported in our last post, we were deciding between using MediaWiki or Shimmie, and after some evaluations, we decided to go with using a MediaWiki installation to accept and host the submissions. With the help of a couple extensions, we were able to create a simple, standardized submission process that should make it easy for anyone to submit something.

We are now accepting messages, letters, and images (fan art, cosplay, etc.) over at our Submission Wiki. Registration is not required for submissions, but it is highly recommended as it helps with user identification and allows for email notifications. It is, however, required for file uploads. To provide a few examples, some of the messages and images submitted to the Key 10th Anniversary Letter Project have been uploaded to the submission wiki. Please read the criteria first before submitting something. Note that although we do accept video submissions, we are still working out the guidelines/criteria for that aspect of the project, and video uploads are not currently allowed on the wiki. If you have any questions about submitting something, please leave a comment here or join us on IRC.

We do not have a set date for when we will stop accepting submissions, which will last until January at the earliest, and probably longer than that. At the end of the submission phase, we will collect these fan submissions to the best of our capacity into a yearbook and DVD, which we will print and send to Key and related publishers on Key’s 15th anniversary next year. As a huge fan of Key, I personally ask you to please take a moment to voice your appreciation to Key and its staff members, and help showing them the extent of its fan base outside of Japan.

A couple participants and I have been working on the submission criteria for the messages, letters, videos, and art. The criteria are not meant to be restrictive, but are intended to [...]]]> It’s been a while since I last wrote a post here on the blog, so I thought I would give everyone a status update.

A couple participants and I have been working on the submission criteria for the messages, letters, videos, and art. The criteria are not meant to be restrictive, but are intended to guarantee the submissions will maintain a certain degree of responsibility and quality (e.g. no plagiarism or tracing of official art and a recommended 300 DPI). Discussion of the criteria is still underway on our IRC channel, and will be provided by the time we begin accepting submissions.

I have also been installing a few software such as a forum, Mediawiki and Shimmie to evaluate which system we should use to handle and collect the submissions (I was told that we could use an AJAX form plugin for WordPress too, but I haven’t exactly tried that out yet). Take a look after the break for a couple of screenshots to get an idea how submitting an image will be like. Note that the screenshots only cover image submissions, and do not entail the submission process for messages, letters, and videos. I am sure everyone has uploaded something to forums running phpBB or vBulletin before, so I won’t include screenshots for that.

Also, I am saddened that Uguu didn’t come out on top in the poll, but I love Kud too.

Unrelated Update: Added new banners. Thanks, [RoXaS] and Ilmari_16!

Update 2: Gave the guys the wrong dimensions; the header’s adjusted to the new size now. Also added Winter Confetti to the blogroll.

Wafuu, fellow Kagikko! It’s only been a few days since the project’s reveal, but there are already a few developments that I would like to announce.

It is my pleasure to announce that Project Wafuu has joined the Key 15th Anniversary Letter Project as a participants alongside the rest of the team! [...]]]>

Wafuu, fellow Kagikko! It’s only been a few days since the project’s reveal, but there are already a few developments that I would like to announce.

It is my pleasure to announce that Project Wafuu  has joined the Key 15th Anniversary Letter Project as a participants alongside the rest of the team! I would also like to announce that, following discussions with Aspirety, the Kinniku Project‘s goal of creating a video love letter to promote muscles awareness of the western Key and Little Busters! fandom has been absorbed into the Key15th project. In order to ensure the project’s original aims will be fulfilled, Aspirety will provide substantial input to the Key15th project, and will continue to oversee the creation of the video.

Stay tuned for more announcements, and join us at #key15th on Rizon!