Update 39: I made a mistake. (Patreon)

Well, several honestly, let’s talk about it.

This is just going to be all wordy and cannot be summarised, if all you want to know is the status of the latest project is that most/all of the core animation is done, all the assets are ready, all that remains is polish, sims, lighting and rendering.

I hope to release it this month.

Enter mistake number 1:

I failed to plan adequately

Sombra’s conclusion was an episode that I know people have been waiting for now for almost a year, I’d promised it would be the next project, it needed to be epic, perfect, I -could not afford to fuck it up-

And, I’d just added to the team a dedicated modeller, and he just went full time working on this. He’d managed to get a bunch of assets done in the time I took animating the last scene (despite also jugging a full time job at the time), so given all this extra time we now had, there’s no reason why we couldn’t manage it!.....     Right?

So, we went full bore, we imagined the most detailed, perfect rendition of what this space would look like, the theory was sound, give me, as the animator, enough basis to work on some aspects in the mean time, establish an order of operations to complete those assets in a manner that made the most sense, and work in parallel to complete the project. 

All of this started well, and apart from a little downtime here and there from me, Things progressed smoothly for the most part. Thanks to the developments to the model, my planning in having the model and voice work prepared ahead of time, my animation process had never been smoother, it being a rather restrictive, limited situation, (and not having mouth animation to worry about which is by far the most time consuming element) allowed me to steamroll ahead of my colleague’s place.

So, once again I was waiting on assets, so I spent some time helping out with those elements where I could, we were still early on in the production, we had time.

But then life struck. The team and I had a lot of personal challenges during this period, and that left us without any new toys, I’d completed as much animation as was worth doing at that point outside of the necessary context provided by the completed assets.

So once again, I was waiting for progress and twiddling my thumbs.

We continued to struggle, finding what I could to keep myself busy, but there was an enormous amount of wasted time, and being that I’m very much focused on a project to project basis, the idea of diverting my attention to something else whilst waiting for the assets didn’t seem like it was a good idea.

With the benefit of hindsight, I should never have gone straight into the Sombra project at that time.

It was too big and too ambitious to go straight into immediately off the back of the last production, in order to have kept a reasonable timeframe for releases I should have had another project with existing assets to do, whilst the assets for this project were being produced.

But I had promised I would do that one next, and I know everybody had been keen to see it, and I believed at the time it was something we needed to focus on, so I doubled down.

Unfortunately by the time I realised my error, it was just too late to pivot and turn something around in time that wasn’t then going to further delay the Sombra project, by the time I realised that we were going to end up well behind schedule, the damage was already done. 

I made a mistake in planning, and that cost us efficiency. I should have been more thoughtful about the production pipelines. These failures cost us, and slowed the output of content to a crawl. For that, I am sorry.

Enter mistake number 2:

I wanted the best of the best, but I’m not there yet.

The creation of an ‘all perfect all round universal super mesh’ was started almost 18 months ago now, and it’s still not ready. 

Now, whereas that’s not been a continuous 18 month project, with it taking a back seat to the needs of asset rigging and troubleshooting to the various works we’ve produced over that time, a significant portion of time and money has been poured into producing a model, a model that I wanted to use in my mainline A414 series.

My idea originally was that once complete, this could be something I could continue to work on in the downtime I had between whatever big project I might be waiting for (I could have spent the time I was idle during Sombra project to work on it for instance) 

The reality though was that this was too ambitious an idea for a small team at this point, and too much of a resource sink, and while I had held off taking action on this for a long time now given the significant investment in it; i had failed to identify this as something that needed pivoting away from.

So, this is now being regularly rigged with a normal method so that I can actually use it, and use it soon.

I wanted to not ‘regress’ into my previous scenes, because I saw the potential of what we could create, and didn’t want to take a step back, at the cost of providing entertainment to you all.

Again, a logistical oversight that cost us time, money, and productivity. One that has been corrected, but impactful nonetheless.

Enter mistake number 3:

I lost sight of why I do this.

When I started producing these animations, it was borne of a personal fantasy, it was full on, self insert ‘man this would be a fun scenario, wouldn’t it?’ reasoning.

It was my art. It is my art. It's my story, my legacy, and my passion. I wanted to show it to the world.

Then people started paying and supporting me to do it more, which encouraged me to continue doing it. This grew steadily over a little while until eventually, on a whim, I thought of a fun concept which I got a bit carried away with, and that became ‘The box’. This little side venture of mine turned overnight from a bit of a fun hobby that pays for itself, into something I could live off of.

And not just that, it was giving me a reason to get out of bed in the morning, I think everybody can relate, at least in some way, to the feeling of darkness in one’s life. I’ve said it before in an update many months ago, this… ‘job’ if you like was one of the first times in my life where I realised that, if money was no object, I would still continue to do it, I had found my passion.

As the months went on, and I became more comfortable with the idea of self employment, and we began to expand, I got excited about telling this original story again, it was left repressed for a while because, I’m no fool, I know that primarily my audience is interested in seeing futa girls be milked. What was supposed to be a fun little side piece was quickly becoming everything I was doing. I had some ideas to explore, and it took on a life of its own, but it was steering further and further away from the tracks, from the plan and ideas I had laid out to begin with, and that began to gnaw at me slowly.

I was flying by the seat of my pants, and was lucky enough to have a support network around me that allowed me to continue to produce content, even if it wasn’t the content I really wanted to do.

But the promise of expanding the team, of no longer having to do it all on my own, allowed the possibility of realising the story in a way I’d never imagined possible beforehand. As an artist, that possibility excited me. I set plans in motion to do it in the best way imaginable.

A very important factor to consider in reference to some of the comments I’ve seen here and elsewhere from a few members of the community, to paraphrase:

‘The stuff you’ve made already is good enough, just keep producing that and you’ll make more money and i’ll be happier’

People may see the insane level of detail we go to when producing assets for the scenes and think that it’s entirely not necessary, that, because they’re fixated on only one small section of the screen, that’s the only part that matters, and I shouldn’t be wasting my time with those other aspects.

It’s an entirely understandable point of view to have.

It also completely misses the point of why we do this.

If I hadn’t always had this drive to do better, I’d never have made the standard of animation that attracted people to me in the first place.

When I produce art, it’s as much for me as it is for you. If I’m not happy with the standard of what I show to the world, there really isn’t any point in me doing it. I don’t “make content”, I make art. Reducing my passion to a conveyor belt of ‘good enough’ is a misunderstanding of why I get out of bed each morning.

That’s not to say I don’t understand the importance of spending time in the right places, I think the fact that I produce the length of content that I do, on the schedule that I do, is testament to that fact.

But there’s no denying the fact that productions have started to reach a level of bloat and complexity that is starting to really just get a bit out of hand.

I was trying to find the next ‘the box’ in the hope that it would alleviate the pressure and desire I’ve had building in me to express myself, whilst not realising that I was going in the wrong direction, pointing us the way of bigger, more complex scenes at the cost of what made me start this in the first place.

To that end, I’m installing a new philosophy and approach to my content delivery plan from now on.

• With the exception of the Sombra piece (which is coming in at around 12 minutes) Productions are going to have a soft limit of 6-8 mins and a maximum of 10. If a story needs more time to evolve than that, it will be split into parts.

• Large, new scene pieces like Sombra will be less frequent, in favour of exploring alternative stories and characters in existing settings (the box, aimee’s labs etc)

• Side stories will be focused on expanding the world-building universe, and exploring all these different aspects through the lens of ‘mundane, ordinary people living in the universe we created’

• The lore and narrative, for the most part, will take centre stage. Pieces will be made that accentuate this, with a focus on providing a richer understanding of the interconnecting paths of the lore.

Thank you everyone for reading, I extend a sincere thanks to those that have stuck with me through this. I will always welcome any and all feedback, even if it’s harsh or critical. As long as it’s constructive, I will listen.

I cannot guarantee I will not make further mistakes in the future. I am human, and I will strive to be the best human I can be. I hope everyone can see the way these mistakes happen. They are born from good intentions, and are hard to visualise in the moment.

Thank you to all, and thank you for accepting my heartfelt apologies for the delays and production errors. I will be putting a lot of work into fixing their root causes, and will move on in a positive light.

Thank you. I could never do this without your support ❤️