Progress Report - July 2, 2024 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

It's been a painfully long and arduous journey, but I have finally gotten the Pharmmetra storyboard in a place where not only am I happy with it, but I think it's a right fucking banger. Honestly, I think this'll end up being one of my best videos to date.

Hard to believe that just last week I was on the knife's edge of cutting the damn thing, because I just couldn't get the fucker to work worth a damn, huh?

Just goes to show, you can accomplish anything with enough crying and writing!

The storyboard ended up running longer than I wanted, clocking in just shy of 13 minutes against the 10-minute target. But every fucking frame is a painting, and I personally feel that not a single second is wasted. I think what I have here is pure fucking fire, and I honestly don't think I need to, nor could even if I wanted to, cut a single sequence.

You can click here to watch the full 13-minute storyboard!

The entire narrative that emerged is tighter than DVa herself, and while I didn't get to even half of the ideas I wanted to incorporate (I didn't even get a single instance of Symmetra referring to Pharah as her wife, so technically their relationship is ambiguous in this project), most all of those ideas can be incorporated into other videos later down the line. What I have here works beautifully as it is, so I won't cry over what was left on the cutting-room floor.

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With all of this being said, my plan moving forward is to update all of the pending voices on the new storyboard (and the production delays it caused), make sure everyone involved is okay with everything here (making sure everyone is comfortable with the material is always of paramount importance to me - the last thing I want to do is make anyone working on a project uncomfortable!), and then just jump straight into production.

There's 13 unique sex animations involved in this storyboard. If we take a conservative estimate of 1 animation per day, with 5 work days in a week (discounting Thursdays which are my days off, and Saturdays which are my Unreal-Engine-streaming days), then that'd be 2.5-ish weeks to get those animations done. Throw in a few more days for the climax animations, which while much simpler do still need to get done, and let's make a conservative 3-week estimate for getting all of the raw animations done.

Realistically I could probably do 2 animations a day, which would cut that down to 1.5 weeks, but let's just be safe and assume the full 3 weeks. Give some breathing room for things going awry.

Once all of the core loops and the climax animations are built, I can send everything off for audio recording. Because of the sheer amount of sex dialogue there is in this project, I'm not going to do my usual method of 2 different recording passes, and just have all of the audio recorded all at once. Which means there will be a period where I won't have any sex animations to build, but I won't have any non-sex audio to lip-sync. Instead, I'll use that time for lighting, polishing, maybe even same camera choreography. I'll make it work.

I also intend to send the first build of the animation over to my sound designer, so that he can start putting together the soundscape. He won't have any character audio to mix at this point, but he can put together all of the slap-slap-slap-clap-clap-clap, the sound effects, and the ambient audio at this point at least.

I always pencil in an assumed week for audio to be recorded and delivered to me. In practice it's usually much faster than that, but again, I like to be conservative with my time estimates. So that puts us at 4 weeks of production time now.

Once the audio comes in and gets installed, it gets immediately delivered off to my sound designer, so that he can start doing the final mix on all of that. While he does that, I work on the lip-sync and the full-body emotive animation (head, body, and arm motions to match the emphasis of the voice performance).

For now, I'm going to assume 2 weeks of production time for lip-sync and emotive animation. Throw in 1 more week for final polish, and that puts the final production schedule estimation at 7 weeks of production time.

It's a lot more than what I originally wanted - the goal was to put together an 8-to-10 minute video in 4 weeks, like the Corsair video was roughly able to do if you discount the audio delays that hit during production. But 2 months for a 13-minute video with this much content in it, I think is a reasonable ask.

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Looking forward a bit more, the plan for after this video is done and released is for me to spend a week or two working on the Frozen video. My goal right now is to get all 50+ minutes of it properly split up and marked for dubbing, and send it off for that monster of a recording task.

That is all I intend to do on the Frozen video at this point. Once it's out for dubbing, it's going back in the freezer (fitting, huh?) for a few months. I then shift gears for another 30-day production sprint on Overbreed, before we repeat this whole cycle again.

Hopefully, next time won't be so tortured. I have a lot of project ideas I can pull on this time around. Some of them, like the Life is Strange ideas, people very clearly signaled need to be heavily reworked. Others, like the Witcher and Marie ideas, are pretty much ready to pop right out of the box. And other ideas yet, like the Primordium and DOAFACU ideas, I need to tinker with a little bit to really make viable.

I can tell you right now I am not going to go through the fucking gauntlet again, though. Trying to put together 15 storyboards in 14 days is, amazingly, extremely fucking stressful. Then there was the matter of operating the polls and all the logistics behind that. I'm not going to do that next time around.

For the next short video, I'm going to take full executive control and just pull the trigger on an idea, and you all will hopefully be along for the ride.

I knew going into this that preproduction was going to take a chunk of time apart from production for the short video. But I expected like, a week. This whole tortuous cycle ended up taking over a fucking month. The process started in the last week of May, and now it's the first week of July.

That just isn't acceptable, and I have no intention of repeating those hellish five weeks again.

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At any rate, that's all for now! I hope you're all as excited as I am for not just Pharmmetra, but everything else that's in the pipe, too. Everything is taking longer than I wanted it to - everything always does - but there's denying the fact we're making good forward progress, and everything is shaping up rather delightfully.

Until next week, everyone!