Progress Report - November 5, 2024 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

All of the labor-intensive VFX work for the Pharmmetra project is done! All that's left to do is color-grading and motion blur, but neither of those are labor-intensive, and I am leaving them till the very end.

I have now shifted my focus to the sound design. As of today, I have all of the critical audio tracks generated and exported. The only audio track left to be generated is the non-sex Foley, but I am intentionally going to leave that till the end of this process, simply because I don't know what I am going to do for a lot of the Foley. I need to look around and see if I can find a good Foley library.

There are a lot of things in Foley you don't really think about. Things like, for example, Pharah swiping her phone. What sound should that make? In real life, it wouldn't really make any sound at all. But in a visual medium like video, silence feels wrong. The general rule of thumb in animation is that motions make sounds. If Pharah is making the motion to swipe her phone, then that swiping motion should be making sound. But what should it sound like? I don't know.

Those are the kinds of conundrums that I need to solve for Foley, and that is why I am leaving the Foley till the end. Everything else - all of the plap-plap-plap's and the room ambiance sounds - is a lot more straightforward to figure out. And then there is the matter of mixing everything together, panning things so they have spatiality, and applying reverb and equalization to make everything feels like it exists in a real space.

In total there are currently 24 generated audio tracks for me to manage. Once the Foley tracks are generated, it'll be 27 audio tracks (3 project files, with 1 Foley audio track per project file). I am not considering ambient tracks in this consideration, but I don't expect there to be more than maybe 4 layers of ambiance.

Again, I don't have the slightest idea of how long all of this will take. It's been years since I've done the sound design on a project entirely myself, and I've never done complete sound design in Davinci Resolve before. So we'll be figuring this out together.

But as always, I will keep you all informed on how things are going.

As a final aside, before I wrap this post up, something fun: there are 1,446 plap sounds for DVa getting her holes stuffed in this video. Assuming she's taking 12 inches of dick per plap, that comes out to DVa taking just over a quarter mile of dick in the video - 0.27 miles, to be precise.

I Tweeted a visualization of what a quarter mile of dick looks like, for those curious.

And that's all for now. Until next week, everyone!