Progress Report - May 10, 2018 - Week 2 (Patreon)

What's this? A Thursday progress report, actually being posted on Thursday? What is this blasphemy?!

People seemed to like last week's progress report structure, of things being highly ordered and listed out. So let's do that again.

Blue Star Episode 3

As the picture for this Patreon post suggests, I am in the process of adding the dub-cues to the Blue Star Episode 3 dub-video. These are color-coded cues and dialogue applied directly onto the video, giving the voice talent (Ivan and Innie, in this case) information about when to record what, and for how long.

Dub cues are done in two passes: the first pass, which I am undergoing right now, involves actually placing the cues on screen. The second pass, which is done after the first's completion (as the title of "pass" would suggest), is transposing the text and time-stamps to a text file.

The reason for the second pass is that some of the text elements move by really quickly, and occasionally take longer to read than they exist on screen for (I pack a lot of information into them, for precise performance direction). In the past, I have had voice talent completely skip over them, without even realizing they were ever there.

And so by having them all written out in a separate text file, the voice talent can study the directions, removed from the video. And they can be aware of all the elements, even the ones so fast they'd normally miss them. Then they can view the cues in context of the video to further cement their understanding of what is being asked of them.

It's a slow-going process, made even slower by the fact that I apparently never revised the second act of the sex scene - and boy HOWDY did it need it! So, while I was dub-cue'ing that act, I actively rewrote the dialogue of the second act.

I finished dub-cue'ing act 2 earlier today,  which means that it is successfully rewritten. The purpose for the rewrite is that earlier drafts of the sex scene (really, the episode as a whole), had some awkward, stilted, and overly extended dialogue all throughout. When I revised the screenplay, I reworked all of the dialogue to be much better than how it was previously.

Act 1 of the sex scene was revised twice, and Act 3 a whopping five times, in my quest for getting the dialogue just right. But Act 2 was never revised at all - I must have skimmed over it during the weeks I spent rewriting on accident.

But now Act 2 is up to pace with the rest of the project's writing, and I'm remembering why it took me so long to get through animating these Acts in the first place - lots of breaks are necessary, if you know what I mean.

During the rewriting process, I have added an entirely new animation sequence. It's not terribly complex, clocking in at less than 8 seconds, but it adds a nice narrative flourish. It quickly expresses that Liara's not totally out of her field in this encounter, gives some insight into the motivations behind her mission, and is delightfully naughty - all at the same time!

As of right now, I have 12 minutes dub-cued, of the total 17-minute sex scene runtime, meaning I have 5 minutes (Act 3) left to do. After that is the grueling task of transposing everything to text.

And luckily, since Act 3 has already been revised so heavily, those 5 minutes should go much faster than Act 2's 6 minutes went, since I won't be actively rewriting the entire damn thing at the same time.

I am hoping to have all of the cue'ing done - including the text-file transposition - by Monday evening.

On the Femshep cameo front, Saville and I have been working together in a sort of give-and-take relationship, where she offers her current interpretation of what I'm asking for,  I give her feedback on what I like and what can be improved on (with massive analytical help from Ordagon, who frankly should be a professional voice coach, in my opinion), and then she sends me a new take and we repeat that cycle.

As of right now, I'm thinking Saville is getting extremely close. I can tell that, the more we iterate on this, the more comfortable she's getting with it, and the more natural and into-it her performance is getting. Which is exactly the sort of performance I want.

Ordagon's opinion will be the hammer-strike, hopefully delivered later tonight as he gets off work. Whether or not that hammer-strike will be to break it down and ask for another iteration, or to forge the steel true and cement the take as final, I cannot say yet. I am personally very impressed, but then, I am easily impressed with voice performances - this is why I rely on the opinions of others like Ordagon to keep me in line, and make sure only the best performances are utilized.

Radio Silence

Not a huge amount of information to report on with the Jill short.

I have picked a sound designer, but due to their working professionally as a sound designer, they don't want me to disclose their working name, which is understandable. They don't have an alias or any work they can attach to it right now, so we're working on getting a healthy chunk of the Jill project engineered, so that we can use that as a way to demonstrate they're a solid pick for the project.

And I do believe they're a solid pick. The fact they work as a professional sound designer should be a hint enough at that, but that of course doesn't necessarily mean they're cut out for this specific type of sound design. But what they showed me on the tiny samples of material I gave them to work with has convinced me they can definitely pull it off.

Beyond the sound designer, the composer has submitted their final tracks. I'm satisfied with them, but I am giving the sound designer full creative control over that, including whether or not they want to actually use the composer's soundtrack. Regardless, the composer has been paid, and if all else fails, they will have another chunk of work they can use for their portfolio - I plan to give them full creative rights to the soundtrack, once the project is released, regardless of if it's used or not. After all, they did compose it. It doesn't seem fair to me to hold them hostage, just because I commissioned them.

Honeydrop Interrogation

On the Leliana front, there's honestly even less news to share.

Milly has notified me that their roommate has moved out earlier this week, which means that she has more availability to record (previously she had to record around their work schedule, so as to not disturb them).

She is hoping to have the dub audio to me by Monday.

Ivan's been working away at his part in the video as well. He got me some rough takes for it that he wasn't terribly enthralled with, but nevertheless wanted my opinions on. My opinion was the same as his. We haven't spoken since, but I suspect he will tackle re-recording them this weekend, too, if time permits.

And time may not permit: while Ivan is usually the living definition of punctual, some temporary complications have come up that make free time for recording a bit of a luxury for him. He does what he can, but we might just have to wait for those complications to sort themselves out. Which hopefully won't take too long. As always, I will keep you informed how things are going in that regard.

Elizabeth Video (don't have a name for it yet...)

Onto Elizabeth next, there isn't much to report on here. Innie has gotten all of the non-sex audio recorded (which is a fair bit, since this is actually a 4-part structure, rather than the classic 3-part structure I've been using. Basically, the "sex scene", which is normally Part 2, has been split into a "sexy tease" scene and a "sexy sex" scene. Parts 1 (pre-sex), 2 (tease), and 4 (post-sex) have all been recorded, leaving only the sex scene itself left.

Unfortunately, Innie has recently been struck down by inexplicable fatigue and exhaustion the past few weeks. She's been trying to work through it, but after passing out while trying to work several separate times yesterday, I insisted she see a doctor as quickly as possible about it. She was hoping to see one today, but I haven't heard on that front since we discussed it last night.

She's a fighter, and she's gotten through far worse in the past few years. All I ask is please be patient with her. We're doing the best we can to get the Elizabeth video done, but the universe seems to actively being working against us every step of the way.

That won't stop us, though. ;)

Sunday Texts

So you might have noticed I've been really bad about the biweekly Sunday texts. April was a fucking hectic month for me, with trying to get Jill done on time (and I succeeded! At least on the animation front...).

I actually intended to get back on course with that this past Sunday, but my hard reset (see next section) fucked that up. So this Sunday I will be posting a new text, and then will do my best to stick to the biweekly text releases.

I apologize for the inconvenience there!

Personal Going-Ons

I don't like to include these often, but when they have an impact on work, I feel it'd be inappropriate to forego them.

In this case, it's nothing serious - in fact, it's actually a good thing.

In a nutshell, I hard-reset my sleep schedule, Sunday into Monday. What that means is I stayed up for 33 straight hours (got up at 1PM Sunday afternoon, went to bed 9PM Monday evening). That's why I didn't get the text posted.

The reason for this is my sleep schedule has a tendency to slip, and when I start regularly going to bed at 5AM and getting up at noon, I get tired of it all and hard reset. I can't do a gradual creeping of waking up earlier, because experience has taught me I can apparently function on 3 hours of sleep (Or, "function" - but I still don't get to bed until 5AM, even if I get up at 8AM...). I can't do a gradual creeping of going to bed earlier, because my body just goes "fuck you" and lays awake until the time I would normally go to bed (EG around 5AM). Hard resets are the only thing that seem to work.

Fortunately, hard resets seem to work spectacularly well, and I am back on a schedule of going to bed around midnight and getting up at 8AM. Which is doubly beneficial because, despite my sleep schedule slippage, I am actually a morning person - I have the most energy and motivation and work around 8AM, and then again around 7PM. Between noon and 7PM is my worst time, where it's a chore to motivate myself to do anything. These late nights have fucked my early-morning, leaving me with just the late-night, where I have the motivation to work but am tired from struggling to work through the day.

So, yeah, that's about all I've got for you this week. Look forward to that text being posted on Sunday, and I will see you all next week!