Progress Report - August 30, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone.

You may have noticed that Overbreed Episode 0 hasn't been released yet.

The long and short of it is that my sound designer got covid. He was expecting to be done and send in the audio by the 25th (Thursday). He got sick around the 22nd (Monday), and wasn't even able to get himself out to bed until the 28th (Sunday). So he effectively lost an entire week to illness.

He's doing better now, and is actually able to get up and do things (or, as he put it, "stay awake for more than 45 minutes at a time before sleeping 2 hours"), but he's still dealing with the lingering effects of covid - coughing, mild fatigue, and most concerningly a brainfog that he can't shake off.

He's voiced a determination to finish the work on Overbreed Episode 0, but I don't know when that'll be. I don't want to push him because it's not exactly his fault this pandemic floored him like it did.

At the same time, Overbreed Episode 0's visuals have been sitting done on my hard drive for weeks now, in a state where I can't do anything except wait for their audio counterpart. And I very much would like to get it out sooner rather than later.

I have been using this down time to tie off various loose ends, however. The biggest things I've been focusing on lately are my new original idea, Parawhores, of which Miya the big tiddy goth girlfriend and tammy the pastel punk are central to. We've recently launched an on-stream project with them that's going well - I am taking this off time to write out the lore for the characters, to release alongside them in an effort to guide peoples' content creation with them.

The second major thing I've been working on is the Claire/Jill on-stream video. Clocking in at 22 minutes, it's been ready for voicing for months. The problem was that we wrote the entire video organically - there was no preproduction. We just made it up as we went.

Which is an extremely fun way to make videos, but the problem is that there is no documentation of the ideas behind the decisions. That documentation is necessary in the form of a screenplay for voice talent to properly interpret the director's intent, to provide the performance that the creator envisioned. I thought I could get the transcript done in a day. I could not.

So I've spent the past week putting that together. In total, it's just shy of 700 lines of formatted transcript, about a thousand words of dialogue between all the characters, and just over 200 individual shots total. The transcript is finally written. I've also written a new set of tools to synchronize the transcript and the video's on-screen subtitles, which the voice talent will be able to use to cross-reference shot numbers in the transcript to shot numbers in the video, to give a better idea of the motions that they will be voicing.

Speaking of tools, that's the third thing I've been working on: while putting together the Parawhores on-stream video (which, unlike the Frozen video and the Claire/Jill video, is actually properly written out and planned in advance), I've shown off some of the tools I've put together for working with Overbreed Episode 1. Several people have voiced interest in the tools, and so I have been working on polishing them up and sanding off the rough edges, getting them ready for a public release. I intend to release a whole set of tools, the ones I personally use to make my life easier when producing videos.

Fourthly, there's the matter of this week's post image: the minivids!

Recall that August's minivid was canceled in favor of Overbreed Episode 0. Also recall that Overbreed Episode 0 was ideally releasing August 1, and realistically releasing August 15. Yeah.

But I'm getting back onto the minivid horse. October's minivid will be with Gaige and Deathtrap. I still need to figure out December's and February's (I like to put these together in batches of three). This next batch of minivids, I am going to expand the formula slightly, and introduce a small amount of narrative on either end.

The past two batches of minivids have been build purely off the "one loop and finisher" paradigm. The Gaige video is going to explore the "several loops and finisher sandwiched between thin narrative" construction. I am hoping the other two minivids, whatever they end up being, will follow a similar construction. They will be closer in length and complexity to the first few videos I did, before Radio Silence (which was the complexity turning point for me).

September 1 (this Thursday) will see me sitting down and animating the bulk of the Gaige video. My goal is to have it ready for voicing by September 8 (the next Friday).

As a final note, the Frozen on-stream video has been temporarily suspended, for purely technical reasons. I did some napkin math, and projected it'd take somewhere between 30 and 60 days of non-stop rendering to push out the Frozen video at the usual 2160p quality. That is absurd.

And that is with its current runtime, not the projected final runtime if we kept working on it.

So I've put the brakes on that so we can instead focus on something that could be reasonably be rendered before the heat death of the universe. I intend to explore what's causing such a massive render time, and see if there's anything I can do to optimize it to get it more reasonably rendered. If I can increase SFM's performance in the project, that'd be fantastic too - normally I get a solid 24fps out of an SFM project when I pan the camera around with lighting on (SFM's playback hard-caps at 24fps, regardless of video framerate). In the Frozen project, I barely get 8fps with lights off - it's straight up unnavigable with lights on.

I have a few thoughts, but I need time to explore them. Hopefully my sound designer will be feeling well enough to get the audio done for Overbreed Episode 0 done soon, so we can get that out the door, and then I can take a week or so off to explore that as well.

So much to do, so little time to do it all.