Progress Report - September 5, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone.

So, it's been a week since the last post, and still no Overbreed Episode 0 release.

It turns out, while my sound design was bedridden with Covid, he became restless and overly ambitious. Once he was well enough to work again, he promptly picked up his music theory books and finally set out on something he's wanted to do for our videos for years now:

Compose an original soundtrack.

He is a musician by education, and a composer by hobby. The sound design gig is honestly just sort of an artifact that falls out of that. And he's been wanting to record his own music for the videos we work on together since Radio Silence, all the way back in 2018. But he's never found himself with the combination of motivation, opportunity, and time.

Getting struck down with covid and not being able to work on anything for a week gave him the motivation. The fact that Overbreed Episode 0 is uniquely cinematic - almost documentarian - in its nature compared to my other videos gave him the opportunity. And the fact that we've already extended the dates for releasing the video as a consequence of him getting sick gave him the time.

Or, he thought it gave him the time anyways.

As is so often the case when we try out something new (or in my case, when we do literally anything ever), complications arise and things go slower than we anticipated. He's composed plenty of music over the years, but this is the first time he's ever composed a soundtrack, and there are some unique caveats that separate the two.

What's been giving him the most stress is the fact that soundtracks need to be synchronized. The music needs to match the mood and action of the video. And so that gives him a pair of constraints: timing, and flow. He can't write overly elaborate passages if the video sequences are too short to fit them, and writing short segments runs the risk of the video running over with no accompaniment. And similarly, he can't just write a track to his own proverbial drum, going through the emotional highs and lows as the track feels natural - he has to meet the emotional rhythm of the video he's tracking.

He's having an absolute blast figuring it out, but he laments the fact it's taking him so much longer than he wanted it to. He was hoping to have it done by last Thursday. He's eyeballing Wednesday now, but honestly I'm expecting that date to come and go.

I'm sure there's a notable audience who are getting impatient with my waiting around for my sound designer. But I trust him and I respect him, and honestly, I'm not in any particular rush here. He's wanted to do this for a long time, I'm really liking what all he's shown me so far, and I think in the end it will be all the better for it, despite the delays.

Speaking of what all he's shown me, the post image says there's a sound preview. So let's just jump right into that. Be aware that this is currently entirely unmixed, he just exported his composition and slapped it over the video and tossed it to me. So the music is a bit overpowering in this clip.

But, here's a roughly-25-second cut near the beginning of the video. I think this is the first time you all have heard Milly Stern as my Mercy, too. So feel free to give me your thoughts on how she's sounding to you all! I think she does a terrifyingly accurate Mercy, personally.

Click here to check it out! 

Beyond Overbreed Episode 0's apparent delay for ~production value~, things have been coming along well. Or, well-ish, anyways. I'm almost done building Gaige for the October minivid. I was hoping to have her done and to start animating on Sunday, but, uhh... Yeah. That didn't happen. The Saturday stream, where we built her, did not go well. She gave me more stress than pretty much any model I've ever built before.

But, the problems are overcome, and she definitely reflects the effort that went into her. She is absolutely stunning, and I think you all are going to enjoy the marked improvement of how she looks over the old Gaige model from half a decade ago.

Beyond that, the Claire/Jill video's production is slowly churning once again. Sultry Lamp and SilkyMilk have officially come on board to voice Claire and Jill respectively, with Ivan E Recshun returning to his role as Chris all the way back from the aforementioned Radio Silence. All of the dialogue lines have been sent out and are in the process of being recorded, and 17.5 minutes of animation that needs to be dubbed has been processed and split into 40 unique video files, and sent off for dubbing as well.

The dubbing for this particular video is going to be done a bit differently than the way I usually do it, because both Silky and Sultry have voiced interest in ad-libbing dirty talk for the video. Which translates to "I have no idea what they're going to say", and that into "they have no idea what each other are going to say," ultimately into "they have no idea what to say in response to each other or when to say it."

All of which means that, sort of by necessity, I've decided on a pecking order for dubbing: since Jill is dominant for the majority of the video, Silky is going to record her dub first, throwing in whatever ad-lib she feels appropriate for Jill to lead with. Then, once Silky's dub is recorded, Sultry is going to record her dub, overtop Silky's Jill audio. That way, Sultry can hear whatever Silky decided to ad-lib, and she can react in real-time, naturally and organically.

Like how actual conversations work. Fancy that.

And then finally, the Parawhores on-stream video project is slowly moving along. I've been working on finishing up and packaging together the tools I use to build my videos, as well as finish up and write out the Parawhores lore so that Miya and tammy can be released to the public and people can build their own fanon constructions with them. And I've also been writing out both that specific video as well as some higher-level and future-video material as well.

So, all things considered, things are moving. Slower than I'd like in the case of Overbreed and Gaige, but they're moving.

And my wallet is crying at the thought of paying for Claire/Jill and Overbreed 0 in short succession.

Regardless, that's all for now! Until next time, everyone! Hopefully that'll be an Episode 0 release. If not, it'll be another progress report.