Progress Report - July 17, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

This week's Progress Report will be rather short.

Right off the top, I now have a firm date on when I will be leaving to spend a few weeks with my family: July 25. I might be back by August 7, I expect to certainly be back by August 14. I will try to get some work done during the 2 or 3 weeks I am, but don't expect much. I know I certainly am not.

With that out of the way, the Life is Strange Minivid has been put together. Earlier today, I sent the video out for dubbing. You can click here to watch the full 5-minute segment. Note that it is still work-in-progress animation, it's a raw no-lighting render, and there is no audio. There's lots of pauses for dialogue (which isn't installed), and there's an overall lack of polish since I don't have the audio to match performance to.

All of Chloe's dialogue has been recorded and sent in, and tomorrow I will start processing and installing it. The Max dialogue hasn't been recorded yet, but I am hoping that my candidate voice for her will be able to record it all alongside the dub. She's been really busy and hasn't even formally confirmed her casting (just stating she's excited for the project, which I am interpreting as being interested).

With the Minivid waiting for audio, once the existing dialogue is installed and lip-synced, I'll be jumping back to Overbreed whilst I wait for the rest of the audio to come in. I need to quickly build the storyboard to tie off the episode, which I don't expect will take terribly long. Biggest decision will be on if I want to set up the next episode diegetically or not - thankfully, Episode 2 is with DVa, Pharah, and Symmetra, all of whom I already have voices for, so it wouldn't require any additional casting. And then if I do, how exactly I want to do that. But all of that is to figured out another day.

Once I've finished off all the storyboarding, I will be returning my attention to animating Sequence C, finally picking up where I left off all those months ago. I can't  overstate just how excited I am to finally resume working on it all.

Hopefully I'll manage to find some time to return to Epilogue as well. I haven't touched it the past few weeks, and it's been driving me crazy because the ideas for it certainly haven't stopped coming, and it's starting to well up like a dam reservoir.

Two final thoughts: Firstly, looking toward the future, I am passively eyeballing future minivid ideas. I am contemplating starting to interweave some original character introductions with the few IPs I haven't built videos for. I have 4 different original IPs (Corsair / Artemis & Medusa, Fumates / Cass Sophie & Viv, Parawhores / Miya Nataly & Tammy, Untitled / Cybil & Pandora) as well as a handful of semi-original IPs (Star Wars / Meeri & Tela, DOAFantasy), to interweave with a handful of hitherto-untouched IPs (Fallout / Vault Liz, Nier Automata / 2B, Left 4 Dead / Zoey, Portal / Chell).

Secondly, the Frozen on-stream video is quickly approaching the end of principle animation. There's less than 10 planned animations left, and we've been averaging 3 or 4 animations per stream. There is some narrative stuff to block out as well, but honestly I can see us finishing off principle animation within 5 streams. Then comes the Goliathan task of getting everything voiced, lip-synced, and detailed: working the Churn.

I've already decided that we are not going to immediately jump into working the Churn, and instead we will take a detour and work on a different project for a few weeks. Right now, my biggest contemplation is if we want to do a small detour like another Primordium episode (strict 7-minute runtime, should take maybe 6 streams total to put together), or if we want to do a bigger project (like a 15-or-so minute video, something more along the lines of Refuge). The fact I want to do both is not helpful.

When the time comes, I will be putting up a poll to see what peoples' interests are. In fact, I'll be putting up 3 polls: one for my Patrons, one for my Stream Regulars, and one for my general Twitter audience. I'll use the results of those 3 polls to color my decision, though I will say right now that I reserve the ultimate right to the final decision.

That's all for now. Next week's Progress Report will be the last big one for a few weeks. I'll remind you all that I'll be out of town for a few weeks and will have reduced work capacity, in next week's Progress Report.

Until next time, everyone!