Progress Report - December 19, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone.

I'll be frank with you all: I am extremely distressed and despondent.

Over the past handful of weeks, in the attempt to find a good 4-minute minivid, I have animated and discarded 10 minutes of animation across 4 different projects, not counting the 3 ideas I spent full days exploring but never got into storyboarding or animating.

The most recent one was the Futashep / Diana one, as shown last week. I absolutely hated the fact I announced one project, and then the next week put it on ice and announced a different one.

And I absolutely hate the fact I'm doing it again, but I just don't like how the Futashep/Diana one is coming out. I noted on Twitter the other day how I wrote a 17-panel super-high-level storyboard for the Futashep video, thinking that might be enough for 5 minutes. And then the first panel alone took up nearly 2 minutes of actual animation runtime.

I have cut out huge swathes of the original super-high-level storyboard, and it still just can't actually complete in a reasonable timeframe. At this point I feel like I am intentionally lobotomizing an otherwise interesting idea just to fit the time constraint. And I just don't want to do that.

So I'm severely disappointed to say that I am putting the Futashep video on ice, too. Like all of these other ideas, it's going in the vault, to be explored later. I really like the ideas, and I just feel like I'm doing a disservice trying to fit them into the minivid format. It's an insult to my audience, saying "I don't think you deserve this full idea, instead you get a lobotomized version of it", and it's a waste of a good idea, cutting it down to fit a time-constraint that it doesn't belong to.

And when I say time-constraint, I don't mean the runtime constraint of 5 minutes. That's really more of a rule of thumb. I mean the production constraint of "get it done in a month." The goal of minivids was to put out a video every few months, to keep people occupied while I whittle away at bigger projects.

There's been myriad problems involved in that over the past year, but it's mostly been things out of my control. Things like voice talent having busy lives, or my mum needing to be hospitalized. It's never really been an issue with me, as it is now.

And to be perfectly clear, it's not an issue of me not having ideas. It's the opposite: I have too many ideas, too big of ideas, too good of ideas. I keep coming up with all these fantastic, exciting stories.  But they just can't be made in a month.

So yeah. I'm currently exploring a Corsair minivid. I recently posted on Twitter how Artemis got a new hairstyle. That's part of it. I think, I think, I can fit it into a one-month production run. And I certainly hope so, because I want to have a video before the end of January.

I won't lie guys I've legit been having bouts of crying over this across the past 3 days. I fucking hate letting you all down, almost as much as I hate letting myself down. It shouldn't be this hard to come up with a simple 5-minute fuck-athon. But apparently it is, for my narrative-rotted brain.

I feel absolutely fucking terrible about this. So as a feeble and insufficient token, I have rendered out and uploaded all of the minivid attempts I've put together in the search for the January minivid. You can see a 5-second sample of them at the top of this post.

Marie (2:32) | Momiji (2:35) | DVa (1:50) | Futashep (2:59) 

I know this isn't sufficient. I know this isn't what you're looking for. But I've put together 10 minutes of animation over the past few weeks, just to throw it all away, because none of it works. And from your perspective, it looks like I've done nothing at all, when it's been anything but. So here is my insecurity-and-anxiety driven proof of work. I really am trying, guys.

I'm just too much of a fucking failure to actually put anything together.

Hopefully next week I'll have some better news. I'm going to keep trying until I finally get this right. My ego won't let me surrender. I'm too fucking stubborn for that.

That's all for now.