April Production Update (Patreon)

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

My premiere episode of Hard Justice is quite close to being complete, but I'm pushing its release to early May. I'm sorry about that.

I've really been busting my ass on it for the vast majority of the month while carving out a bit of time for other editing work to boost my income a bit, helping my mom around her house with a few things, and errands like my taxes, some of each unexpected. I take a few hours in the morning each day for myself to work out and take a walk as it's necessary for my health and state of mind, then I sit and work through the day and night, weekends included. I've cut out gaming almost entirely-- save for a few hours of Helldivers early in the month to be somewhat sociable, and the rare half hour here and there of games like Celeste and, more recently, a new game called Pools to decompress-- and I mostly only watch movies or shows while I'm capturing or editing video. I took a couple days off across the month just to catch up on sleep. I don't mean to cause concern that I'm pushing myself-- I'm quite comfortable, happy and having fun with the work, there's just a lot of it.

Capturing everything in every scene from every angle is necessary for the edit and takes ages-- about 720 unique camera angles were captured altogether for the episode. I currently estimate it will be fifty minutes altogether at least, maybe an hour once everything's in.

It's all shot and, as of this moment, I've finely edited, mixed and scored most of everything I can. The first half's thoroughly finalized, as in showable, minus one voice I'm waiting on that's needed about fifteen minutes into the video. The last half has a fine assembly cut done, everything's there (except several voices I'm awaiting)-- balanced, edited and trimmed voice work, every critical shot trimmed, color correction, visual effects, sound design, music, text, credits-- it won't take me long to trim and align everything, but I think it'll be a few days from this writing at least, if not longer, before I get all the voice work I need, which I then need some time to edit once it comes in.

Just casting, writing thorough messages and instructions, getting a hold of everyone, and making sure everyone has the files they need took a couple days, and it's an ongoing task managing everyone up to delivery. I have a stacked and talented cast that I'm very excited about, composed of some people many of you will no doubt recognize. I have gotten several actors' voice work so far and have edited near all of it.

I suspect I ultimately won't get a couple voices I need from the dozen or so people I've contacted in total so far, and still need to set up the public auditioning process on my website for the roles I can't find anyone to play. There's a couple of people I'd like to reach out to personally first before that step-- but also, before that, I wanna await some messages from others to determine if that's necessary.

In hindsight I should've initiated the casting process way earlier, which was actually the initial plan, but I decided it was important to put it off until after everything was shot, to add lines and jokes during one last revision of the script based on unexpected occurrences during production, because I don't always accurately calculate at the screenplay stage everything that the game's gonna let me do and not. There was a benefit to doing this, but not a huge one, so I think with episode two and onward I might get the casting out of the way early and let those audio files trickle to me at whatever pace across the time it takes me to get everything shot, especially now that I have the maps and technical limitations of the game substantially refreshed in my memory. You'd think several seasons of Arby 'n' the Chief would cement it all in my head, but I still get rusty.

As always, I'm deeply appreciative of everyone who's continued to support me financially so generously as I make this, as well as everyone's patience. I feel very lucky to work on projects like this and am excited to show everyone what I've been working on for so long. I'm very happy with how the first episode's turning out.

I'm considering streaming before the end of April and showing the first bit of the episode, if the majority of people want that according to a chat poll-- but, frankly, what I'd really like to do is, at the cost of not delivering something this month, hold on to what I have and surprise everyone with the whole thing when it's finally done in May. I'm not sure a lot of people are ready for how hard this show goes, and I want the full premiere to make an impression. I want to make an event of it that includes a post-release stream and Q&A-- and, perhaps, a pre-release one as well, just before.

I did make and share one thing this month, on my Soundcloud page-- a music track that I made for the episode, with a new MIDI controller and some virtual synthetic instruments I got.

If anyone pledged to me via a funding platform this month with the intention of being credited in a video released by April's end, please message me directly on the platform corresponding to the pledge if you'd like a refund on your charge, I'm happy to do it.

I hope you're all looking forward to the show. Thank you all.