Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery - Update #1 (Patreon)

Thank you for the feedback and comments on the latest Random Arma Bullshittery (part 10) folks. That's gone live on Monday and it appears to have been well received.

It turns out I'd made a few minor grammatical whoopsies and ended up duplicating an audio layer which deafened a few headphone users. Patrons/Twitch subs spotted them and I was able to quickly fix before launch. Many thanks for doing so. It all helps overall quality.

So now that part 2 of Arma bullshittery is all finished, I'd like to take something of a break from that Arma series to do something a bit different, to provide some much needed variety. A return to a long running side-project - Dungeons & Dragons Bullshittery

To bring new patrons/twitch subs up to speed:

A couple of years ago the clan and I played some games of Dungeons and Dragons, and I was hoping to make a bullshittery out of the amusing highlights. I have the audio recordings from the live-streams, but naturally there's no visuals to go with it (since you use your imagination). My original hope was to edit an audio adventure and then hand it over to an animator who would be able to make all the visual elements.

I've even made a sort of "pre-visualisation" for that purpose, so an animator would know what I wanted. That pre-vis is available right here if you're not that fussed about the visuals. Though naturally, HUGE spoiler warning. This is the bullshittery in a very rough form.

Upon doing this though I hit upon a snag - on getting quotes back, a full animation with the complexity I'm looking for is extremely time consuming and expensive. There's a reason why most cartoons on Youtube are under 5 minutes long. And this first episode is 25 minutes. It just wouldn't have been feasible to outsource so much. 

So plan B is as follows: commission some static art assets from artists and then use Adobe After Effects to animate it myself. If you're familiar with the Youtube series If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, what I hope to make is not dissimilar from that. Static images, which are being keyframed in AE. Either using different poses, or the Puppeteer tool.  It's just been a question of finding the time, which is what I'd like to do now.

So my task now is to go through and convert the temporary pre-vis into a true cartoon. Turning the 6-7 image layers (characters) per scene, into 6-7 After Effects compositions, within which the characters are animated. When composited together, the result should be a proper cartoon to match the audio

On that front, whilst the last bullshittery was in progress, I've been commissioning two artists. One to do all of the background assets and the other to do the characters. And both have been providing excellent work for me to use.

The background artist has been steadily replacing my amateurish scribbling with something more presentable. For example:

And the character artist has been working with me to upgrade my character designs to something much more worthy of D&D:

So I plan to spend roughly 4-5 weeks on this in order to get as far as possible, hoping that this side-project can one day be presentable for the main channel. And I shall show you my work to you as I go. I think it's really looking really good so far!