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Progress Report - January 2, 2024
🕑 Added 2024-01-02 23:55:05 +0000 UTCHello, everyone!
I hope you all had a great New Year. Mine was surprise-eventful, in the sense that I had plans to put together stuff for the January 1st Progress Report but my friends spontaneously decided we'd be doing things for New Years starting at like 7pm. Needless to say, I didn't get that stuff done, and that's why it's now the January 2nd Progress Report.
Let's just get right into it, shall we?
The first draft of the Corsair storyboard for February's video is done!
It runs a bit longer than I'd like for a minivid, clocking in at just under 8 minutes right now. Recall I try to keep Minivids under 5 minutes if I can help it. I intend to run over it myself, and ask around as well, see if I can't find anything to shave some runtime off without compromising the integrity of the story or the pacing of the video.
You can click here to watch it!
But with that being said, I'm not certain I want to cut it down. You'll notice I didn't call it a minivid in the section header. That's because I'm not certain I want to consider it a minivid.
The original intent of minivids was basically to just be throwaway ideas that are too small or spurious to make into a full narrative cohesive, or fit into a larger video. And, well, this Corsair video doesn't fit into either category at all.
It's introducing entirely new characters in an entirely new IP, and doing a lot of heavy-lifting in establishing their personalities, professions, and quirks. And a lot of fucking. Can't forget the fucking.
All things considered, I think the amount of lifting it manages in only 8 minutes is rather impressive, at least as far as my own writing goes. Brevity and I have never been friends, as I'm sure you're all aware, reading this week's novella Progress Report.
So I'm going to workshop the video and give it the usual editing treatment, but I don't think I'm going to be overly aggressive when it comes to trying to cut it down to under 5 minutes. I'll cut what needs to be cut, add what needs to be added, and revise what needs to be revised. And then I'll just let it sit where it sits.
The nice thing about this storyboard is that a lot of the animation work is already done for it. Not just the sex animations, but a good chunk of the non-dialogue narrative animation too, like Medusa grabbing her glasses, or Medusa grabbing Artemis' ass (Medusa grabs a lot of things). Hell, even the space scenes ended up getting animated by the end of the storyboard's production run.
There's a good bit of model-work I need to do, especially on the alien's side of things, and then of course there is no scenebuilding or lighting done at all as of yet. But, overall, I think I might actually be able to fit this production cycle within a month.
I intend to spend today editing and revising, and then tomorrow I intend to reach out to Milly and Ivan to see if they're interested and available in lending their voices, and to Tonedeaf to see if he's up for sound design in a few weeks' time. I want to get this production underway as soon as possible.
What all do you think of the Corsair storyboard, as it is?
Oops I Accidentally A Slut Squad Storyboard Too
So yeah. This one was entirely incidental. Late one evening a few nights ago, I spontaneously had an idea for a Slut Squad intro cinematic, Slut Squad of course being the UE5 game I am designing for us to build on stream.
What started as me just quickly banging out a few loose thoughts turned into me moonlighting a full video storyboard. Two hours a night before bed over the course of 3 days yielded this.
It failed its original goal of being a snappy cinematic intro for a game, but I think it definitely has potential to be a fun, stylish video. That being said, right now, it is way too narrative-heavy, so it's going back into the tumbler for a few more cycles. Boil it down to its essence, strip away the chaff, cut it all down to size for the sake of better pacing.
It's also a lot rougher than my usual storyboards, as a consequence of the fact it wasn't really a storyboarding project - it was just a moonlight project.
You can click here to check that storyboard out too. Do be warned however, it has music! The specific song isn't in any way final, but the creative vision very explicitly had a hard rock song with sex-positive lyrics in it. In This Moment are the closest hard rock band with sex-positive lyrics I know, so after sampling a few songs I went with Half God Half Devil for this proof-of-concept.
As a final note on this subject, the newspaper windows would be animated. So you'd have an animation playing inside the newspaper framing. I think that'd be a neat effect.
Really, this whole idea started as style over substance. And then it kinda turned into an ideological manifesto. Oops.
Start-Of-Year Plans
And then as a final note, seeing how it's the start of a new year, I have a few things I want to get done over the next few days.
The first thing I am planning to do is put out a big ole content-dump release of every model I've ever worked on. I do one every few years, and it's been a while since the last. The new year is the perfect time to do it.
I originally wanted to do it on New Years Eve, but life got in the way. Bless my friends but they are so unpredictable.
After that model release is done, I intend to make a big-ass post over on my blog detailing my plans for the future. If you've been following along, it won't be much news to you: February video, top off my UE5 experiments (only got a few things left to do, should only take a week - he said for the fifth time now), Overbreed Ep1, Blue Star Ep4.
I'll be sure to link to the blog post in the next Progress Report after it's made, which will hopefully be next week's, seeing how I plan to make that post tomorrow.
That's all for now. Until next time, everyone!
