Progress Report - March 19, 2024 (Patreon)

NOTE: This post was originally written on March 19, but due to a 5-hour render to prove a point (see end of post), it was delayed to March 20. I apologize for the inconvenience.

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Hello, everyone!

So in last week's Progress Report, I alluded that the week was going to be a bit of a dud productivity-wise. All things considered, it actually turned out better than I had expected.

As I said last week, the Progress Report was pushed off till late Wednesday evening, and I was going to be out of town for the weekend. Thursdays are of course my day off, which effectively only left Friday and Monday to get work done.

Monday ended up being a recovery day, because the weekend was spent with my parents visiting. I love my parents, and I love when they visit, but as you all know, I am very much a night owl. My parents are early birds. So my parents were wanting us to be up and about doing things around 9am. I normally go to bed around 4am or 5am, and I try to get up at least an hour ahead of when my parents want to do things so I can do all my morning ritual stuff.

I got less than 8 hours of sleep across Friday into Saturday, and then Saturday into Sunday, combined. To say I was absolutely exhausted by Sunday night is an understatement, and I ended up getting more sleep Sunday into Monday than the previous two nights combined, pushing 12 hours of sleep. It was almost 4pm when I finally woke up on Monday.

So that's why I didn't make the Progress Report on Monday.

HOWEVER! Today, Tuesday, was a different story altogether. Oh yes indeed.

As I alluded to last week, I did indeed reset the 30-day counter for Overbreed today. But now, I have a big scary intimidating spreadsheet to hopefully scare myself into getting work done. Thursdays are my days off, and then Saturdays are my stream days, so I pre-emptively marked them both off. The rest of the days, I color-code whether or not I got work done and document what work I got done that day. The hope is to shame myself into not wanting to see any big scary red "No"s, because that'd make me feel bad.

The secondary hope is that I intend to share these spreadsheets with each Progress Report, so that you all can join in on shaming me for days that I fail to make progress.

See, I know my brain. You know the stereotype about how people with ADHD procrastinate work until the deadline is imminent, or only clean the house when they have people coming over? Well I have that too, and it counts for shame too: if I'm doing things for myself, I'll likely procrastinate it. But if I'm getting judged for it, then I'm much more likely to do it.

So by holding myself publicly accountable, the hope is I'll finally stop procrastinating and just get it done.

With that being said, I did make a Tweet a few days ago about how I ended up scrapping about 90 seconds of new footage. This was because the original position I had put together simply did not allow the camera angles I needed to properly progress the story, but really didn't want to toss out the work I had done (plus I just really liked the pose and the animation). So I tried to organically write a new sequence that didn't need those camera angles. But long story short, the rewrite didn't work, and so I ended up scrapping it all anyways.

I have decided to share the entire scrapped sequence with you all here this week. You can click here to view it. Keep in mind this sequence is scrapped, so you will not see any iteration of it in the final video. It will never exist beyond this rough draft form.

In its place, I decided to find a new position, and this time explicitly build it to make sure it can show off the camera angles I need. While I'm not as happy with the new pose and animation as I was with the last one, it importantly allows me to keep to the original screenplay. This means that not only does it hit the necessary beats for the story to make sense (something I just couldn't achieve with the rewrite attempt), but it is overall just a tighter and more focused sequence.

There is a reason why I spend so much time on preproduction writing my projects: I don't know if you all have noticed, but I tend to ramble when left unsupervised. This is a problem in not only my writing Progress Reports, but in everything I do - including videos.

Very famously, I ended up scrapping several minutes of entirely animated, voiced, and edited footage from Blue Star Episode 3, before completely rewriting the sequence and paying for another round of voice-work and redoing all of the animation and editing. All because it just rambled on and achieved nothing. The rewrite took a third of the runtime of that original edition, and achieved about twice as much narratively.

That was the day I started doing proper preproduction for all my videos. I lost several hundred dollars worth of work and dozens of hours of work because of that. It's a lot cheaper and a lot faster spending a week in Notepad than doing that.

So with all of that in mind, and to make up for how poorly the past week went in terms of productivity, I decided to share the entirety of what I got done today. You can click here to view the full 100-second WIP. Keep in mind that this is still a rough draft. Animation will be polished, voice of course added, and overall the specifics might get tuned a bit between now and when the final work is done. But this is, broad strokes, what this sequence will look like in the final video.

One last final thing I want to note is in regards to the Frozen project. I wanted to mention this in the previous Progress Report where I explained the new schedule, but it ended up going so long that I decided to just wait for a later Progress Report. And today's is that Progress Report.

As I'm sure you all know, I made an absolutely catastrophic oopsie-woopsie back late 2022: merging my online stream projects with my offline stream projects. The end result was the 23-minute-long Refuge and the 50-minute-long Frozen videos both being pushed from being done on-stream to being finished off-stream.

In isolation, this isn't a big deal. But of course, nothing exists in isolation. I already had an existing schedule for off-stream work: namely, Overbreed (and then later Blue Star).

What came about as a result of that was months of time slated for Overbreed instead being spent finishing up Refuge. Throw in some terrible delays with the Life is Strange minivid and then the Corsair short video, and in the end basically my entire schedule for 2023 was thrown out the window trying to correct this mistake.

And as you all probably know, I've stopped doing video-animation streams, and have moved over to using Saturdays to work on Unreal Engine game work. This is mostly because I just really want to learn how to make games in Unreal, but also partly because I didn't want to make the same mistake of making a video on-stream and then pushing the polish work involved to be done offline. If I don't make videos, I can't push the video work offline, is the thinking.

Obviously, Refuge has since been released, but the 50-minute Frozen project is still in limbo. And that is very much by design: I want to get my schedule back on track, and finally get these long-overdue projects done.

This means that the Frozen project exists outside of my schedule right now, and I am going to have to make time for it. My plan, then, is to make room for a week during Overbreed's 30-day cycle. This will pause the cycle, and not consume any days for it. Meaning that it'll probably be near the end of April when it finally finishes, as opposed to mid-April as the schedule currently suggests.

If this upcoming week goes well and is very productive, then I want to take that week off starting with next week's Progress Report. That time will be predominantly spent processing all of the raw footage for dubbing, marking it all out for what sequences need Anna audio, what need Elsa audio, and what need both. This is being done partly for technical reasons, namely that audio for scenes you can't see is distracting. But it's also being doing for monetary reasons - since the project is going to be abandon-released, rather than properly finished, I won't be running it through the normal Patreon release system. Which means rather than 1080p early access, than 720p public + 2160p Patreon exclusive, it will instead immediately get a public release.

And because of the enormity of the project and the well-documented problems rendering it will present, instead of being rendered out at high-quality 2160p, it will be rendered out at low-quality 720p. This image is showing what those look like, with the 720p upscaled to 2160p (click here for full resolution it to get a proper idea of how it will look - thumbnails don't really do it justice).

Like the audio optimizations, the render settings are being done for technical reasons. This image is part of a 6-second sample that I rendered out to do some quick napkin math. The 720p version took 18 minutes to render - the 2160p version took 4 hours 28 minutes. Multiply both render times out by 500 to estimate how long it'd take to render out the full 50-minute video (50 minutes * 60 seconds per minute / 6 second sample = 500 multiplier), and it would take 150 hours (just over 6 days) to render the 720p - and 2238 hours, or 93 days, or 3 months, to render the 2160p.

So, yeah. That's why it's being rendered out at the low quality it is. 6 days versus 3 months is a bit of a no-brainer. The quality change is noticeable, but I don't think it's 3 months noticeable. That's hard to justify on a finished product, let alone an abandon-release like this.

To be perfectly clear, the Frozen video will not be finished over this weekend. The only, and I mean the only thing, I hope to accomplish during that week is send it all off to get the voice-work started. Work then resumes on Overbreed, and the Frozen project probably won't be touched again until the next 30-day cycle.

It's going to take a very long time for the Frozen video to get released. That's just the nature of a project existing of a schedule. And I take 100% full responsibility for it. I never should have made the Frozen video on-stream in the first place. We should've done something smaller.

But it is what it is. I'll carry that weight. And it will get released. Eventually.

But that's all for now! Until next week, everyone!