Blue Star Episode 3 - Public Update (Patreon)

Howdy everyone!

As I’m sure you’re all aware of by now, Blue Star Episode 3 (hereafter referred to as BSE3, for the sake of my sanity) has been delayed for quite a while now due to it being hung in the audio stage. The lovable @InsideIncognita, who is my Liara voice, has had a string of delays, resulting first from health scares, then technical equipment failures, and most recently from an opportunity-of-a-lifetime in being accepted into a large-production singing competition and all the scheduling and traveling that involves. And none of that is to mention of all her family- and life-related responsibilities, of which she has many.

Her health issues seem to be mostly behind her now, and while she is now dealing with the stress of the final leg of that competition, she has buckled down to get all of the Blue Star Episode 3 audio to me as quickly as possible.

She has recorded over 2 hours’ worth of audio for this almost-20-minutes-long sex scene, and if you’ve ever dealt with voice-overs (or even really audio in general), then you know that a lot of processing goes into getting audio production-ready.

With all of that in mind, we are 75% of the way to being finished with Innie’s audio.

I have all of her non-dialogue audio synchronized and ready for work. She split the dialogue audio into 4 sections, affectionately referred to as A, B, C, and D. I have A & B fully synchronized; she is currently processing C; and she decided to rerecord D earlier this week when she decided that her performance wasn’t intense enough for it. She is hoping to get C to me before the weekend, and maybe even D if things go especially well.

This is just part A - and this is only the audio that she considered high enough quality to pass on to me as a potential take.

149 files for the first 5 minutes of the sex scene. nearly 7.5 minutes of raw audio footage for 70 seconds of final audio. And that’s just the quarter of the sex scene. Part B is comparable to A, and I expect C and D will be similarly comparable.

So, there’s a lot of audio to process, both on Innie’s side, and then again on me, as I whittle down her groups of takes for a line (sometimes she gives me as many as 11 unique takes for a given line) down to 1 take per line. And then I have to integrate it with her non-dialogue audio, finding natural segue points and then blending the audio together so it all sounds like one cohesive take.

By all accounts, this is a slow-going process.

Once Innie gets all of her audio to me, and I get it all synced up, I will then be passing this off to Ivan to do his audio for the Shadowbroker. Once Ivan gets his audio back to me, then BSE3 will finally be able to move out of the dubbing stage, and enter the penultimate stage of production, which is lip-sync and detail.

My goal (what work I’d be satisfied with getting done) for production is to get all of the audio processed and get out of the dubbing stage before October 1. My supergoal (what work I’d feel accomplished getting done) is to have all of the lip-sync done by October 1.

Projecting farther down the line, I would really like to have the whole episode done and released on Christmas.

However, none of these are promises, only aspirations. Do not take these projections as gospel; I cannot guarantee that this timeline will play out.

So, that’s where things are right now.

It’s a big project, with busy people. But I personally think it’ll be worth the wait - it certainly has been for me. As usual, I feel Innie knocks it out the park. I hope you all will agree, once you finally get to hear her in action.

Until next time!