BAS Liz Short - Progress Report #6 - Home Stretch! (Patreon)

Hello again everybody!

As with last time, I am posting this now rather late, but for good reason: I've another segment rendering! And this time, I am not running an overclock on my GPU, so hopefully it won't lock up my computer right as I finish writing.

Last week's original post (the one lost due to the overclock-caused lockup) laid out a detailed breakdown of how long I expected everything to take. For posterity's sake, this is what that schedule looked like:

• 01 Void - Done!
• 02 Store - 2 days (1 day for narrative animation; 1 day for detailing & lighting)
• 03 Sex - 4 days (2 days for lip-sync; 2 days for detailing & lighting)
• 04 Storeroom - 2 days (1 day for narrative animation; 1 day for detailing & lighting)
• 05 Exterior - 1 day (1 day for narrative, detailing, & lighting [it's a really short sequence, only like 5 shots total])

I then pointed out that Fridays and Saturdays are dead days for me (Friday is my run-about-and-do-chores day; Saturday is the stream), leaving 5 work days before the next progress report (which is today!) I laid out that my goal for the week was to get the Store, Storeroom, and Exterior shots all done (2+2+1=5; I can do math!!), and to be making this post with the Storeroom rendering.

For the most part, that schedule has panned out perfectly. In fact, my timing projections have been spot on (amazingly; I am fucking terrible at timing projects, as evidenced by the fact that I am writing to you on November 7th about being 1 week out before release of a video intended to release on November 1st...). However, there was a slight complication.

I forgot that Tuesdays are half-dead days too, like Friday (and so I should count them as fully dead days). The reason for that is my friends and I do our weekly game night on Tuesdays, which can go 2 or 3 hours, but also requires a fair bit of preparation (tabletop games yo) ahead of time and careful scheduling of my day so I don't blow past it (which I have done before, to my chagrin).

As such, Tuesday didn't see anything get done. However, that is only one day behind schedule! And I am hoping that I might be able to get what I planned to do on Tuesday - the exterior shot - done through Friday and Saturday anyways, my otherwise "dead" days. No idea if it'll work, but it's the hope.

So, with that being said, where does that leave us now? Let's update that schedule.

01 Void - Done!

02 Store - Done!

03 Sex -  4 days (2 days for lip-sync; 2 days for detailing & lighting) 

04 Storeroom - Done! (Rendering right now)

05 Exterior -  1 day (1 day for narrative, detailing, & lighting) 

So 5 days total. Let's be generous and assume that I don't get the Exterior done on my dead days. Then it'll take 5 work days, which just so happens to lead us to next Thursday, the 14th. This coincides perfectly, since I asked my sound designer to try and get everything done by the 12th, and if the render is done overnight from the 14th into the 15th, then that would give me the whole of the 15th (which is a Friday, but I can make it work) to edit and release the video to Patreon.

Which means, if everything goes well, we should be getting an early-access release on the 15th, and a public release on the 20th! As always, these dates are prone to slide, as they're basically giving me no slack at all. But they're the goal!

And speaking of goals, I finally have a name for the BAS Liz Short! Technically two names: a series name, and an episode name. But because this is a pilot of a series that I don't know if it will be picked up, I am going to omit the series name for now, and just go with the episode name: No Gods, No Kings. 

I think I floated that name in one of the very first posts about the short. Even if I didn't, though, that is the name I've decided on. It is a beautiful callback to one of the most iconic lines from Bioshock, and while this isn't necessarily the best utilization of it (mostly due to the writing compression; this is effectively 2 episodes put into 1.5 episodes' runtime and made on 1 episode's time budget), it does still have a tie in to the story presented.

For posterity's sake, the series name is As Columbia Above, So Rapture Below, which will be shortened to Rapture Below (much like how Down the Rabbit.Hole is shortened to just Rabbit.Hole). The name is a Biblical reference, a mutation of the line "As Heaven Above, So Hell Below." The analogy is self-evident I hope, with the city in the clouds - Elizabeth's home as she grew up knowing it - being Heaven, and the city leagues beneath the ocean - a foreign place which she visited through a motivation of hate, and has given her nothing but pain and her literal death (twice!) - being Hell.

Indeed, Elizabeth despising Rapture plays a large role in both this episode's narrative, and the series' story as a whole. Her hatred of the city is what compels her to take the path she does in it, not wanting to make the same mistakes she did last time, and frankly just not wanting to deal with the city's shit.

And so I think analogizing Rapture to Hell is fitting. For Elizabeth in this series, Rapture is her personal hell.

That's all for now, everyone! Until next week!