June 1 - Phazon Addendum B Screenplay, Behind-The-Scenes, & Hiveship News Too?! Oh My! (Patreon)

Hello, everyone! It's been a few weeks since we last spoke, but here we are!

So I've got stuff to discuss in this post. The first and foremost thing is that I have, indeed, officially begun production on the next Samus video - episode 4 of 6 in the Phazon hexology, and episode 2 of 3 of the Phazon Addendum trilogy (recall that the Phazon hexology is two interwoven trilogies - because I hate myself and refuse to ever make anything simple!)

At the bottom of this post, I have attached the full screenplay of the video, for you to peruse at your leisure. It is (obviously) very spoiler-heavy (seeing as it is literally the schematic that I am using for making the video...), but for the curious and the impatient, it is there to tide you over during this two-month production cycle.

So with that being said, let's break this post up into headers, and get discussing!

Phazon Addendum B

So as stated above, Phazon Addendum B production has officially begun today. I am very pointedly scaling back the scope and complexity of PAB as opposed to RHE3 because, in a nutshell, RHE3 pretty much pushed me to my limits. It appears that a 12-minute narrative with 10 different scenes is just about the maximum of what I can do as a single person in two months, while still maintaining whatever standard of quality I have (whether you consider that standard to be high or not is up to your discretion).

Additionally, PAB is going to likely be one of the most controversial and divisive videos that I will have made to date, and that is almost entirely due to a single sequence. Namely, the sex sequence. I won't spoil the reasons why I think it will be controversial here (feel free to read the screenplay if you wish to spoil it for yourself), but the long and short of it is that PAB follows the common blueprint for an act 2 of a story (curious how it's part 2 of a trilogy :thinking:). And for those of you who are a bit rusty in your storytelling mechanisms, act 2 of a story commonly ends with the protagonist at their lowest / darkest point in the story.

Of course, the common construction of act 3 in a story sees the hero rise to their highest point yet, and the contrast with the low that they left at the end of act 2 only makes it all the better. And Phazon Addendum C very much intends to reflect that as well. We just have to wait a while to get there ;).

With that being said, with the discussion of storytelling acts fresh in mind, it shouldn't come as too much a surprise when I mention that Phazon Addendum B begins to tighten the screws on the greater narrative of the Phazon Hexology. In particular, it is focusing much more heavily on character development (in particular for Samus, the Scientist, and the Female Scientist), as well as contributing to some worldbuilding and, perhaps more importantly (and to be discussed in more detail further below), in setting up for how the Phazon Hexology ties into Hiveship.

Yes, my friends, you read that correctly. What you may have thought as just being a loosely related sequence of videos is actually, in fact, all a part of a very long-term six-part (and six-year - Phazon Experiment A came out in January 2017!) prequel setup for the Big Kahuna itself, the Samus film Hiveship.

Again, I won't go into details as to how exactly PAB contributes to that set-up, but it is there if you know what to look for. Of course, I haven't released enough public information yet for people to know what to look for - but when the dust has settled and this entire Samus saga (Hiveship included) is done and released, it will hopefully all fall into place in the retrospective.

Behind The Scenes

Now, those of you who've been around a while may have noticed something a bit odd about the past few weeks. Namely, the fact that I haven't posted anything for the past month, and that I haven't shared any WIPs of the scenebuilds and such!

The reason for that is twofold. The second reason will be discussed later, but the first reason is that, the reason I haven't shared any scenebuild WIPs is because I don't have scenebuilds to show.

In a nutshell, Samus has been a redheaded stepchild of a model to work with. I slotted two days to work on her model - one for her base body, one for her Zero Suit. This is a perfectly typical time-allotment for model-work, anyone whose seen the modeling streams can attest that in general models only take me 2 to 3 sessions. And that's on stream, which can slow me down rather notably as compared to when I am entirely by myself and able to focus.

Of those 2 days I allotted Samus, she ended up taking 6 fucking days... just to get into Source. No bodygroups, very little bells and whistles, and that was with a handful of details still incomplete. For example, the first animation shown in the top-right of today's preview image? Yeah, I put that together while she was still missing textures. That's the state she's in right now, and it took 6 days to get there.

I don't know what exactly what went wrong, or why it went wrong, but boy howdy, did things go wrong building her. I had to undo and redo so many hours' worth of work, I probably could have built her three times over.

I would go into some of the details of my pain, but frankly I fear that I'd either end up curling into the fetal position as a consequence of trigger the PTSD she's left me, or I would end up needing to buy a new monitor because I just reflexively punched a goddamn dent into this one while recalling all of the horrors that I had to suffer through to get her to the point that you see her now, in the left-hand side of this preview image.

Am I happy with the results? Absolutely! Was it worth all the stress? FUCK NO. But, alas, it is what it is. And with her taking up 4 additional days of preproduction... well, let's just say that I had originally slated 3 of those days for scenebuilding with an additional day as a "oopsie things went bad buffer."

Yeah... I apparently needed a bigger buffer.

So that's where things are right now. I have virtually no preproduction done, outside of the screenplay and a fundamental outfitting of the Zero Suit. I still have an entire second outfit to put together for Samus (though thankfully it is prefitted, as it is an incomplete outfit that I had started making for the DazV5 Prototype of Samus that was never publicly showcased, which takes out a LOT of the work...). I still have the male uniform to put together as well, though that ideally shouldn't be too difficult to do, as it is simply an update and expansion of the LtC Scifi Uniform that my current Generic Males already have. And, of course, I have to do all the scenebuilding. So much scenebuilding.

As a consequence, PAB's production is gonna be a bit... interesting. Rather than having a nice cut-and-dry preproduction-then-production, I am going to have to shuffle the two of them. Basically doing model work as I need it, while in the middle of animating - and then, in the middle of animating and doing model work, also building out the scenebuilds as I need them.

To say that these are going to be a chaotic few months is a bit of an understatement.

But, hey, it keeps things interesting, right?

Hiveship?!!?

Yes, my friends. You read that correctly. The elusive Samus video that was originally teased and announced back in 2016. It's not a myth. It's not a legend. It's a real thing, and it took up the majority of this past month's efforts.

But First, Some Backstory...

Back in 2018(ish), while working and burning out on Blue Star Episode 3, I realized that I needed to change how I approach videos. Rather than just going straight forward on large videos like BSE3 or Hiveship for 6+ months at a time, I need to break up my schedule, and alternate between working on larger projects and small one-off projects. This birthed what I call the Tick-Tock schedule, which was later renamed to the Long-Short schedule, because what the fuck is a Tick, what the fuck is a Tock, and why are there no funny 7-second videos attached to Tick-Tock? Of course, this schedule was devised when Vine was still the dominating platform, but I digress...

So the Long-Short schedule dominated 2019, and it was a beautifully simple plan in theory: I take 4 weeks to work on a Short video, and then I take 4 weeks to work on a Long video. I then alternate between the two of these, with a total of 6 Short videos being released, and about 6 months' worth of work being put into the current Long endeavor. 2019's Long endeavor, of course, being Hiveship.

Unfortunately, 2019 didn't quite go the way I had planned it to. For starters, it turns out that Shorts need more than 0 days' worth of preproduction to write, organize voice talent, and build assets for. In fact, it turns out that they take anywhere between 7 and 14 days - about 10 on average.

On top of that, it turns out that my "make a Short video in 4 weeks" was more optimistic than I thought it would be. Literally every single video released in 2019 took between 6 and 7 weeks to produce. Now, I'm not a math major, but I've about 73% certainty than 7 is bigger than 4. In fact, I'd say that 7 is about twice as big as 4. And I'd say that if you take 4 weeks of production, and then a 4-week gap before the next production begins. And then you replace that 7 with a 4, that only leaves 1 week before the next production begins.

Yeah, I suspect you can probably guess where I am going with this. As a consequence of every 2019 video running massively over its time budget, I didn't have any time at all during the year to work on Hiveship, which at that time was so far in preproduction I'd almost call it dishonest to say it was in "preproduction" at all. "Prepreproduction" is honestly more apt at that point.

Instead, 2019 ended up being literally a back-to-back 10-ish-month-straight sprint of constantly animating. As soon as a video finished (3 weeks over budget, mind you), I had a whopping 7 days to brainstorm, write, revise, organize, build assets for, and scenebuild the next video project. I had virtually zero downtime, and by the time that Q3 dragged its ass around, my wick was pretty much burnt straight down to the wax.

You may recall that the original plan for the Long-Short cycle was to have 6 Shorts released in a year. The astute of you may notice that only 4 Shorts were released in 2019. That is because I ended up abandoning the August short entirely, so I could spend August catching up with all of the rigmarole and housekeeping that I had neglected for the previous three quarters of that year. And then the sixth short, Surrosluts... I'm still bitter about how that ended. I don't want to think about it anymore.

But, the past is the past. It is no longer 2019, but it is now 2020. And you all are probably aware of the fact that 2020 has a slightly different schedule. It's still a Long-Short sequence, but it is now 8 weeks for a Short, and then 4 weeks for the current Long. The reasoning for this is simple: "Since every video in 2019 took me between 6 and 7 weeks to do, I should give myself 8 weeks so that I don't run over-budget again."

And, so far, that's actually worked quite well. Unfortunately, the releases on my website don't accurately reflect that the new schedule is working well, because of the late abortion of the Surrosluts project resulting in a nearly-6-month delay between the previous release (No Gods, No Kings) and Rabbit.Hole Episode 3.

BUT! Rabbit.Hole Episode 3 actually released (just about) on time, leaving the month of May virtually entirely in-tact for its actual scheduled purpose: brainstorming Hiveship.

And now, we finally get to the exciting part of the story.

Hiveship!

Yes, my friends, progress has finally actually been made on this mythical, magical thing of legends and tall tales. For those of you who actually have any living memory of when it was first announced and teased in 2016, let me just say this up front: drop any and all preconceptions you might have had of what Hiveship would be based off those initial announcements.

That isn't to say that the film has been scrapped or rewritten (as such), but rather that the scope and scale have increased significantly. In 2016, I teased that the bulk of the film would be a single tentacle sequence. Now? That tentacle sequence is literally just the beginning of act 2. And act 2 is long. Very, very long.

Ordagon, who has long been my co-writer on Hiveship, as well as a great friend and an amazing modeler, and I have put entirely too much hours, and entirely too many text files, spreadsheets, Photoshop images, and even Blender files to work in brainstorming out the elusive act 2 of Hiveship.

For a long time now, we've had a pretty concrete idea of what act 1 would entail, and a general sense of how act 3 would play out. But act 2 is, as author Jerry B Jenkins puts it, the Marathon of the Middle. It is where, as a reader (or viewer in this case), all of the most interesting and juicy bits of narrative and character development occur. And it is where, as a writer, roadblocks, obstacles, and writers block dwell in droves. Where act 1 is full of fire in getting the adventure started, and act 3 is a fireworks show just waiting to go off in a spectacular climax, act 2 is where all the real work goes. And it has, for a long while now, eluded us in exactly how it should transpire.

For context, Ordagon and I have been slowly trying to figure out act 2 since literally early January 2019. But when you, at most, only get maybe 4 hours a month to brainstorm... things go a bit slowly, especially when half of those 4 hours are spent going over the last session's notes and just trying to remember where the fuck you left off.

But this past May, Ordagon and I put somewhere between 25 and 30 hours into focusing on act 2, and act 2 alone. And I have to say, I'm very pleased with where we've ended up, and frankly I am rather terrified with how much material we've come up with.

I'm not going to go into the details just yet (that will, assuming everything goes well, occur at the end of August ;) ), but let's just say that for the longest of time I had this nagging fear that calling the film "Hiveship" would be inaccurate, with how much material and runtime I project act 1 to take up (which doesn't even take place on the titular Hiveship; act 1 ends once Samus actually arrives on the Ship). But at the end of May's brainstorming, I definitely don't worry about that anymore. Without adjusting act 1 at all, the material and runtime it takes isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to act 2.

So, all in all, Hiveship has made massive progress in this past month. If 2019 had gone according to plan, then we'd likely be a full year further along in terms of progress, (and Hiveship would likely actually be in active production, rather than preproduction as it is right now), but it is what it is, and I am pleased with where we are, and where we are headed.

I anticipate that August will see the screenplay itself for Hiveship be written in earnest. Ordagon and I have a few details left to iron out in act 2 (very few details, I need to stress), and then we just need to once-over the plans for act 1 and act 3, just to get everything up to the same standard of writing and narrative throughput as act 2 has been lifted up to.

Once the screenplay has formally begun writing, then I will be posting an outline for Hiveship here. And that outline will include, among other things, a genuinely terrifying flowchart that we used for the progression of act 2. And when I say terrifying, I mean that we ended up going from one-dimension (text), to two dimensions (images), and finally settling on a literal three-dimensional flowchart made in Blender. And, frankly, we kind of really needed a fourth dimension to organize it all - it's pretty fucking chaotic if we have all of the different layers active at the same time.

So, that's all I have to say for this particular novel. I apologize for not posting much of anything for the past 4 weeks, but I think all of the writing done in this one post more than makes up for the lack of writing over the past month.

I just wanted to keep you all abreast of where I've been, and where we're going. Starting today, we are once again entering the phase of having a Progress Report posted every Thursday between now and PAB's release.

So I'll see you all again on Thursday! Take care until then, everyone!

And give your poor eyes a rest. You just read 6 pages of monologuing about a fucking porn series. Jeez.