July 2020, Take 2 - New Project, New Approach To Production [IMPORTANT CHANGES TO SCHEDULE] (Patreon)

Hello again everyone!

I apologize for this "Thursday reports coming late on Fridays / early on Saturdays" becoming a trend. I blame the time-sink that is the early-access game Stellar Tactics.

With that being said, I just want to take the time to say that I appreciate the sheer amount of support that you guys have been sending my way since last Saturday's post. To say I had a bit of a breakdown would be an understatement, and while postponing Phazon Addendum B till later in the year was a relief valve to all the pressure I was under, it would be inaccurate to say that PAB was the sole cause of it.

I took all of Saturday, and a good bit of Sunday, just reflecting on everything. And from that reflecting, two things fell out.

The First Thing:

The first thing that came out is the new July project, Tales From the Liziverse! This is an idea that I’ve had kicking around for a few months now, but haven’t been able to pursue in any capacity because of my schedule for the next two years. It had joined a great many other ideas in the “Maybe in 2022” bucket.

The idea behind making Tales From the Liziverse is for it to be a more irreverent, light-hearted series, with less emphasis on continuity and drama and more on just exploiting Elizabeth’s uniquely canon ability to arbitrarily distort space, time, and reality itself. It is designed with the trope of “sexy scifi super space cop” in mind, except it’s more “sexy dimension-hopping space-time cop.”

The core thesis of the series is based on the idea of there being a “Bureau of Elizigations,” a central unit where Elizabeths from various realities who have all independently discovered that they can use their abilities to change outcomes in a given reality come together and pool their resources. They sit and listen in on the spacetime-line, and wherever there is an aberration that needs correcting, then an Elizabeth is assigned to discreetly alter the course of events.

The series primarily focuses around the adventures of Agent Seven, who has a bit of difficulty with the concept of “discretion”—try as hard as she might, it seems that all of her assignments end in her having mind-shattering sex. Often with the target of her assignment, sometimes with third parties, not uncommon both and more. She’s on thin ice, but you can’t exactly fire an Elizabeth. Nevertheless, she’s trying her best, and we love her for it. Of course, we don’t mind when she invariably ends up putting her baby-making hips to work, either.

July’s video is a pilot into this series, and whether or not it continues will depend on the response to it. No Gods, No Kings received an extremely strong welcome, and it was probably one of the most drama-heavy pieces I’ve done to date. I’m curious to see how this decidedly more comedic take on Elizabeth will fare in comparison.

If you are interested in the details of the pilot episode, then you can read the screenplay here. You can also see some WIP images in this week’s Progress Report.

The Second Thing

Getting back to the grander topic at hand here, as I said, postponing Phazon Addendum B is treating a symptom, not curing the problem. The problem, as I heavy-handedly alluded to earlier in the first paragraph of The First Thing, is the schedule itself.

The intent behind the schedule was simple, noble, and pure. At the beginning of each year, I plan out my next 12 months in advance, and publicly announce all the projects. This gives people things to look forward to, and forces some sense of regularity onto my release schedule.

Unfortunately, it seems that such rigid schedules are just not conducive to the way I work. The history of my work is one of stress, delays, incomplete releases, and in recent months postponements and straight-up cancellations. Obviously, something needs to budge. And seeing as, despite my best efforts, I’m not the one bending under the hammer’s strikes, my only conclusion then is that the schedule has to be what gives.

Importantly, I think I am going to rid myself of the schedule altogether. Both the 2020 schedule, and the notion of schedules as a whole.

When I made the decision to postpone PAB, I needed a new project to put in its place. The next logical choice was the BatCat project, but Milly (my Barbara Gordon voice) was unavailable for an indeterminate amount of time at the time of making the decision. And besides, I was secretly wanting to replace BatCat with a resurrected Surrosluts, which I have been quietly tinkering away at since the cancellation in February (EG about 4 months now). But it has the same issue with unavailable voice talent, and a myriad other issues besides, which made in untenable.

And that left me with no scheduled projects. 2020’s schedule was originally Surrosluts, Rabbit.Hole, Phazon Addendum B, and BatCat. Surrosluts was cancelled, Rabbit.Hole completed, Phazon Addendum B pushed off to later in the year due to stress, and BatCat both not in a position I was comfortable committing to and honestly an idea I’m not comfortable committing to in the first place.

But instead of filling me with dread and despair with having nothing to work on, I was instead awash in—and indeed drowning in—euphoric excitement and glee. I could actually dust off the literal folder of ideas I’ve had to put in the “Maybe in 2022” bucket. And more or less all of them were actually fair game.

Indeed, I wasn’t faced with an issue of having nothing to choose from. I had the problem of having too much to choose from. There’s at least a half-dozen ideas that I could have put together in half the scale as the previous projects (half the production time, half the scale). In the end, I went with Liziverse, simply because I had a grand total of 3 days to get everything together for it, if I wanted to start production on July 1. In reality, I needed less than 1 day—animation began that Sunday evening.

I haven’t experienced that degree of exhilarating liberty in what feels like years now. And honestly, I don’t think I can go back to the dread of having The Schedule®©™ hovering over me. So I don’t think I will.

But what does this mean for my productions? For 2020, and for the years yet to come?

To be perfectly honestly, I’m not sure. There are only three things I am really confident on:

1.) I want to continue making Phazon and Rabbit.Hole videos on a yearly basis. I think one a year is a good pace for them.

2.) I need to make sure I take plenty of time away from animation projects to focus my energy on Hiveship.

3.) I don’t want to commit to projects before I sit down and begin working on them. Which means no schedule.

When I say I want to abolish the schedule, I think I want to abolish it in its entirety. This poses a problem with point 2, because the schedule includes a scheduled month to work on Hiveship. But if I abolish the schedule, then that scheduled month goes with Hiveship. And I don’t know if you fine ladies and gentlemen have noticed, but I’m a bit of a workaholic. Every day I spend not animating (or building models for animating) feels like a day wasted to me. And honestly, about halfway through that month of focusing on Hiveship, I started to go stir crazy and dabbled in animation and modeling side projects, just to keep idle hands busy.

So I think that a month of focused Hiveship is just too much for me. I think maybe a week at a time is a better focus for me. Maybe even just a day or two every other week. I don’t know exactly. Scheduling it out is sort of the antithesis of this revelation, after all.

In regards to animations themselves, I think I also want to focus on trying to cut them back. While I am proud of the fact I was able to get 12 minutes of animation, with a diverse set of locations and a rather dense narrative, out of Rabbit.Hole Episode 3, it was pretty stressful on me to get done in time. Nothing really went wrong per se—it was just a lot of work for one person to do. I think until such a time as I can find a co-animator (if that ever happens, but I am still optimistic), I am going to try to focus on projects that are about half the scale of Rabbit.Hole Episode 3.

Honestly, something more on the scale of No Gods, No Kings. While that project wasn’t short by any stretch of the imagination, clocking in at a hair over 10 minutes of runtime, it wasn’t complex, either. It was four scenebuilds: void (literally one prop and two volumetric lights lmao), the store interior, the back room, and the shopping distract exterior; and was four sex animations: blowjob, titfuck, tease, and anal.

The complications that I ran into with No Gods, No Kings was predominantly a lack of proper preproduction. I started it before the DazV5 body was ready to build a new Elizabeth onto, I didn’t properly get all of the casting sorted, and I had to produce some assets while working on it, to make everything come together.

In retrospect, the way that Phazon Addendum B was going, it boiling over was all but inevitable. While it doesn’t have the location variety of Rabbit.Hole Episode 3 (with its nine locations), it still has more locational variety than No Gods, No Kings; it surpasses both Rabbit.Hole and No Gods in terms of its narrative density, effectively progressing four story threads in roughly the same number of shots as RHE3 pushes two (FuckBuddies thread and Bitzhung thread), leans even more heavily into drama and character development that No Gods does, and blows both RHE3 and No Gods clean out the water in the sheer volume of sex animations. Wrap all of that into having virtually no preproduction and requiring a constant shuffling of building assets while animating them, and working on casting while juggling everything else…

Yeah. I don’t think it’s any wonder that things came out the way they did with Phazon Addendum B, looking back on it.

So looking forward, I think this is how things are going to go:

1.) I’m not going to pre-announce projects. No beginning-of-year tweet with the entire year planned in advance.

2.) I’m not going to publicly commit to projects until all of their preproduction is done. Asset-work, writing, voice-casting. Hell, let’s throw scenebuilding into this, too. Set construction is generally considered preproduction in film, right?

3.) I’m not going to aim for specific release deadlines. Honestly, I just fucking miss them anyways. They’re a joke at this point. So why bother set up the punchline? Things will release at the same time as they always have: when they’re done. No sooner, no later.

4.) I’m not going to take large blocks of time off to work on Hiveship. Four weeks at the end of every production is frankly just too much time for me to focus on just writing, and it literally knocks out between a quarter and a third of the year when it comes to potential animating time.

5.) I will continue weekly progress reports. I think they’re a great way for me to keep track of my own progress, as well as keep everyone in the loop. And I suspect that, with the abolition of set deadlines, progress reports are going to become even more important, so that people can keep confidence that progress is being made.

6.) I will take shorter Hiveship breaks. I don’t know when exactly, but I think at least one day every two weeks is a good goal. Enough to make some progress, even if it is in small increments. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say.

7.) I will attempt my best to honor the July-August schedule commitment. Which is to say, I will attempt to have Liziverse ready for release on August 1. But after that, all bets are off.

8.) I will attempt Phazon Addendum B again before the end of the year. I don’t know if I will finish it before the end of the year. But I will at least continue work on it. But this time, I will finish all preproduction first before resuming work proper. And I will not try to keep to a strict deadline. I will take the time I need, and get it done to the best of my ability, without having the stress of deadlines crushing down atop me and making everything worse for everyone.

9.) I will focus on making smaller video projects from here on out. Maybe not necessarily in terms of runtime, but smaller in terms of scope. The hope here is to keep the idea wheel turning, and to be able to put out inspired passion projects more quickly than I have been able to release videos. I have a lot of little ideas that I want to explore. A return back to the 2017-2018 days, if you will. But hopefully with better production value.

I think that’s all for now. Thank you all again so much for your support on last week’s public report. I am hoping that you all will be equally supportive of these changes I have decided to make in light of it, but if not, I understand. It’s a big change. I don’t expect everyone to be on board with it.

Again, you can read the Liziverse screenplay here and read the first progress report on it here.

Until next week, everyone!