Liziverse Pilot - Progress Report #5 PLUS An Update On Future Plans (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I meant to make this post last night, but time got away from me. I meant to make it this morning, but... well, what matters is I'm making it now.

Getting the dubbing sequences put together and exported took a bit longer than expected, though not without good reason. As this post's image suggests, I've ended up with just over seven MINUTES of dub footage.

Not all of this is strictly speaking sex sequence, though. Those who read the screenplay may recall that the narrative sequence has an undercurrent of inconspicuous oral sex all throughout it. Innie and I decided the best way to handle that would be by having her dub the oral audio overtop the runtime of the narrative sequence, which necessitated me to block out and export the narrative sequence. That accounts for 2.5 minutes of this runtime (I won’t lie, I’m surprised that 14 shots of narrative ended up taking 2.5 minutes…).

The rest of it kind of blurs the line, being split between the strip-tease and the penetration. One could argue that while the former isn’t strictly-speaking sex, it’s certainly sexy, and I think a fair argument can be made that it’s still pornographic, in much the same way that the tease sequence at the beginning of Fair Market Value is. Regardless, for the sake of completion, that split is 1.5 minutes strip-tease followed by 3 minutes of penetrative sex.

Last week’s progress report shared aspirations of having not only have the dub sequence done, but having the dub audio itself back to me by the time I write this update. Seeing as I finally finished exporting these videos last night, that very clearly has happened. So I am pushing those aspirations off to next Thursday.

The reasons for the delay are long and many, and I’ve as little interest in detailing them in minutiae as I am sure you all have interest in reading them. So instead, I will instead focus on the two biggest reasons for the delay. Reason number one:

Reforming in the Wake of the Dragon

As I am sure you all are aware, my Patreon was hit by the slumbering dragon that is Nintendo stirring once more last week. There’s been plenty of discussion in the days since as to whether or not it was a legitimate takedown request, or a false claim made in Nintendo’s name, but frankly it doesn’t matter in the end. Regardless of the claim’s legitimacy, Patreon’s response to it was all too real. And so as a consequence, I had to purge every post I made that even remotely featured Samus (including several practice-animation posts).

Of course, I decided to make all of my existing Samus videos fully open to the public on my website, stripping Patreon out of the equation entirely when it comes to viewing their 1080p versions. But that doesn’t account for future videos that would have formerly starred Samus – including the delayed Phazon Addendum B, which would have been releasing the same week as this takedown storm hit me, and causing very real complications when it comes to recouping production costs. So I’ve been putting a fair bit of attention this past week into solving this conundrum.

In the week that’s passed, I have come to the following conclusion: The Phazon hexology, and Hiveship, will continue as originally planned – but they will be transferred to an original intellectual property. In practice, this actually impacts very little with Phazon hexology or the Hiveship film: both are effectively original IPs anyways, with barely any threads anchoring them to Metroid lore. Outside of the names of Samus, the Galactic Federation (which itself is a generic name), and Phazon, the only tie to the Metroid games has been Samus’ Zero Suit.

Names are trivial to change, and so I am not concerned about them. The Zero Suit will be redesigned from the ground up, and the new as-yet-unnamed bounty huntress character will be given a 100% original outfit, built triangle-by-triangle from scratch by Ordagon and myself. It will keep the aesthetic of being a skintight bodysuit, but with an entirely new design, as well as a few goodies that we’ve been struggling with when it comes to writing Hiveship anyways – most notably, the bodysuit will itself be the huntress’ armor (think the Crysis nanosuit), and it will be a “smart” suit, in that it can arbitrarily repair minor tears given time and energy.

The consequences of these points being that it justifies the huntress wearing her skintight suit while exploring the Hiveship of the titular film, and allows for her suit to be torn, repaired, and torn again for each exotic encounter she has on the ship (and there will be several). One of the continuity issues Ordagon and I have had with writing Hiveship is that it’s a bit bizarre to have the character exploring the entire ship with her suit torn, with tits, ass, and pussy hanging loose. Because the first encounter—and thus the first suit tearing—happens in literally the very first chamber of the ship, and that’s only the beginning of her journey. Having the suit repair itself cleanly solves that issue.

Beyond the new outfit, the huntress will also be getting a hair-style and hair-color change (nothing is finalized yet, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a weakness for fiery red hair to match her sassy sexaholic personality). Innie’s interpretation of the character will remain unchanged, and her physique (tall, strong, and voluptuous) will also remain unaltered. I’m on the fence about changing her face – on the one hand, Sarah Bryant’s face is outside of Nintendo’s grasp; but on the other hand, I’m going so far to make the character original, I might as well go all the way. If the face does end up being rebuilt, it will certainly strive to keep the major features of Sarah’s Bryant face, though: fiercely strong, yet disarmingly feminine.

I don’t yet know what the new name for the hexalogy will be, but it will otherwise maintain the existing names. So the next installment in it will still end with the title of “Addendum B.” Similarly, the story of the hexalogy and Hiveship formal are completely unchanged as a consequence of this: Addendum B will still focus on the huntress’ fledgling relationship with the Scientist, and the hexalogy as a whole will build up to be a prequel to the film. The videos will be released the same as any others, with 720p public available, and 1080p and 2160p being Patreon exclusives. The existing Samus videos on my website will not be revised in any way, so expect an unexplained jump in the names from “Phazon Experiment A”, “Phazon Addendum A”, “Phazon Experiment B”, “<Something> Addendum B”, “<Something> Experiment C”, “<Something> Addendum C.”

After Liziverse – Overbreed Episode 1

Another big timesink for me has been trying to figure out what to do after Liziverse. I don’t think it’s a big secret—and if it is, not a big surprise—when I say that I have been feeling underwhelmed with how Liziverse is turning out. It’s squarely my fault for writing it the way I did—Innie has done a fantastic job with the material given to her, as she always does.

But the indefinite delay of Surrosluts, the postponement of Addendum B (which turned to be a blessing in disguise), and the underwhelming nature of Liziverse has been leaving me feeling frustrated and unsatisfied as an artist. I’ve been craving something exciting, something inspired. Something bombastic.

And so a fair bit of this past week has involved me exploring various ideas, trying to find something to sate my craving for dynamicism, that hunger for kinetic energy. After playing with a few ideas, I decided to brush off and revisit the Overbreed idea I discussed some months ago. Since this was an early exploratory phase, I decided to circumvent my usual process of writing the narrative first, and instead jumped straight into the B-side of episode 1: Futanari Mercy and Sombra.

I hunted down some references, and decided to let go of the leash and just let my imagination guide my hand: find reference GIFs that speak to me and tell a story both in themselves and together, and just roll with it. In the end, I ended up with 17 GIFs – for comparison, Rabbit.Hole Episode 3’s sex scene had 6 GIFs. And then I started writing.

And boy howdy did I write.

My fingers had a life of their own. Before I knew it, over an hour had passed, the screenplay fragment I was writing had 21 shots… and I had only covered the first two references. Of seventeen.

I did some refactoring, removing some references and installing new ones that I think told a tighter and more exciting story, bringing the overall reference count down to 14 (“down” to 14, still over twice as much as RHE3’s sex scene). And then I wrote some more.

Another 25 shots later, and I came up with a total of 46 shots, covering just the first five references of fourteen. For comparison, the entirety of Liziverse Pilot is only 38 shots, and RHE3, with its 12-minute runtime, is 89 shots. This sex scene for Overbreed, by itself, is already half the shot length of RHE3 – and assuming an even distribution of time for the remaining 9 shots, it’d surpass 128 shots.

Of course, that’s a highly fallacious assumption to make. But I expect this sex sequence will still likely approach 100 shots in total.

And then, you have to remember, that is just the B-side to the project. There is still the A-side, which is admittedly much simpler and far more straightforward (why I chose to do the B-side first). And then there’s all of the narrative adhesion as well.

I wrote out a high-level draft of the entire episode, start-to-finish. And the B-side is definitely the bulk of the episode, with the A-side probably taking up the second-most time, and the narrative taking third place in terms of complexity (and so probable runtime).

I’m not ready to share it in its entirety yet, but this labeled screenshot demonstrates the structure at least:

In total, I wouldn’t be surprised if this project exceeds 200 shots. Which is an absolutely huge project, there’s no doubt about it. And calling it a “short” would definitely be a misnomer.

But I think between the frustrations and disappointments I’ve had with the past few projects, how long I’ve been mulling on this idea as a backburner project, and the sheer amount of inspiration I’ve had just writing the sex sequence, I think it is a worthy time investment.

And so, if you haven’t figured it out already, I believe I will be committing myself to creating the first episode of the 7-part miniseries that is Overbreed as my next project after Liziverse.

I am not going to hard commit yet until Liziverse is done and all of the Overbreed preproduction is done (including asset creation and voice organization), though. I’ve learned my lesson about committing to projects before preproduction is done – recall that is a major reason why Phazon Addendum B was delayed in the first place.

But don’t be surprised to be reading a new post in a few weeks where I publicly announce the project, with a teaser showing off new Mercy and Sombra models and an accompanying screenplay release post.

So yeah. I didn’t get as much done on Liziverse as I wanted, but it’s not like the time was just pissed away. Been thinking and working on a lot of things going forward!

Until next time, everyone!