Progress Report - July 2, 2021 (Patreon)

Hello once more, everyone!

I don't have much to show this week, because I've been spending it writing. And boy howdy, have I been writing.

I've had this project on my mind for a very long time, and as a consequence of that, my mind has had a lot of time to sit and process the idea, and relevant to this discussion, a lot of time to flesh it out. But I didn't quite realize just how much my mind has fleshed things out, until I sat down to actually collect references and begin writing.

One of the things that I've never been satisfied with my work is that it has a very strong tendency to take a "disconnected islands" approach to sex sequences. Usually a singular pose, and then just a weak transition to an entirely different pose, with no real spacial continuity between them, and often little narrative continuity either.

Fraternization is an obvious example of this, but that was very much by design, leveraging the split-screen time-folding nature of the video to its advantage. But pretty much all of my videos do it in one capacity or another - cross-fades, cut-aways, or even straight smash-cuts. The only video of mine with real sexual continuity is Blue Star Episode 3, with notably continuity in the oral-sex sequences. And even BSE3 breaks down in terms of continuity near the end.

As I'm sure you're all aware of by now, I always try to experiment with things in my projects, both technically but also creatively. Every project is an opportunity to experiment, learn, and grow. Fraternization was an experiment in extensive motion-capture and unconventional storytelling. And for Overbreed Episode 1, I want to use it as an experiment in writing more contiguous sex scenes.

And boy howdy did I end up writing one. The sequence between Mercy and Sombra has ended up with 33 references in total, split across 5 subsequences, each of them having strong continuity as it runs through a handful of different positions, and with a strong narrative thread tying them all intimately together.

I am still in the process of writing it, but as of right now, with 24 of 33 references having their descriptions and dialogue written out, the screenplay is sitting at just over 350 lines, at 18kB. Fraternization's screenplay is a healthy 8.5 kB, and Rabbit.Hole Episode 3's screenplay weighed in at a solid 30kB.

It's important to note, though, that this is not a screenplay I am writing right now. For this project, because of the continuity, I have decided to take a different approach to writing it. Historically, I write the screenplay all in one go - the way you watch it is the way I write it, with beginning, narrative, sex, narrative, end; and written on a shot-by-shot basis, with camera angles and focus points and transitions all written directly into the screenplay.

This time around, I am writing the sex sequence first, by itself. I'm not worrying about individual shots, camera angles or focus points or transitions. Instead, I am focusing on the higher-level flow of motion, how the positions change, and the dialogue spoken and actions taken within a given reference's motion.

Take, for example, the text associated with this week's poster (which, if you can't tell, is absolutely not final - I just quickly threw it together as a proof-of-concept for this post):

A few things immediately become obvious. Firstly, this is definitely something to be split across multiple shots--differing camera angles, focuses, and what-not. Secondly, this isn't just a one-and-done pose, like were done in Fraternization or make up the bulk of my videos past--instead, it involves a lot of unique animation and transitions. And thirdly, that there is a strong emphasis on character interaction and narrative exploration.

All of which is to say, that there is no way to compare what I have written so far to anything written in the past, because they are fundamentally different projects. The filesize of a screenplay doesn't give much information, and I can't give anything more concrete like a shot count because I haven't actually written out in the individual shots yet.

But what I CAN tell you is, unless things get massively cut down in the revising process, Overbreed Episode 1 is going to be a long project. Both in terms of runtime, and in terms of production. I honestly, truly, sincerely think that it will rival Blue Star Episode 3's 27-minute runtime, and could possibly exceed it.

Especially when you consider that this is only one of three sex sequences in the project. The first sex sequence was pretty quick by design--it is a cold open, teasing where the mini-series is headed. The second sex sequence was pretty straightforward, but now that I have ended up putting over four days into writing this third sex sequence (and still not done!), the second sequence is definitely a weak link I have to revisit.

I've considered cutting it, but I don't want to for a multitude of a reasons I don't want to get into right now. I'll bring it up again once this sex sequence has finished the writing and revising stages.

On the subject of, you might have noticed that I screenshotted that text, and that it doesn't look like the Notepad++ theme I generally use. And that's for a good reason.

Classically, the way I compose my references is I save them as GIFs named in numerical order--01.gif, 02.gif, 03.gif, 04.gif, etc--and write the screenplay with references to the gifs as appropriate. The problem with this problem is that adding, removing, and rearranging references is a whole dog-and-pony show, with intermediary names and renaming all of the subsequent files, and editing the references in the screenplay to reflect the changes.

Long story short, it was an absolute mess and I needed a better way to manage and write for my references. And so I spent a day and wrote a tool to do exactly that:

The tool is composed of 3 main segments: The preview, the notes, and the references list. It functions much as you'd expect, where you click a reference, the preview updates, and you can update the notes assigned to that reference. It also has quick functionality with the up/down arrow keys to move the selected references up and down in the list, allowing for a quick and trivial rearranging of references. Similarly, adding and removing references is trivial. And the notes are tied directly to the references themselves, so I don't need to make any changes to the notes if I add, remove, or rearrange notes.

And it's a good thing I wrote this tool, too, because this sex sequence changed too many times for me to keep track of as I was putting it together. At one point, I was using both monitors in sorting references: one monitor had all of the potential references loaded in 100 or so tabs, the other monitor had all of the currently confirmed references loaded into tab groupings, separated by blank tabs as placeholders while I tried to find references to tie them all together.

And the currently confirmed sections changed constantly. I'd be looking for one specific reference to tie two groups together, but then I'd see something completely unrelated and just spontaneously come up with a much more interesting direction to have the animation go instead.

In the end, though, I am extremely pleased with the sequence I have planned out, and am currently in the process of writing out. I don't know how much of it is going to get cut, but I try to avoid doing early revising first. I'd rather have too much content, than too little content, after all. So I'm writing the whole thing, and will share it here on Patreon when the first draft is done, and then taking the axe to it after the fact.

And this tool has been extremely helpful in the process. I honestly don't think I could have gotten it written to the extent I have without this tool--the inconvenience and constant struggle would have beat the ambition right out of me.

I originally had a lot more to say for this post. I honestly thought it'd be a really short post, because I had so little to share, and so I dug up some "unrelated but" to share. But now, seeing how immense this post has become, I am going to leave those for another time.

This project is absolutely the longest I've spent in the writing stage. Blue Star Episode 3 notoriously didn't have a writing stage, and I learned to never do that again as a result. Recall that BSE3 took two years to produce, and most of that was me just constantly throwing out and rewriting things mid-animation, and just getting frustrated with how disorganized everything was. Never again.

And even though Rabbit.Hole Episode 3 had an unusually long writing cycle, with me throwing out and rewriting the entire episode three separate times (thankfully before production began this time around...), I think that Overbreed Episode 1 will take the crown for the longest writing cycle.

I definitely think it will reflect in the final product, too, when it's finally all ready.

That's all for now, everyone! I am hoping to have this first draft written by next week, and be retooling the second sex sequence. I'd like to be revising the whole batch, but honestly, I'm not certain I'll reach that goal.

Until next time!