Progress Report - December 19, 2021 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Another week, another delayed progress report.

You may recognize the first few frames of this week's progress report preview as being taken from this WIP animation I previewed back in October. Indeed, it is the one and the same project.

I've had the idea more or less fully drafted out since before that initial posting, but I just haven't had the time to animate it all. And as you can see, it has a rather lengthy (and visually uninteresting) narrative build-up to it. Which only made finding the time to animate it more prohibitive.

After much thought, and tinkering about with other ideas, I had an idea come to mind: I don't have to commit myself hip-deep to the video-production process. Instead, I can draw it out, and take a few carefully-calculated swings to get large swaths of meaningful progress done for relatively little production time and effort.

Specifically, adapting the idea into a psuedo-comic. In this way, I can get all of the major poses that would need to be made when animating done, without having to deal with the rigmarole involved in actually animating - basically, keyframing without the animating element. At the same time, I can flesh out the writing, scout the camera angles, and get a feel for the pacing. Basically get all of the major aspects of the animation done, minus the time-bog that is the animation itself.

Then, when it comes time to actually animate the project, all of the major milestones are already in place. It just becomes a matter of threading the needle between the individual frames.

Pulling special attention to the concept of it being a psuedo-comic, I say this because comics need to be very carefully designed with the visual layout in mind. They need to be framed such that they can be cut, cropped, and placed amongst each other, while also having enough open space for speech-bubbles and the like to be placed without blocking out essential visual information.

All of which is to say, comics and animations are put together in a very different way - where animations use the entire frame, as well as voice-acting and sound design to express their ideas, comics use only very specific windows and an entirely VFX approach to storytelling. They are not plug-and-play interchangeable.

This is where that "psuedo" comes into play - this psuedo-comic is still being composed and framed with the sensibilities of it being an animation. After all, the final goal is to animate it. And so each "page" of this psuedo-comic is a single full-size panel, as opposed to multiple cropped, sized, and positioned panels on a page.

Finally, another big aspect of the psuedo-comic is that I have aspirations to have it be voiced. In this capacity, it will basically play out like a kinetic novel, where the viewer can flip through each individual page at their own pace, with each page having fully-voiced audio to accompany it, which they can either sit and listen to, or skip as they see fit.

This has two benefits: firstly, as a reader, it helps with immersion and fully exploring the mood of the piece. There's a world of difference between just flat text to read, and having voices actually ready out the dialogue. Audiobooks aren't a thing for no reason, after all.

And secondly, and more importantly to me as a creator: all of that dialogue would need to be recorded anyways, for the animation. So by getting it all recorded before the animation itself is actually made, that is one less resource that I have to hang production on. And, because the audio is already in play as part of the psuedo-comic, it's not just sitting on my hard-drive for months on end waiting for me to get the video fully animated, lip-synced, polished, rendered, edited, sound-designed, and ready for release.

A third benefit unique to the psuedo-comic approach is, because I am not constraining myself to the multi-panel nature of traditional comic pages, I can seamlessly interweave full-frame videos into the psuedo-comic. So I can, for example, have core animation loops for the sex scenes, to give an idea of how the final animation would lay out, scattered among the less-visually-interesting narrative sequences, like the panels seen here.

All in all, then, after much contemplation on the subject, I think this psuedo-comic approach is an all-around win for everyone. It's a win for me, because I get to quickly put to paper a story idea I've had sitting around waiting to be explored for literal months now. It's a win for my audience, because they get to explore the meat and potatoes of said story many many months in advance of an actual animated video being completed and released. And it's a win for the voice talent, because they don't have to wait those same many many months for me to get to the point where the animation is built enough to be ready for voice acting to be recorded and implemented.

I don't know when exactly I will manage to have this psuedo-comic fully put together, but everything seen here (outside of the first 8 panels, of the 50 total) was all put together in a single sitting. Assuming I don't get lost in the weeds doing the sexy-time animations, and just focus on "basic idea, then move forward", then I suspect I can probably explore the entire idea inside a week.

Seeing as I was going to be spending the rest of this month with my family (from the 18th of December till the 1st of January), with those plans being canceled on the 17th due to a covid-exposure scare with one of my dad's coworkers, I don't feel too bad about shifting gears to exploring this long-sitting idea in this experimental new medium. You guys know by now I love experimenting.

Overbreed has made some progress too. I tweeted a sample of what all got done. There's more than that, but honestly, I think this DVa/Zarya story and the psuedo-comic idea associated with it is more interesting and worthy the discussion. Overbreed's not going anywhere any time soon. I can update you all on its progress at a later time. Again, I was supposed to be on vacation these next 2 weeks anyways.

Finally, I have attached a video version of the preview GIF to this post. You can download it, and then pause it as you deem fit to read. The GIF doesn't really give you that flexibility, but I have to compromise to actually get "videos" at all onto Patreon as previews.

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