Progress Report - May 9, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

So, uhh, apparently I missed last week's Progress Report. Oops.

Anyways, work on Overbreed Ep0 has started. Here is the screenplay for it, and here is the condensed monologue form. The screenplay is in a different format than usual, and it's a bit hard to read, hence the separate condensed form. Ignore the notes at the top, that's internal house-keeping for me to keep track of all the fucking things that Episode 0 has to accomplish (detailed exhaustively below).

What Episode 0 is

As these texts suggest, Episode 0 is predominantly a voice-over slideshow. Think video-game openers, like Darkest Dungeon or Divinity Original Sin 2. It is not a "proper" video, and was never intended to be - which is why it's Episode 0, rather than a non-zero-numbered episode or a "prequel" or whatever.

Basically, Episode 0 is an exposition dump, serving as a stopgap to hopefully spark interest in the narrative side of Overbreed, as I continue to chew away at Episode 1. Episode 0 trades off animation fidelity for breadth - rather than a few things moving a lot (such as the current 12+ minutes of Mercy and Sombra fucking in a single room, for Episode 1), it is instead a lot of things moving very little.

I'm sure you all can imagine the terrifying workload that would be if I tried to actually animate this entire fucker.

I've done a dry read of the monologue, and it clocked in at 5.5 minutes. Taking into account character accent and presentation, I am expecting the final Episode 0 runtime to clock in anywhere from 5 to 7 minutes. Why it's so long is also described, exhaustively, below.

What Episode 0 is meant to do

The voice-over monologue is long, but it sort of has to be, because it's pulling triple-duty. The first duty it's pulling is retreading Overwatch's actual lore, because - in what is likely a surprise to most people who actually play the game - yes, it does actually have a story. Did you know that Overwatch is technically a post-apocalypse game, taking place a few years after an extremely violent war that killed tens of millions of people? You'd never guess it, if you played the game!

Overwatch as a game, and the writers in general, do such a piss-poor job conveying the story of Overwatch, that I effectively have to do their job for them. That's the first duty.

Once that is done, Episode 0 then has to take the absolute scrap-heap of a story that Blizzard left us with, picking up the pieces, and forging an entirely original story from it to work with. Because you know that super-massive robot uprising that took place across the entire globe and utterly decimated populations in a seemingly hopeless war that, against all odds, had the tides turned and ultimately resulted in a human victory due to the last-ditch efforts of the world banding together and forming a globe-spanning elite special task force named Overwatch? And all the cool and interesting stories that can have been told during that engaging and interesting time?

Yeah all that shit happened 30 years ago, and the vast majority of the characters you're expected to care about now literally weren't even born yet at the time of that conflict. Instead, you get to play in a world that's basically just the clean-up crew after that massive world-changing event. Sure, there's a few rumblings of cool things happening in the background, like a second Omnic Uprising in remote regions of Russia - but God forbid Blizzard actually have the players engage with the interesting bits of this story.

SO Wolves and I had to basically forge and entirely new story, taking the beats from the Omnic Uprising and crafting a new story for it, something with actual ramifications for the characters you're supposed to care about - the actual Overwatch cast - to grapple with and overcome.

And so, Overbreed takes place 6 years after the "current day" of Overwatch the game - 1 year after the "current day", the Second Omnic Uprising went into full swing. The war lasted for 2 years, and then the world has been struggling to pick up the pieces of being literally genocided Children of Men style for the past 3 years.

And so Episode 0's second duty is literally explaining that entire fucking story. All because Blizzard made the absolutely boneheaded decision to have an immensely interesting and world-changing event happen so far in the past as to barely be noticeable in the modern day. And so I had to do Blizzard's job for them. Again.

With all of that out of the way, Episode 0 then has to actually set up the story of Overbreed itself. Everything before? That was just fixing Blizzard's jank world-building to properly set up context for Overbreed proper. Unlike Overwatch, Overbreed actually exists in a world of consequences. The conclusion of the Second Omnic Uprising left the world deeply traumatized, with humanity on the literal brink of extinction. Overbreed is actively about working to mitigate that trauma and bring humanity back from the edge. See how that works, Blizzard? Actions, consequences. Truly a novel approach to storytelling, right there.

And while I don't like splitting hairs, especially when I consider this specific discussion to belittle the subject matter, Overbreed is as much a story with porn as it is a porno with story. We've got the story well covered with the first two points, and so Episode 0 also needs to cover the porno bit. I don't like to separate the two out, since my goal is to interweave the two as seamlessly as I can manage, and I like to think that Overbreed's overt sexuality is core and principle to its narrative premise, but in this case I need to introduce some artificiality and explicitly highlight the porn part of Overbreed.

And so, that is the third duty of Overbreed Episode 0: To actually preview and, hopefully, stir up interest and hype in the porn aspect of Overbreed as a story and as a miniseries.

What there is to do, and what has been done

I'll save you all the legwork in parsing the texts linked at the top of this post: there are 55 unique shots in Episode 0. Of them, 8 are shots of Mercy diegetically giving this monologue at a televised event; And 12 of them are uniquely animated shots, 10 of those being sex scenes. That leaves 35 non-sex still images to be made.

Right now, I am going through and building first drafts of all 35 of those scenes. I have so far made 10 such scenes, with 9 of them being shown in this post's image (the 10th image, not shown, is just a wall of supercomputers. It isn't visually interesting, so I decided to exclude it for the sake of the 3x3 symmetry of the remaining 9 images).

You will notice that the ladies are naked for most of them. This is because I have elected to step off from model-work and get into SFM for a bit. Once I have all of the shots made, I will go back and build the missing outfits (and there a lot of outfits I have to make for Episode 0; though none of them are "wasted effort", since they'll all be used eventually in the miniseries), as well as fix the existing outfits as necessary (most obviously, Brigitte's outfit clipping horribly).

I realized I didn't need the outfits to pose the scenes, and so I elected to pose without them.

My efforts for the rest of this week

That being said, I am shifting gears starting tomorrow, and will be working toward finalizing June's Minivid. My goal is to get it ready before Saturday, for the next chapter in this post. This chapter was hilariously short, but it is what it is. Compared to what I've done, what I need to do is pretty straightforward.

Vacation

If you follow my Twitter and my streams, then you've likely heard me mention that I will be going on a family vacation. I will be leaving on the 14th, which is this upcoming Saturday, 5 days from now. I will be able to work in a greatly reduced capacity for the week after that, but between the 20th and the 26th, possibly extending as late as the 1st of June, I will not be able to work at all. I won't even be in the same state, let alone at my computer. And then, I will likely be spending another week after that with my family, again working at a greatly reduced capacity.

In total, I expect to be unable to work at any meaningful rate for the next 3 to 5 weeks, starting May 14th. This leads up to and possibly into June, which is when the Minivid is scheduled to be released. Normally, I would continue working on Overbreed until May 20th, and then spend the last 10 days of May working on the Minivid. But seeing as I don't have those days free, I have to move my schedule forward in anticipation of this family vacation.

The Pre-Vacation Sprint & How Progress Reports Will Be Handled During Vacation

Thankfully, the June minivid is largely already done. The principle animation is all done, the voice is all recorded and installed, and the dialogue lip-sync has already had a first pass done with the automated lip-sync. That just leaves finalizing the dialogue lip-sync, doing the non-dialogue lip-sync, and finalizing the animation. I hope to get as much of that done as I can in the next 5 days. It'll be a sprint, but I think I can get it within just a day or two of being ready to render. I am hoping to be able to finish it up and render it out during the week between the 14th and the 20th - I won't have my rendering machine, and will only be able to render at night, but it'll at least be something.

You can expect a progress report on the 17th, and possibly a progress report on 24th - though, by the 24th, I won't have access to my computer, so that's a huge "maybe". You will definitely get an update from me once return to the "limited access" state of things, sometime between the 26th and June 1st. From there, you should be able to expect another Progress Report, as well as an update of when I back at my apartment and able to fully get work done.

Hopefully by then, the June minivid will be finished, rendered, and posted without issue, and I will be able to get back to chewing through Episode 0. And hopefully, by the end of June, Episode 0 will be done and ready to be posted. And then I return to Episode 1 mines, where I will probably spend another 8 months chewing through what I am personally considering to my current magnum opus in terms of both animation quality and storytelling.

So, that's where things are, and that's where they're going. The linked texts above have also been attached as downloads at the bottom of this post, just for posterity.

Until next week, everyone!