Progress Report - July 19, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Let's all pretend that it is actually the 18th, and I am posting this Progress Report on time.

With that being said, it's been a productive week for Overbreed Episode 0! Two major milestones were made: firstly, I've gotten the model for the Serum Injector built! I am extremely pleased with the results, especially since it's an entirely bespoke design that I came up with more or less by the seat of my pants. I knew I wanted a cartridge-esque system for the serum, but beyond that? I just stuck boxes and cylinders all over the place and then smoothed them and went from there!

While I was putting it together, I was trying to keep in mind the physical mechanisms that would be involved (could it actually work?), the complexity of the system (the in-universe goal is to have these injectors mass-produced and distributed across the world), and the design aesthetic (Overwatch is all sterile environments and smooth, swooping curves). This included devising an animation for how it would actually be loaded and operated.

I even put together some proof-of-concept animations of exactly that:

I need to make the needle bigger (you can see it poke through the bottom in the left-hand side of the first gif), but other than that, I am extremely pleased with how it works. On the one hand, the idea of it just fucking yeeting the expended vial seems extremely wasteful - but on the other hand, the context is that this vial is basically a humanitarian product, and so the goal is to make it as quick, cheap, and easy-to-use as possible. Being disposable is certainly more conducive to that solution than a single vial you have to refill for each dose.

One could make an argument against my spending so much time and effort on the injector, but it is literally the centerpiece of Overbreed as a miniseries. Like, the entire point of the story of Overbreed is the creation and perfection of this serum. So the mechanism to delivery it, I think, deserves the attention.

Plus, it's going to get a lot of use. Every episode will have it be used (at least implicitly) at least once, with some episodes up to or even exceeding 3 times. So it's worth getting it right the first time, with how often it'll be on screen.

The second milestone reached is that I've gotten all of the lip-sync done! This post's images are from the bookends of Episode 0, and you can download and watch the bookends with audio as an attachment at the bottom of this post. This bookend is also a beautiful opportunity for me to formally introduce the three wonderful voices in Episode 0: Milly Stern as Mercy, Bordeaux Black as Zarya, and Mimi Hung as Mei. They all do absolutely fantastic jobs, and I am sure you all will agree when you give the clip a download and a listen!

In addition to this ~15 seconds of footage, I also have all of the televised-event segments lipsynced, which adds another 70 seconds of lip-synced dialogue, up to a total of 85 seconds of lip-syncing done.

Less of a milestone, but still worthy of discussion I think, is that I settled on a solution for the visual aspect of the slideshow, which is the majority of Episode 0. Slideshows are well and good, but on their own, they're kind of visually boring. Most slideshows-as-cinematics do something with their images. Some have them zoom-pan, others give them fake parallax, others yet even animate the pieces and make a little puppet-show-esque display.

After some contemplation, I decided to settle on a technique I've wanted to use for years now, but have never been able to justify - and something you don't see that much in cinema:

Dolly zooms!

For those who don't know, a dolly zoom is a technique where the camera operator simultaneously widens the field-of-view of the camera, and pushes the camera in. When you widen the field of view, it exaggerates distances - things that are farther away from the camera appear to move even farther, and things that are close to the camera appear to come even closer. By pushing the camera in at a very specific rate, you can match the widening such that the target of your focus appears to stay exactly in the same place on screen, but everything in front of them appears to get closer to the screen, and everything behind them appears to go farther away.

It's a really trippy effect, made famous in its use in Jaws, and also notably used whenever the Battlestar Galactica used its jumpdrive in the 2004 remake.

I've always wanted to use them, but they're a pretty exotic effect and hard to justify. For something like this though, just adding some visual flair to an otherwise still image? I think it's a great idea, and I think the execution came out even better!

Right now, I am working on adding these dolly zooms to the rest of the shots. I've gotten a good chunk of them done, but there is a particular sequence that is proving quite tricky - it is four separate sequences all composited together, and then seamlessly blended into another pair of four separate sequences. Which, for the folks keeping score at home, means I have a whopping eight sequences to synchronize a dolly zoom across.

Once that is done, the next major goal is to body-animate the monologue sequences. As you can see, the bookend sequences with Zarya, Mercy, and Mei are already animated and basically ready to render as they are.

For the body-animating, my goal is to pull out the motion-capture and give it a spin. I've noted before how I am extremely limited by space in regards to what I can mocap - basically, anything beyond standing in one spot is outside of my capabilities on a purely technical level.

Luckily, the monologue sequence is literally just Mercy standing in one spot. Behind a podium, giving a televised speech to the United Nations council, more specifically. Which is something perfectly suited to my mocap limitations.

I'm not hard-married to the idea of mocap. If it turns out rubbish, I can animate it by hand. But it feels like too perfect a setup to squander the opportunity. And this time, I am not going to track shoulders. I've learned my lessons from Fraternization.

So yeah, all in all, very productive week! And we are very quickly approaching the finish line for Episode 0. I dare say, we might actually be able to get this released by August 1, which is the plan for it taking the place of the upcoming Mini-Vid.

At any rate, that's all for now, everyone! Until next week!