Progress Report - October 10, 2022 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

The Gaige video is coming along swimmingly! All of Milly Stern's audio has been delivered, processed, and installed. Indeed, the video as a whole has been rough-exported and cut together into the final video mix, and clocks in at 8.5 minutes before credits. My plans to make a short, quick video kinda... fell short. Again.

But I don't think anyone will complain about it!

I've sent the video off to my sound designer to do his magic, as I work on lip-syncing Milly's audio and polish the animation. I am still waiting on my Mad Moxxi audio, though hopefully that will be arriving within the next 24 hours. My sound designer is thinking that, assuming the Moxxi audio comes in quick, he can have the video done by next Sunday.

So, hopefully next Monday's Progress Report will be replaced with a video release post.

The Claire/Jill on-stream video is also coming along quite well. I've gotten all of the audio processed, synced, and installed, and am in the process of getting everything lip-synced. I am doing that off-stream, though right now Gaige is taking higher priority. Once all of the Claire/Jill lip-sync is done, a rough cut of it will be exported and sent out to my sound designer to work on, and then we will figure out how much of the polish work we want to do on- and off-stream.

On one hand, I would like to do it on-stream, because we've never done a large project like this on-stream. The only other videos we've done on-stream are the Marie project and the Pharmmetra projects. The former had very little in the way of bespoke animation, and the latter had none to speak of, so neither of them really got the full experience of what polishing actually looks like.

Polishing a video project is definitely an experience I'd like to share at least once, to give people an idea of just what I mean when I say polishing, and how it can often times be almost as much work as the core animating that came before it - just a different type of work.

On the other hand, the Claire/Jill video is 22 minutes long. That's a lot of polish. So, it may end up being an on/off thing, where I work on it off-stream and then stream days are just me working on it as per usual, sharing glimpses of the polishing process.

The stream and I will need to figure that out, once the time comes.

No news on the Frozen or Parawhores projects, other than that I am making the executive decision to pause the both of them until Claire/Jill is done. With that project so close to finished as-is, I'd like to just tie it off and attempt to recoup the money I spent on it, which will probably end up totaling in excess of $3000 USD once Tonedeaf (my sound designer) gets his cut.

Needless to say, despite Claire/Jill being an on-stream project, it is going to fall into the traditional scheme of 1080p early access + 2160p/720p delayed release. I am debating extending the early access period from 5 days to 10 days, just to help drive people to pledging for that early access. I'm not interested in making a profit off my work - never have been - but there's a big difference between recouping production costs and making a profit.

And in the past 8 or so weeks, I'll probably have ended up dropping upwards of $5000 in total just in production-related expenses. Having Overbreed Episode 0, Gaige, and Claire/Jill all converge on needing audio at the same time hurt my wallet a fair bit. And none of that is considering the cost of living in my area (and the world over let's be honest here) skyrocketing, nor the fact that I was in a minor six-vehicle collision a few weeks back and it's starting to seem like the insurances involved are never going to decide whose liable and whose going to pay to fix my truck, and so I'll probably end up having to pay out of pocket for that.

So yeah. Claire/Jill and Gaige are both going to be doing some leg-work to try and recoup those costs. I gotta keep the lights on, at the end of the day.

And then finally, whose the pretty lady in the post image? Well, I'm not quite ready to get explicit there. All I'll say for now is that I've been mentioning in passing for a long time plans to bring back a much-beloved characterization with a new character, after circumstances rendered me unable to make anything with the original character for fear of losing my funding and possible litigation. I'll leave it to all you smart lads and ladies to deduce what I mean from that.

That's all for now! Until next week, everyone. And hopefully, next week won't have a Progress Report at all - because it'll have a release post instead!