Update 50: The Plan

Hello everyone!

Another release done and me and my team can breathe a collective sigh of relief in a job well done I think!

The production represented some unique challenges and took way longer than I thought it would, but I'm enormously proud of the result, everyone involved really did give it their all, and that culmination of artistic representation (in particular the sound work am I right??) reminded me of why I started this venture to begin with.

It's a wonderful representation of what a bunch of passionate people can do when they get together and give it their all.

In hindsight, I think the production timescale turned out about right, bearing in mind I didn't really start work on actual production until the Middle of February (aside from writing and asset production) to complete a 13:30 presentation in 2.5 months is pretty astounding.

Production timescales are something that's always niggling at me, I've let people push me around and impose those expectations on me before, I've even embraced them and made some posts talking about it (those of you that have been around for a while will remember that update)

You can probably all tell I've changed my attitude in allowing that kind of talk around here, if someone starts bringing it up now, it just gets deleted, It's simply not something I'm going to entertain discussing anymore.

Nevertheless, nobody will put harsher demands on myself than myself, and towards the end of last year, that was reaching breaking point.

Around that time, I'd spend upwards of 16 hours a day at my desk working, sometimes longer, at times I would go from bed to my desk until I couldn't stay awake anymore, than back to bed, rinse and repeat until it was done, no lunches, very few breaks.

I'd ignore social events, stop working out, not even go outside, not take the time to cook for myself, live off of takeaways and ready meals, I wouldn't tidy my environment, I wouldn't be able to enjoy playing a game even, the thought of spending time on something that wasn't furthering the production in some way was just ridiculous.

Since that I've gained a lot of experience, learned new tools and gotten more help, but I'd still retained the idea that, it was possible to 'rush' art.

As it turns out, you can't, and as we expand this enterprise and take on more help and widen the scope of our productions, it becomes clear there is only really one risk to the future of this business, and that is burnout.

The reality is that I cannot continue to work at the pace I did previously, It would result in a hellish 2-3 month production cycles of 12-16 hours a day at my desk, followed by such a dramatic release of stress that I felt that I'd need to separate myself from even the thought of sitting at that desk for, sometimes months at a time.

That could not be sustained long term, so for this production I took a different approach, limiting my time each day to a more reasonable 7-8 hours, sometimes less if it wasn't working for me at the time, and I took my weekends back.

This was in and of itself an incredibly challenging thing to do, especially in the last weeks of the production, usually at the stage when the render is done and it just needs putting together, I would normally work insane hours to make that a reality, however as of the 26th of this month just gone, I forced myself to take that weekend instead, and I am so very glad that I did.

Having the more measured work/life balance allowed me to overcome obstacles that I'd previously just spend the day banging my head against my desk (figuratively but sometimes literally) trying to force results.

I hope you can all see that, even with working comparatively less, this approach is resulting in an even higher standard of work.

And perhaps more importantly, after having completed the production, I don't feel an excessive need to immediately run away from the environment entirely, in fact I'm excited to work on the next follow up piece!

There will be some downtime, of course, as well as finishing up some of the actions I took leading into starting this production (that being an organisation of my office space into a much more tidy, creatively inspiring workspace) there's also a lot of technical issues I need to overcome and solve.

I'm going to spend my next update going over those technical issues in more detail, right now I really do want to step away for a moment, take some time to nourish my creativity, build some new computers and start investigating some of the technical issues that were plaguing me during this production lifecycle.

As for what's next, I'm planning to follow on directly from the most recent piece with a series of sleepy orgasms from our tuckered out girl, it will be around 9 minutes of new content.

As it's the same setup, in the same environment and all the technical problems have been solved already, that should be done fairly rapidly I should hope (I've said that before!), but we will see. More news on that as it develops, suffice to say I do not intend on rushing it.

As an additional note: The next release will result in an increase in tier pricing for new supporters.

As ever I will retain my philosophy of ensuring that those that joined will keep the same level of benefits at the same price they paid when they signed up (provided they do not end their sub) I still have one or two people subbed that still only pay the original price of £1 a month.

An enormous thank you to everyone who helped make this project a reality (that's you guys!), and a hearty welcome to our newcomers.

Ciao for Niaou