March Update (Thunderbolts Final Edit)

Hey gang!!!

 Let’s start with the big news- Episode one of the Thunderbolts Story is in the edit bay.

 What does this really mean? Well-

•  All the planned excerpt scenes are in there.

• All my narration audio has been recorded and edited.

•  Both have been spaced and edited together.

 Now, there are still things that are subject to change. I’m keeping track of minor tweaks I want to make to the scenes, as well as bits of the recording I might want to redo, but this has been the same with all my other projects. All that matters is I have a full timeline to start filling in, mostly concerning the visuals to go over the rest of the narration- which, as you can see, is already taking place, and quite quickly too.

 It’s that usual thing of me going over all my collected material and deciding what visuals work best where, and how I might want to display them, and for now all I’m doing is just getting all of that filled in and planned before I do a second pass and then work into them with pans, zooms, overlays, even more photoshop edits. A lot of it is just still images, so this gives me a lot of flexibility and freedom in how long I want anything to stretch on for, which I don’t always get with video clips, so the first step of getting those visuals blocked out is proving reasonably relaxed so far.

 Altogether, it’s come out to about 2:10:00, but I reckon as the final edit takes shape we’ll probably be more like 2:30:00, maybe slightly more. My narration came to about 54 minutes, so that means a lot of the runtime that I have to physically edit has already been taken care of. All in all, that’s a very healthy shape for this to be in!

 Now, does this mean I’m definitely going to beat the movie’s deadline?

 I… don’t know.

 I’ve been working pretty solidly for three months now and I do feel kind of exhausted. It’s been a long time to crunch on a project that I’d already been trying to get into production for the last couple years, and I’m definitely going to need a little break after this, just to recover and get, you know, outside and moving more again. Definitely hoping I’ll be making enough from this to get more people involved on the next couple videos, as it’s a very daunting task to do the rest of this alone. Hopefully, with one episode done, more people will be able to better see what I’m doing and grasp how they could get involved.

 On the other hand, the rest of the video edits are a lot less arduous and I kind of just want this out there. Not having a new video on my channel in a while and having sat on this for so long are both really good motivators for me to want this out in the world as soon as possible. Plus I wanna see this movie without the baggage of changing the vision of my video with any nods to things it might be doing connected to the original comic, IF it has any. So these are all good motivators to push me through this, and not overthink too much more of the process.

 The good news is that having the video on it’s feet, I’m getting my first glimpse of how this flows and I think all my planning is actually going to pay off. There’s one aspect I’m unsure about, but I’ll let you judge if it was worth getting in there. It’s been a long road to see this exist and I have no idea if I’ll regret it or not once we finally drop, but it feels good for something that was so ambitious in my head to actually exist now as something real and tangible, and I’m extremely grateful to what I now realise is a sizeable team of people who helped make this possible, and even as we speak are bringing their best.

 Can’t promise we’re totally in the home stretch yet, but fingers crossed this month will see real progress towards the final draft. If I do hit the target, well, then I guess that’ll just be a real nice bonus.

 Soon, friends.

-B