Progress Report - March 4, 2025

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for this post being a day late (as they so often are). As Monday closed out, I was less than 10 shots away from finishing the Batcat storyboard, and so decided to delay a day to get it done so I have something complete to post.

Without further adieu, you can click here to watch the full 11-minute draft.

I mentioned last week how Innie had written the story to be a two-parter, and that I was expecting that the full story would likely clock in north of 20 minutes. As such, I was expecting that I'd need to split the video in the same way Innie wrote the story, and that is exactly what I am doing. The 11-minute draft ahead is part one of her story.

The goal for this week is for Innie and I to sit down and try to cut it down to get it under 8 minutes. I'm not going to break our backs over it - that kind of dogmatic approach to cutting is what ended up making the Pharmmetra video take over a month just in writing, as it was rewritten from the ground up 4 times over, and it still clocked in at 15 minutes.

Instead, I'm going to firmly put my foot down: however long the storyboard is come next Monday is how long the video will be. We'll try to trim it down, but we're not going to stress over it. All things considered, 11 minutes isn't terrible. It's longer than I'd like, but it's doable.

So next Monday I am locking down the story, sending out emails to get people on-board, and beginning asset preproduction. Babs is getting some new hairdos, and both of them are getting a few new outfits (and Selina is getting an outfit that doesn't clip through her body anymore). There are also a few props I need to make or modify.

All of that going well, production should start in earnest the Monday after, on March 17. From there, we all know the drill. Hopefully, between this video being so dialogue-heavy and there being a small cast, I can get most of the audio recorded before the core animations are even finished, meaning that there won't be the month-plus delay where I'm sitting on my thumbs waiting for audio like Pharmmetra had. Beyond that, we'll play by ear week to week, just like we always do.

Beyond Batcat, I have also been exploring a potential new content avenue: micro-videos. Let me explain.

As I've mentioned before, I have dropped Twitter as my daily driver social media, and am now using Bluesky for my day-to-day posts. I've been working a regiment of posting daily pinups, in an effort to get the account circulating and slowly rebuild my follower base. So far it's been working moderately well.

But I want to make inroads into the animated-video circles on Bluesky, since that is, of course, what people most know me for. There's only one issue: Bluesky only allows for 60-second videos.

At first, I considered the classic approach of taking longer videos and cutting 60-second trailers for them (something I honestly might do with my existing videos, just to get them onto Bluesky). But then I thought on it a bit more, and I came up with a far more radical solution:

What if I just made 60-second videos? Like, full videos explicitly written to be 60 seconds long. And so, the idea of the Micro was born.

As of right now, I have 7 micros written out in various different stages of completion. Two of them (the DVa one and Witcher one) were written under the illusion Bluesky had the same 140-second limit that Twitter does. I have ideas on how to rework them both, but have decided to pursue new ideas first. Another two of them are concurrent episodes, the Parawhores ones. And then a fifth, the Marie one, is only half-finished, clocking at 35 seconds with a few plot beats I still want to hit.

You can watch each of the micro drafts here:

DVa | Marie | Parawhores Ep1 | Parawhores Ep 2 | Witcher | Life is Strange [Sound warning]

You may have noticed that is only 6, when I said I have 7 micros written. That is because the seventh, which in my opinion is probably the strongest of the bunch, hasn't been drafted yet. It can't yet, in fact, because it requires some new characters. But allow me to introduce you anyways, to A Barbarian Named Bitchbreaker.

A Baldur's Gate-derived anthology, heavily inspired by the wonderful works of Jack Cayless / Chimneyspeak / Rapscallion, Bitchbreaker is a futanari tiefling barbarian wielding a mighty greataxe in her hands and a mightier bastard sword between her legs who hasn't come across an obstacle she hasn't managed to fuck her way past. The premise is delightfully simple: each installment is her getting into some predicament, and proceeding to get herself out of said predicament by living up to her name. And yes, she really does go by the name Bitchbreaker.

I've got some ideas written out for her that I think will work wonderfully, and I am very excited to get her put together and to start storyboarding out her Micro ideas. So much so that, as you can tell, I couldn't wait to prototype the poster idea, and ended up using Brigitte as a placeholder, since she was the closest completed character I had to Bitchbreaker's physique.

I haven't been putting too much effort into these micros though, only putting an hour or so an evening into them before I go to bed, as my primary focus this past week has been chewing through the Batcat storyboard. In total, just over 300 unique images were assembled and rendered out for Batcat over the past week, and boy howdy can I feel it. But the journey ain't over yet - we just keep on trucking.

I'd love to hear peoples' thoughts, on anything and everything. What do you think of Innie's Batcat story? How do you feel about the idea of 60-second videos? Do any of the Micros tickle your interest?

That's all for now! Until next week, everyone!