Progress Report - November 11, 2024

Hello, everyone!

We're getting close to release now. Very close. This isn't a hard commitment, but I think it is fairly likely that this will be the last Progress Report before the video finally gets released. And it's about fucking time, too.

There was a time when I thought I'd have this video done and out the door by the end of July. I genuinely, honestly, and sincerely don't even know how the hell this video has ended up taking 3 fucking months longer to produce than I had planned. It hasn't even had any particular nasty setbacks, outside of my sound designer going radio silent. The project had a tortured preproduction, but the July projection was taking that into account. It just... ended up taking 4 months.

But regardless!

I've gotten all of the dialogue + sex-sounds fully mixed, as well as the ambient soundscape built and mixed. You can click here to hear a sample of what that work looks like. I've also managed to put together and install all of the Foley, mixing it all will be the task for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Once all of the Foley is mixed, though, that's the last of the audio work. And the last of the labor-intensive work.

At that point, there's only five things left for me to do:

1.) Light and 4K render the three slides for the credits sequence

2.) Actually add the credits to the video itself

3.) Color grade the video

4.) Add the vector-based motion blur*

5.) Cut a Twitter-friendly teaser trailer ahead of the video's release

And then that's it. I expect that I can get the first 3 done all in one sitting (the credits sliders are already posed and scenebuilt, they're just not lit), and I expect items 4 and 5 can also be done in a single sitting.

Which means that, the way things are looking now, I've only got 4 days of work left before the video is done and ready for release. Taking into account the fact I take Thursdays off, and we're looking at a potential release as early as this Saturday.

It's been a helluva long journey. And I can't overstate just how blessed and grateful I am for the infinite patience that you all have shown. After the video's release, I intend to make a formal post about what my immediately plans are. And then a week or two after the video's release, I want to run a poll across my three main audience bases (Patreon, Twitter, and Discord) about the wake of this tortured development cycle.

So, those are some of the things to look forward to!

Until next time, everyone. And hopefully, the next time will be the early-access release of the video!

*I am not wholly convinced I even want to add motion blur. It honestly looks pretty decent without motion blur. But I've also been so focused on the technical details for the past few weeks, I haven't been paying much attention to the aesthetics. I need to sit back and watch the video holistically before deciding if motion blur is needed or not. Motion blur is good for giving more power and intensity to fast motions, but it is extremely intense to process in Davinci Resolve and is a pain to preview, so I have hesitations about adding it unless I think it's really necessary.