Progress Report - October 28, 2024

Hello, everyone!

I've decided to make this available to all paying Patrons, due to the final section of this post and the ramifications it has for the release date. It's nothing cataclysmic, but it is a delay. And I think everyone should know about it.

Where We Are

As of yesterday evening (circa 10:30PM on Sunday October 27), all of the principle 4K footage for the Pharmmetra project has been rendered! This isn't including anything I may have missed and need to rerender, but I don't expect that to be a massive setback.

I ran into a few technical hurdles while getting the render done, but I managed to overcome them. The problems were actually with my render machine, rather than the render itself. It fell into two separate boot-loops during the course of the render, both times requiring me to crack it open and fiddle with hardware. I'm not sure what exactly the problem is, though I suspect the CPU is dying. It's an 11-year-old processor that survived a power supply going bad on it, so to say it's had a long, hard life is an understatement.

During the 4-day render, I spent time working on the livestream sequences. They are the most VFX-heavy shots I've ever had in a project, with a lot of moving parts (as you can tell). Far and away the biggest obstacle was the stream chat - and it wasn't even the chat itself that was the problem. Instead, the problem was just getting the damn chat to export in a form I could import it into Resolve cleanly. Exporting HTML as transparent images is a cunt, it turns out.

Once I finally resolved that though, I explored particle emitters and scripting in Davinci Resolve, both of which were extremely fruitful. The particle emitters used for the emoji spam in the top-left are both extremely versatile and pretty damn easy to use, it only took me a 5-minute tutorial and 15 minutes of tinkering to get the effect seen here. Similarly, scripting the counters (view counter, commenter counter, and follower counter) became magnitudes simpler once I learned you can embed full Lua functions into them. It took a little bit of creativity to design a counter that ticks up randomly without maintaining state between frames (the script runs from 0 for every frame; no pulling information from previous frames allowed), but once I nailed it down, generalizing it and parameterizing it was trivially easy. Now each counter can be easily tuned by the artist (that's me!)

So that's what all I got done last week, now to talk about what's next.

Where We're Going

Immediately, the next thing to do is go over all of the 4k footage and just make sure it all looks good. Once I verify that, the next thing to do is sit down and write the string templates for the final chat. What you see here is just leftover remnants from my old DVa Does December project back in 2021, from which the chat generator (which I call Thirst Engine, for reasons I hope are obvious) is pulled. It's nothing hard, I just have to actually sit down and think up what kind of gooner phrases people would spam in a porn stream chat, and then build up the synonym tables for the parser to pull from.

Once I have all the templates written, I need to go through and generate all of the image sequences for the different livestream shots, and then install them. Alongside installation, I also need to set up and tune the other VFX elements. For example, the stream starts pretty slow and boring during the opening shots of DVa talking to the stream, reacts in shock (and shocked-emoji spam) when the face-fucking starts, and is just completely exploding and unreadable by the ending shot.

The last thing I need to do on the VFX side, then, is go through and add the motion blur to everything. For this project, I decided to not use Source Filmmaker's motion-blur, because the animations are so damn fast and exaggerated that it just comes out an unreadable mess. So instead I decided to do some experiments with Davinci Resolve's built-in motion-blur, and found some very nice results. I need to adjust them on a per-shot basis (a heavier blur for action-focused shots, to help sell the power; and weaker blur for speaking-focused shots, so the faces don't become blurry messes), and unfortunately the Davinci Resolve blurs are EXTREMELY intensive to render, and I can't preview them back in realtime. So it's going to be a slow and arduous process of guess-and-check'ing. But it'll get done.

Once that is done, though... The video editing is done. Unfortunately, though, the work doesn't end there...

The Unforeseen Setback

As you all likely know, for the past few years I've been relegating the sound design on my videos to the wonderfully skilled Tonedeaf Lewdness. He is a fantastic sound designer, a pleasure to work with, and I've come to consider him a friend as well as a business partner and fellow artist.

The way we've worked together for the past few years is that I give him a rough cut of the video as soon as I can, and then he works on the sound design while I work on polishing everything up. That way, once the video editing is done, I can simply slot his audio work in underneath it, and immediately push the video out for release.

Unfortunately, Tonedeaf has been completely radio silent for the past month. The last I spoke with him was September 24, where he told me that he had finished the first draft of the sound design and was going to send it to me that evening. I never got that audio, and I haven't heard from him since. I've sent him several messages over the weeks (especially in the past week as we raced toward the finish line), and haven't gotten any response.

I won't lie, I worry deeply whenever I haven't heard from someone in a while. I just hope that he's okay and has just gotten busy with the new job he was interviewing for when I last spoke to him.

Unfortunately for us, that means I am going to have to do the sound design myself. I don't mind it - I did it for years before I started working with Tonedeaf, so it's not like I don't know how. I just don't like doing it, and Tonedeaf is unquestionably better at it than I am.

I don't know how long it's going to take me to do the sound design. It's been years since I've done it - the last video I did the sound design on myself was Blue Star Episode 3, all the way back in 2018 (fuck). So, we're just going to play it by ear (hah). I will, as always, give you weekly updates on how it's going.

And hopefully, Tonedeaf will appear from the aether, completely unharmed and in a new job that he doesn't hate, with the sound design for the video ready to go.

I apologize for the delay, but there's not much I can do about it. I'm sure you all understand.

That's all for now. Until next time, everyone!