Progress Report - August 26, 2024

Hello, everyone!

I am pleased to report that everything is moving precisely on schedule. Like, alarmingly precisely. Before writing this post, I jumped back to last week's post and reviewed the schedule I had laid out, and what all I said I hoped to have done by today. And I had managed to nail it square.

As part of that, I have a preview to share with you all! I always have a hard time deciding just how much to show off in a preview, but with the full video clocking in at 14:13 before credits, I decided just shy of 3 minutes was fair. And so:

Click here for a three-minute sampler of the video, with full voice-acting!

Do be aware that while the voice-acting is complete and fully installed, it is also entirely unmixed. So it all sounds very chaotic, and the different audio levels from the various voice talents' recording setups mean some voices overpower others - and not in a fun kinky way, but in a not-fun "I can't hear what is being said" way.

Similarly, there is no additional sound design yet. So no slap-slap-slap's or squirt-squirt-squirt's or squeak-squeak-squeak's or stroke-stroke-stroke's. As such, the soundscape is entirely empty sans the raw voice recordings.

And then, of course, these are all very low-quality renders. No lighting or even ambient occlusion, done to minimize the render times so that I could just quickly put everything together for my sound designer, before I move onto finishing everything.

With all of that being said, as you may have noticed in the preview, I've upgraded the camera-phone UI a bit and have put together a work-in-progress livestream UI. Simple black bars on the sides are cool and all, but you know what's cooler? Darkened blow-ups of the main view, to keep things visually interesting without them being distracting.

I don't want to talk about how annoying it was to figure out how to compose all of that in Davinci Resolve. All I will say on the matter is that Resolve has some very curious quirks about how compositing and masking works in its node-based Fusion editor.

The camera-phone UI is finalized, with animated timestamps. The livestream UI is not, however. Beyond the obvious placeholder text for the text chat, I have various things that will update in realtime, such as the viewer count and subscriber count. I decided to hold off on wiring all of that up though, because it will be very non-trivial, and frankly I have more important things to do first.

Everything has been tossed off to my sound designer, and I am now going to focus on finalizing the animation. As I stated last week, my plan for this week is to have all of the lip-sync done end-of-day Monday, September 2nd. After that, I hope to have all of the detail animation and camera choreography done by end-of-day Monday, September 9th.

Hopefully my sound designer will be wrapping up his initial draft around September 10th, meaning that I can kick out a render, pair it with the draft, and we can make any final adjustments before the final 4k render is started. So far, still eyeballing a September 13th release. And as always, that is not a commitment.

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