Elizabeth Short - Progress Report - October 11, 2018

WIP Clip W/ Audio 

Hello, everybody!

It's been a long while since this project last showed its head, but I have finally gotten around to working on properly finishing it.

The above clip is highly work in progress - it only has the core animation and the lip-sync applied. No detail motions, facial animation, camera motion, or sound design of any sort yet.

With that being said, here is a quick break-down of where things currently are:

• All of the auction scene's audio is fully lip-synced.
• All of the sex scenes' audio is designed and ready for installation
• All of the core animation is complete

And what needs to be done:

• Lip-sync the sex scenes
• Detail animate everything
• Complete the auction-theatre scenebuild
• Install the crowd
• Get a handful of male narrative lines
• Render & post-process
• Sound design

All of that is actually pretty easy stuff. The only thing I expect to give me stress is installing the crowd (just due to how resource-heavy the crowd is; SFM is going to be crashing a LOT...); most of the actual work ahead of me is just busy-work, lip-syncing 5 minutes' worth of sex-scene, and detailing about 7 minutes' worth of animation.

Speaking of minutes' worth of animation, this will be a rare short to have deleted scenes available as a Patreon exclusive. I try hard to avoid unnecessary work, but this project was written back in November 2017, before I had my writing renaissance in March 2018. And the project shows it.

This short was originally comprised of 4 sequences: An introduction, the auction, the sex scenes, and the outro.

However, since it was far too late to rewrite anything (already had swathes of the audio for the introduction and conclusion recorded months ago), I decided to just leave the introduction and outro on the cutting-room floor. They ultimately served no purpose, they dragged the hell out of the video, and honestly some of the writing made me cringe on reflection.

Luckily the auction scene was far more salvageable - moving a few lines around, and adding a few lines after-the-fact, and the scene is actually about 80% of the way to my satisfaction. A good bit lower than the standard I like to hold myself, but seeing as this fucking project has been delayed nearly a year now, I'll take 80%.

So the 1080p Patreon release will get the unfinished intro & outro as a bonus reward. Don't expect anything Earth-moving - or even anything good. After all, I went through the effort of writing them, paying for them to be voiced (and paying for their scenes to be built), blocking them out, and lip-syncing them; all to just throw them in the trash at the end. That should tell you just how bad they are.

But I know some people like to peek behind the curtain, so for those of you who like to see what I consider below the bar, then those will be released for you.

All in all, it's about a minute and a half of cut footage that will be included as a bonus for the 1080p Patreon release.

My goal for next Thursday's update is to have all of the sex-scenes lip-synced and detailed, and to have a good start on the auction scene's detailing done as well. I will be surprised if the project isn't in post-production by the 25th.

As always, I'll keep you all up to date as things progress.

Until next week!