Progress Report - Radio Silence - Week 3

Hello, everyone! It's 330am the morning after Thursday, which means it's time for the Thursday progress report I'm always a few hours late on!

Before we get carried way, you may notice that the overall progress has only increased by 4% from last week. I want to clarify that this is due to the change in computation systems between this week and last. If this same system were applied to last week's progress report, then it'd be closer to 32% - meaning that this week, I made about 10% total progress.

That's still not a lot, but there are a few reasons for that:

• 1.) I had to polish the Atrium scene last-minute. This scene was originally not planned at all. It was going to be all voices over a black screen - boring, but I didn't have a scenebuild planned for it. And then StrayaSFM surprised me by delivering an Atrium scenebuild, without me even asking for one, or it even being in the screenplay. He just felt like making another scenebuild in the project canon, and just so happened to make something that could work perfectly for this scene. And so I rushed to fit the build into the screenplay, did some model work to complete it, filled in some holes, and then built the lighting. It has a wide shot with exterior-to-interior lighting, and then animated flashlights, all of which can be a real pain to set up. This all ended up taking a day by itself.
• 2.) I had to rebuild the Helicopter scene's lighting. This one was entirely my fault. I had the Helicopter scene completely lit and ready to go, a beautiful broad daylight shot, and so I moved onto the Atrium scene, where Jill and Chris were looking around the house with their flashlights. With their flashlights. The short takes place at night, but I built the Helicopter scene in daylight. So I had to completely redo the lighting, which took a few hours.
• 3.) I ran into technical issues with the Atrium scene. I really don't want to go into details here. Let's just say that I experimented with a crazy idea as a Hail-Mary final attempt before scrapping the Atrium scene. And, amazingly, it worked. Exceptionally well.

With all of that said and done, the remaining narrative shots should take far less time to build. I am hoping to have all of the narrative shots done by Monday night. I am hoping to have SilkyMilk's dub (which she has gotten to me, sans a pair of lines she's working on getting to me presently) installed, lip-synced, and detailed four days after that. So if all goes according to plan, I will have all of the SFM work done by Friday the 27th. That will give me 3 days to post-process and release on the 30th.

It'll be really close, and it's possible I will have to delay the release by a few days. I will be posting any set-backs and pull-aheads I encounter in the announcements channel of my Discord, so be sure to keep an eye on that. If a delay is decided on, I will post it both on Discord and here on Patreon.

IN THE MEANTIME! I have posted a near-finished WIP of the Helicopter scene, which serves as the project's opening, onto the Discord. You can also watch it by clicking here. The scene is completely done on the visual front. I just need to finalize the sound design, which will come in those final days of post-processing.

If you do decide to watch the Helicopter scene, then you might have noticed a particular editing style in it. Indeed, I try to experiment with every project I do, and this short is rife with them. One of those experiments is more creative editing than straight cuts. Specifically, I hope you all like J-cuts! Because this fucker is going to be chock full of them.

Until next week, everyone!