WIP 181003

Been a while! This project's still rolling, as you can see: episode 1, scene 01. Temp audio and subs in place until the episode's complete and I start casting VAs.

It's not a very interesting scene compared to the others and is really heavy on exposition, so it was a bit tougher to power through. Something nice for screenwriters to do when trying to drop tedious amounts of info is to have at least one other thing going on in the scene--at best, something productive or character-developing. Magus's character has a single note for the most part (and that note is a tuba-blasted "MISANTHROPIC ASSHOLE") but hey, at least he rolled high on intimidation.

Something that helped was the decision to ditch full animation and adopt an animatic style, using keyframes with constant interpolation. It's good tech for making "limited" animation, requires WAY fewer keyframes and, as you can guess, is more efficient when you're working a project solo. Just for bookending, I did fully animate the first and last shots. For final cuts of the episode I may cherry-pick additional shots to animate, depending--or you guys could help vote on which ones? It's a fun possibility. In the meantime, I'll work on better timing.

New-ish tech on the background, too, including the fake-out I did post-processing for depth-of-field (pssst it's just a masking blend texture.) I like the de-saturated colors and shading with ambient occlusion, though there's plenty of room for improvement (shadow passes break when the camera moves, for one thing.) Lord help me understand color theory. Also, I can't stand set designing--getting down to the details drives me nuts. Were I a lady of means, I'd totally farm that shit out to another artist. Oh well, gotta keep truckin'.

Sound design was an adventure. What these games did back then was make the background music do the heavy lifting for the tone of the scene, for lack of voice acting or more sophisticated SFX. There's a base flavor of "Delightful Spekkio" in here (literally just the bass track and drums), and then I quit after two days of trying to compose something more ambitious. Turns out writing music is hard, props to you kids who can.

Righty then. Moving on! New "Ask Doc" this Friday.