September Preview

Dear Patrons,

How are you doing? Not too long time since last, given the mid-month update, but I hope you've all been well nonetheless! I'm back at it with another update, before I'm off for a quick trip to Copenhagen to celebrate my birthday with friends and family. Let's jump right into it!

THIS MONTH'S PREVIEW:

In this particular scene we see Zale enter the ruins for the first time (of the episode). You can view the scene without compositing if you go back to the May preview. In this particular scene, the compositing is pretty simple, aside from a few shots. There's not too much fancy lighting or effects - oh those sweet summer days, before I drowned in rain effects towards the latter half of the episode! There are actually two shots in this scene where the compositing is not yet done, one unfinished background, and one minor compositing error. I wonder if you can find which is which?

EPISODE 3:

Tales of Zale episode 3 is coming along. Like REALLY coming along now. We're rapidly nearing the 90% completion mark and it's kind of got me swaying into an existential crisis at times. That's a slight exaggeration, but point is that we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Now when that's said, once we do reach those 100%, that doesn't mean that the episode is all done and ready to be released. First, there's a lot of editing polish for me to take care of - I haven't been all deep down in the Premier Pro file since I locked the animatic, and there's plenty of stray scratch sounds that need to be cleaned up and old place-holder wallah that needs to be updated at this point. Secondly, the initial composites I did for 3 of the scenes way back in 2020/19 are outdated, so I will have to go through them again and update them with the newer style and approach. None of these things are especially hard, but it is going to be tedious for sure. THEN, when that's done we can finally go into all out audio production. Since I don't have much of a budget for this stuff, the people who I do get to work with will need to be given plenty of time to work their magic, so it will likely be a while before the episode is ready for release.

To let you in on some of my thoughts, I do have a small ambition to have a song with vocals in the very last scene of the episode. That's very much a new venture for me, and one that I'm going to have to explore the logistics of. There's a decent chance that something like this might put me over my personal budget too, so there's that to consider. I'm contemplating if I should try to get some quotes from the audio people I'm going to involve and see if I can crowdfund it with a Kickstarter or what-not. I've been holding off on something like this for the episode, because I know there's no way I'd ever be able to raise enough budget for the full-on production with my current level of reach. But if the rest of the episode is done and it's only for audio production, there could be a chance... That'd certainly allow me to keep the post production on a much more solid schedule too.

But that's all a little further out, so we'll see. Like I wrote in a previous update, my current aim is to finish the whole visual side of the episode before the end of this year, and so far we're well on track for that to be the case. One milestone at a time!

TV-SERIES PITCH:

At this point, I hoped that I could have written that I'd been out and done my first broadcaster pitch. But alas, things have been drawing out. For this first one, we do have a good bunch of information to go on, and that information has been something we've had to take into consideration and re-evaluate before jumping into the fray. I have to be vague, but it's got to do with all sorts of "boring" stuff like financing models and rights distribution. The veterans at the team basically pulled the break and advised that we reconsider what we want from this particular broadcaster. I really do agree with their assessment, so we've decided to play the long game. We're still going to pitch to this broadcaster, but it's not going to be with full financing in mind. But yeah, hopefully that's going to happen sometime this month? So I've still got another pitch to prepare!

I've also had the pleasure of attending some relevant seminars and talks around the TAW area. And I'm still working on polishing some of the episode treatments at the Open Workshop, preparing them for a final feedback round in October. It's real nice to have a bit of liveliness around town again!

ROUND-UP:

I'm always thinking "I don't have much new to add in this month's update", yet I still end up with a wall of text. Hopefully that sort of unfiltered blog update is part of the charm of reading these! I'm really excited to see how the web-episode is coming along, and am really looking forward to sharing the next scenes to come. In the meanwhile, I hope you have an awesome September!

- Sif