Wedding and Special Features

Making a post to share some pictures. For starters, I've just gotten married! Here's some pics of me, my bride Naty, and our wedding party.

While I'm here in Sweden getting married, my buddy AJ is looking in on my cats. They always hide from him under the settee and they're so cuuuute.

Let's look at some special features, enough to make up for the few weeks I've neglected to post special features. Be sure to check our Linktree for other places I may have posted these special features. Let's look at some older stuff - storyboards!

Sadie Allen's storyboards for the Irregular Fantasy teaser, and the final result as seen in the video's thumbnail! See it here. Can we get the video to 1,000 views? Or at least 900. It's been lingering in the 890s for some time.

I wasn't able to find the entirety of the "Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices" pilot storyboards. Hopefully they're still on my other laptop. I don't think I'd have been so short-sighted as to delete them. If so, at least every frame of them still exists in the fully-edited storyboard video that features them; as it is, to make this segment of this post, I had to pick out storyboard pics from earlier blog posts. Hopefully I can find the rest another time.

dance scene by Naty Jenfjord

Airi nocking an arrow by Casey Gosselin

characters walking along by Naty Jenfjord

Stacky in a song number by Michelle Jenfjord

group shot by Sadie Allen

The only K&K storyboards I could find in my computer were from "teaser 2", which has been cancelled, there's only going to be one teaser. Still going to make the storyboards for it a special feature later on, as we went to the trouble of boarding them all and did some of the voice work. Something exclusive for the patrons, yeah?

Stacky preparing some exposition for the audience, by Naty Jenfjord

full group shot of the seven heroes by Naty Jenfjord

the seven heroes setting down for dinner by McKenzie Eby

And here's some concept art. From what I've seen, concept art is really detailed these days. But I'm going more by the original meaning, where it's the earliest conception of what a character might look like. Here's some concept art for characters of Irregular Fantasy!

King Dworin by Naty Jenfjord

Ted by Naty Jenfjord

Dwizella by McKenzie Eby

Cthulhu by me

Chief Dwangus by me

Big Bad Dwohn by me

I made concept art for lots of other characters in order to create the character blogs, which you can check in the archives of the blog, from August 2023 to July 2024, with Naty and McKenzie having digitized and colorized all the pics.

Here we have the height chart of the Irregular Fantasy model sheets by Stacy Lord - we're redoing the model sheets one final time to make the model-making process more accessible to newcomers, and after successfully getting redone Keys & Kingdoms models from YerayYL (seen here still not quite on a real height chart), I couldn't find anyone who could produce satisfactory Irregular Fantasy ones, so, I'm hoping Stacy herself can tackle that.

And finally, I wanted to take another look at one of the earliest phases of Keys & Kingdoms character design: the artwork of Matt Fair, who I commissioned after seeing an avatar he'd made for a fellow member of the Dominic Noble patron Discord. Find him here. Apparently he's "Rusty's Sketches" now. Got nervous when I couldn't find him for a second there! But then I found his new name by seeking out our old DMs. Yay.

Now, his results made me realize what I was really after -- I had forgotten, in the early stages of designing the characters, that I was going for a Disney-esque art style for the Keys & Kingdoms world, and Matt's style was certainly not that. But some of the details original to Matt's version made their way into the characters' true, final designs!

Special Features

I tried to resolve this month to release some sort of special feature every week, to put it on all the socials, everywhere you can find TAPAS, as seen on our Linktree. But, even though there's a decent backlog of concept art and storyboards and stuff, it's been hard figuring out what to post. I'm trying not to be afraid of spoiling anything, trying not to tell myself that matters, and trying not to be self-conscious of the relatively low quality of concept art and storyboards, as it compares to final character art and final results such as the Irregular Fantasy! teaser. They're still very interesting, they'll just be more interesting when accompanied by their final version.

So, let's see what we're looking at, special features wise. Well, it's now been four years since the release of Better Yet? - every year I keep intending to do an anniversary special, and every year something gets in the way. Usually depression, ironically enough, but I'm hoping to prepare enough that I can do a fifth anniversary special, which involves LEGO minifigures of all the characters, which I had made last year, and a full-feature commentary/watch party, ideally with myself, Mason... and Adrienne, who wasn't available to commentate on release day or the first anniversary for medical reasons.

Mason's working on a follow-up, by which we mean just the next project written and directed by Mason, called I'm Telling Mom!, which he intends to really make into a play this time, while I've always maintained, okay, you can do that if you wish, but I think it should also be an audio play in the exact same format as Better Yet?, for consistency, it's what the fans will want.

Better Yet? is hovering at 294 hits on YouTube, which is ten more than its trailer has. Mason was always bummed out that the trailer has more hits than the actual project, and I was always like, why would it be any other way? That's how trailers work. But, no, apparently we've reached that point that more people have, in fact, clicked on the play itself than the trailer, so... I'm shocked, but I guess Mason got what he wished.

I've started working with Bass, a screenplay I was given by my Grandpa Larry before he died... I've considered that someday if we get big, we might shoot the movie in Denver, where it's set. Having gone over the first scene, I'm thinking even that will be a bit beyond our capabilities, but if we could convert it into a big audio drama and form it into a thematic trilogy... hey.

Moving on, I definitely want to give a shout-out to all the voice casts of the projects we've done. It's been a very long time since we did the voice recording for Keys & Kingdoms and Irregular Fantasy, and, outside of the Irregular Fantasy teaser, nobody's gotten to hear the work they did in its full, glorious context.

We're working so hard on finally getting the pilots out, and all the teasers and shorts that come before them. We haven't recorded the voices for the Irregular Fantasy pilot yet, I certainly hope we get the whole cast together again and so many more. And after the pilots, well, we intend to lay low a couple of years and just write the series, and write like mad for a long time before starting to self-adapt the series into the animated-comic format, so... might be a few years before we need the Keys & Kingdoms voice actors again, though I have been considering making the "educational shorts" about their world a feature for during the "writing like mad" portion...

And, finally... I've got kitties. It's just been me and Butter and Marmalade in this apartment for a very long time. Sometimes I wonder if they get bored. But I try to take some cute pics to share as often as I can.

New Resolve

 I haven't been around here in a while. For a long time, I've been doing a whole lot of nothing. Just occasionally posting in my insiders groups on Facebook and Discord about how frustrated I am that I've been doing a whole lot of nothing.

Right now, I'd like to preserve the most recent of those posts, which is a resolution to really change that moving forward. So, for posterity, I'd like to also put today's post on the blog. It went as follows:

I was talking some time ago with the boys about my frustrations with moving on. It's an executive dysfunction issue, massively, but Mason also made a pretty good point: that I'm actually ruthlessly efficient when I'm writing and performing. But we finished that part a long time ago. I've been trying to continue the projects as the producer and director, but there's no reason to expect me to know how to produce and direct projects like these, so, one can see how that would give me trouble. I was reminded of the saying that if you judge a fish by the way it climbs a tree, that fish is going to think it's stupid. I have been feeling stupid for the past two years as I've failed to make any progress.

Also, you know... the country. I've been told it's okay not to be okay right now. I don't know what to do about it. I'm not the person who's bringing the art that gives people hope and joy at a time like this. I've tried to be and I beat myself up so hard over the fact I haven't been succeeding.

So, here's what I'm working on currently:

First of all, whatever else happens, I'm going to try to post stuff publicly more often. Previously, I haven't wanted to give too much stuff away, but there's not really any point to that. I'm going to try to publish a special feature on all TAPAS socials at least once a week. Also, more pictures of my cats. Those are good.

Enclosed are the new (hopefully final and ultimate) design sheets for the Keys & Kingdoms characters, going for an easier system. First thing I'm going to do is have Stacy put them in a height chart again (this image is a quick approximation), see how well that works from the new angle. And then we're going to go into doing the same thing for the Irregular Fantasy characters; I haven't been able to find a freelancer who can really get those right, so we're going to try to get Stacy back on it! Nice full-circle deal; I started the new system because Stacy was unavailable and I thought that no one other than her could adapt to our intricate character-design system, so I came up with a less-intricate version which I'm sure will be a relief to her upon returning. :P

Following that, I'm working on some guides to the general design schematics of K&K, like a species guide, and some follow-ups to those human, elf, and dwarf videos I made some time ago. Need to draw up detailed plans for those and then, commission!

And then there's storyboards. As the director, I've wanted to do those by myself, to teach myself how; at least for some pre-board boards to give direction to the real storyboarders. And in two years I've never started. I have to do that. And I think what I have to do is start big instead of starting small: teach myself how to do it by boarding the big and grand Irregular Fantasy pilot episode. So the smaller segments, all remaining teasers and such, those won't come out for a while, not until after I've done that.