Having a Good Time

So, these past couple weeks... been pretty stinkin' cold, hasn't it? Today being 10 degrees and sunny was the nicest it's been in a while, I instantly jumped on the chance to actually go outside without being driven back in by the blistering snows and winds. Still didn't spend a ton of time outside, as the snow was still pretty deep, not easy to walk around, but it was so nice to get outside and look around the neighborhood again. Good for my old dog too, we just haven't been able to take real walks out there. We met a mail carrier, who came up to him so he could sniff her and she could pet him -- he's been very scared of strangers since we came to Quincy, so it was nice to have someone notice and come put him at ease. Very sweet encounter.

Hmm, not fifteen minutes after that encounter, my mom asked me if I ever considered being a mail carrier. Just as I was about to call vocational rehab to ask about, er, whatever it is they do, I need the employment help. What do you think? Omen?

Well, I don't know about carrying mail, but I am in contact with vocational rehab now. So much nicer and more helpful and accommodating than I expected, not at all cold and bureaucratic.

Also this week, we've done another readthrough of Better Yet? following some heavy rewrites Mason did. This time, we also discussed the script together and he's going to do some more, smaller rewrites before we start scheduling the actual recording of the drama. Had a good time! It was excellent. Such a good story. We hope it reaches people and touches them.

Also-also this week, we finished the Phase Two TAPAS banner. Not going to show you here, it's to be unveiled when we reach Phase Two. When does Phase Two begin? Hard to say. It was scheduled for November 2019. I had plans every week for a year. Started off pretty well, the first 15 or 16 weeks went okay, but ever since then, eh, things have been going slower. I have five weeks left in that original 52-week plan, so... Phase Two starts in five weeks, minimum, probably more.

60%

We've hit an excellent milestone on Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices! I've started keeping track of how much storyboarding we have left to do, really really hoping that we get on to the next step before we reach, well, the anniversary of the previous step. That was casting; the scratch actors were chosen last April, the real cast at the end of May. So, yeah, that first group has been waiting since then to see their work, and the second group has been waiting almost as long to actually get to find out what they're working on... and then do it.

But this week, my keeping-track paid off because I got to see the moment we reached 60% completion on the storyboard of the pilot. Now, just because it took a whole year to get to that point, I don't think it'll take another eight months to finish, we've been picking up speed, and enjoying ourselves more, and I hope we can get it done by the end of May at the latest.

And last May was the last time I shared any of the boards here on the blog. We kind of stopped at that point, I did go through some depression and apathy over the summer, stopped trying to get anyone to work, and no one else was up for trying either. Not until October, when I was ready to jump back in and slowly managed to rally everyone else as well.

So, here's some of the new boards we've cooked up since then!

Top to bottom: newer boards by McKenzie Eby, Michelle Jenfjord, Nathalie Jenfjord, Sadie Allen, and... Sadie Allen again! She's gotten really good.

This is about all the boards that'll ever be released out into the open, I imagine. The story reel itself will be for the crew, then probably behind a paywall after that, a special feature to encourage patronage and all that. Not the big priority, what we really wanna do is get this bad boy done, and we just hit a milestone. More gets done every week!

Deadlines

Okay, with the buffer in place, I've got many deadlines set up... it's not going great, yesterday was the due date for The Little Mermaid retrospective #7 and I had it written on time, but didn't get it recorded until an hour before it was due, and it premiered at 10pm last night instead of 4pm when I usually like to release those, buuuut, that's better than I usually do, late by only a matter of hours, I still have time to get the buffer in place, yes.

Also hoping for some deadlines for storyboarding. We've been doing that for approximately a year, it was February-ish when I had Kenzie launch into it... it was a mistake to think just one person could do it, now there are four other storyboard artists on this pilot project and only one of them is finished with their scenes, most of the others have only just reached the halfway point. But we're gaining ground, gaining efficiency, I think our speed is increasing.

March 14 last year is when I first opened auditions for scratch actors... April 18 is when we chose the scratch actors... and the real actors were cast, er, sometime in May? May 30 is when I announced it. So, that's the hope, that maybe we can finish the boards by March 14, failing that by April 18... definitely, definitely want it done well before May 30, I'm just so... fuming that I've made all these actors wait an entire year to see what they worked on, what their work will become.

It shames me. As does the fact that I proved incapable of the task of actually boarding a scene myself. I just can't construct drawings anymore, not the way that I used to. I don't have the head for it. It shames me that all I can contribute to this baby I created is writing and leadership. Writing, any mook can do. Every artist in the world has projects they've written themselves, artists don't need writers the way writers need them in return. And leading? Clearly, I'm really, really bad at it, I just haven't stoked anyone's passion for any of these projects. Here we are a year later and so much farther behind on storyboarding than I ever imagined was possible.

Well, whenever those boards are done... I think I may need a producer far earlier than I expected. A lot of the artists I already work with have, in the intervening year, moved on to a much more professional level outside my price range. Hopefully I'll have something to show a producer who might be able to invest... and in investing, also tell me how to turn their contribution into an investment, by actually generating revenue from these story things. Merch, I guess? Among other things? I don't really know.

On the other hand, here's a more positive realization! Been thinking about Irregular Fantasy, my pretty-much-greenlit adapatation of Irregular Webcomic -- I've always assumed that, being an adaptation, it should be a bigger project, and therefore actually be animated unlike most of the other projects we're working on, but the other day I had a very simple thought... what if it's not? What if it's just a motion-comic animatic like everything else? Well, then, it's probably doable.

I was always shooting for the 20th anniversary of the comic as the time to release something -- the comic premiered on New Year's Eve of 2002, the Fantasy theme less than a week later on January 6, 2003. I figured maybe we can release some teaser trailers on those anniversaries, but if we're not animating them... maybe we can get those teasers out way earlier and the actual pilot on 20th anniversary! That sounds very doable without having to go through the CGI process; even though we haven't made a full motion-comic yet and can't say for sure how doable it actually is. So, I've started taking the Irregular Fantasy project more seriously! Gonna get it done.

Whoops, forgot to post this blog yesterday, it's Tuesday now, and today, podcast #48 is due. And it's only halfway finished. So... absolutely no buffer happened, not even a little bit, it's four weeks after this podcast was originally supposed to premiere and, after setting a distant due date that would allow me to prepare multiple podcasts, I'm still frantically scrambling to finish the first one on the slate.

Ugggh, I truly hate myself sometimes, even tweeted about it late last night, about the depths to which I hate myself. Called myself a "plague", then once I was in bed started beating myself up over the fact I said "plague" and didn't think to say "cancer" instead. Deleted it first thing when I woke up, nobody needs to see that level of negativity, and it certainly doesn't help me.

Buffer

Musing about a new way of going about things, I think it's time to bow to conventional wisdom and set up a buffer. Finish a whole bunch of things before I have any intention of releasing them to the public, and then later on I'll be able to release them at a steady pace. Lots of work now for much less later down the road.

This assumes doing anything at all is possible. Thus far, off to a bad start. Really need to rewire my entire brain.

Still, trying out this buffer thing, and with that in mind... won't be much TAPAS stuff released for a while. Though Naty and I have been discussing some ideas for other content. I was invested in reaction videos for a time, seemed a guaranteed channel-grower, but with everyone scattered around so much, and reaction videos requiring so many different components, some of which are kind of illegal, I think we'll save that for when video-conferencing is not one of the balls that has to be kept in the air at the time, we'll wait until we have people who can actually hang out together with a single camera pointed at them.

In the meantime, other things to do, in particular I had a lot of brainwaves last night about bringing The Trivia Box to life as a purely virtual game show, we'll see how that goes.

This buffer thing, especially worth considering as the anniversary draws near. Not for another two months or so, third anniversary of TAPAS is near the end of March and I intend to actually celebrate it with something purty cool this time. Stay tuned.