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.