Nailing It

Didn't have a blog post for last Monday, the 12th... but that's okay! We had good stuff going on last week, though weirdly, it's already Sunday the 18th by the time I start writing this, been meaning to get around to it for a while, but, heh, sometimes things happen and you squeeze in at the last minute.

The first big breakthrough from last week is another milestone hit on the Choices storyboards. Today was our second goal, once again we didn't hit it, but we did hit the 75% mark. Our third goal is May 30, six weeks away, and I have confidence, I've set up a game plan, I think we can finally finish the whole pilot by that point. So I'm very excited about that! I think I'll display a few boards again! Not necessarily new boards, just a selection of those I haven't displayed yet, to celebrate the milestone.

Boards by all five board artists! Top to bottom: Sadie Allen, McKenzie Eby,

Casey Gosselin, Michelle Jenfjord, and Nathalie Jenfjord.

So, we've got goals set for that; also working hard on Irregular Fantasy! Doing a quick redesign of the characters and making a teaser. Also need character redesigns and a teaser for The Choices, as well, hoping to kind of make these two ideas sort of "sister series"... to release two teasers, an Indiegogo campaign to fund them both, and then the two pilots in, well, their own time. As fast as we can. Guess we'll get an estimate on that while putting the teasers together, which I think can maybe be done purely "in-house", no need to discover some new freelancers until the pilots truly begin production... we'll find out.

The Crown of Power and the ten Soul Gems,

from a board of the Irregular Fantasy! teaser,

drawn by Sadie Allen.

Directing these things is pretty stressful, you know. I do very little of the physical drawing myself, but the directing... the constant correcting and adjusting of what other people do... with my social anxiety, I don't have the emotional fortitude for it, yo. I like to think I have the conviction to make sure my projects come out well, but I'm constantly convinced I'm making people hate me. I don't know how I'm gonna do it to actors right to their face.

As for Better Yet?, well, I do believe that starts tomorrow! We'll be heading into the studio tomorrow evening to start recording the dialogue. Scene by scene, working in pairs; how long it'll take to get every scene recorded remains to be seen, but after tomorrow we have another four sessions lined up for next week which should have us a little over halfway done with the show, recording-wise. After that, I'm not sure, but it's exciting...

BY announced

First blog of April 2021 comin' up. First thing to mention, we've officially announced Better Yet?

Decided to whip out the announcement because, well, it's time! We're scheduling one final round of rehearsals for the fourth draft of the show, and we're knocking out most of that this week. So by the time this blog is posted, it will have been knocked out, final readings of, well, every scene that Gary's not in, Randy's a busy guy and we haven't pinned him down yet.

Mason says he's satisfied with most of the script except for the big climactic dinner scene; so our reading of that one may result in a few changes and another read. Whenever we're through with that, we're hitting the recording studio!

A few, eh, sticks in the spokes have also hit production on The Choices. Casey needs some mental health time, so she's backed out from those character redesigns I talked about last week just before she started. That's okay for now, we are continuing to see delays in the storyboarding process... we'll see where those stand at the end of May. After boarding, we also want to do as much of the voice acting as possible before swapping out the boards for the real deal... all the same, those designs should probably be ready well before then, since there's a lot of other stuff to design in the pilot episode apart from the main characters... eh, I'm probably getting anxious over nothing, I have no idea how soon we'll actually need those redone character designs and I'm certainly not going to try to force Casey out of a mental health break for them, so we'll take that as it comes.

Casey did mention her experiments with adapting to the Disneyesque art style... I haven't seen them yet, but it sounds like a really cool thing to show off as a bonus feature sometime.

So that was Monday. It's Wednesday now; we've scheduled readings of every scene in Better Yet? for this week, yesterday we did all of Dr. Albarn's scenes, today it's all of Jodie and Gary's scenes, and on Friday it's what remains of Corrine's scenes. Next week (by which I mean this week, since this blog will post on Monday) we dive into the aforementioned climactic dinner scene, so we anticipate hitting the recording studio the week after that.

And Monday again! Last rehearsal, we ended up having a great conversation well into the night about politics and projects and pandemic struggles, I very much enjoyed it. It got me thinking, you know, I really need to do regular socializing more, not quite so constantly working toward getting the next project done. I need mental health breaks too.

So, ready to head out and see what awaits. In life, not just in the TAPAS world.