Rehearsals, Recordings, and Recruits

Beauty and the Beast rehearsals are going on. Complex stuff! The ensemble numbers are massive productions, even bigger and longer than they were in the film. Lots of dancing, lots of harmonizing, it's so much fun! I was recently spotlighted by the QCT Facebook page, they've been promoting one cast member every few days, and my cast bio mentions TAPAS and Better Yet? - a fellow cast member approached Mason and me at the latest rehearsal to say he went to investigate and started watching Better Yet?, so, yay! Marketing. Maybe we'll have other new viewers. The YouTube channel is up to 97 subscribers. I've had a lot of trouble focusing, I hope I can break through that in time to make a "Best of Phase One" video as a 100-subscriber special. Growth is still pretty slow, so I don't anticipate any urgency. Agh, but I do need to focus. It's been difficult.

We've begun voice recording for the Irregular Fantasy teasers and trailers and the Keys & Kingdoms pilot. Completion of the character designs and storyboards has slowed down for the past couple of months - both of the artists have been occupied by work stuff but they've been trooping along, they're almost done. Then it'll be time for finalizing the motion-comics for the teasers... we'll need more artists for that. Gotta get ready for some big, big plans.

And for that, I've approached Mason and AJ. The longtime biggest supporters of TAPAS to be found locally, I decided to bring them in as producers, helping me arrange ideas and funds. Not gonna work on anything too hard while we're still working on Beauty and the Beast, of course! But this is off to a good start, not only helping move forward with these big fantasy projects, but coming up with ideas for more content. I just, gah, need somebody to breathe down my neck at all times if I'm ever gonna get back to what I've been working on... why is it so hard to make myself work creatively when I've literally nothing else to do...?

So, this past weekend we did our first Irregular Fantasy voice session, and we'll have a whole bunch more next week that should get us nearly all the audio we need! And we're nearing completion of storyboards, designs, then time to get started on music... just taking things bit by bit. Thinking of starting a mini-fundraiser soon... the actual motion-comic part is gonna take a lot of work hours, a lot more people, gotta pay them somehow. Just need a bit more art to show off first! To tempt people. A mini-fundraiser for the teasers whose purpose is, well, to introduce the big fundraiser.

We've recruited a couple of new people into the team from the Beauty and the Beast company, some old friends who were interested in helping us put it together, and in particular a choreographer. With all the challenges that storyboarding has presented, we're going to try to have a live-action reference photography stage before storyboards from now on. The idea is to stage every scene with actors and models so the storyboard artists can just quickly convert the models into the characters, and do their work much faster and easier without having to guess as much.

We'll need a space and models and photographers and some rudimentary props... could check out the dance studio, maybe the prop basement down at the theatre! We're thinking it over. And for fight and dance scenes... choreography. I hope our choreography still looks good in this motion comic format, as a sequence of stills... I really think we're gonna be doing something really extraordinary here, if only we can finish it up, pioneer a very new art form.