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Progress Report - July 15, 2024
🕑 Added 2024-07-16 10:23:44 +0000 UTCHello, everyone!
Progress on the Pharmmetra video is coming along well. As you can tell from this week's preview image, an unplanned animation loop made its way into the project. I wasn't really sure what all to have DVa doing during this sequence - in the storyboard, Pharah's just holding onto her as she and Symmetra talk; but I wanted to have DVa a bit more dynamic and actually doing something.
I decided that I wanted to visually communicate that she's eager to keep going, and somehow that ended up being translated into her grinding her fat ass on Pharah's cock. I originally played with Pharah's cock throbbing, but it kinda got lost in the motion and muddied things up, so I ultimately elected to drop that particular aspect of it all.
In total, I have just over 9 minutes of footage blocked out. Audio recording and initial sound design will almost certainly be greenlit later this week.
Amusingly, the project has experienced a whopping +90 seconds of drift. That means that the video is 90 seconds longer than the storyboard - where the video currently ends is at 9:12 in Resolve, while in the storyboard that same point is at 7:43. Now, a fair few seconds of that runtime is bonus runtime to cover for transitions like J-cuts and crossfades, but it's still a fair amount of drift.
A lot of that drift is coming from the fact I've been rewriting segments as I go. Most of the rewrites have been minor, just changing a word here or there. But I've also completely reworked a few sections as well, such as the anal section rewrite I detailed in a Twitter post.
In total, I'm expecting the video to end up around the 15-minute mark now. It's a lot longer than my original target, but I am personally okay with the drift so far, because I think it is all in service of making a stronger video. The added runtime is a take-it-or-leave-it, I don't believe that longer videos are inherently better, and that a video should only be as long or as short as it needs to be - but I think that the rewrites make the overall video stronger, in terms of narrative and in terms of pacing. The fact the rewrites also make the video longer is honestly entirely ancillary.
Overall, I'm very pleased with how it's coming along. I think it's going to be a right banger of a video. And considering the dire state the project was in a few weeks ago, before I finally straightened my thoughts out and got a clear, concise trajectory for it to follow, I couldn't be happier with how things are going.
Looking ahead slightly, this video also finally motivated me to do something I've been meaning to do for years now, but just could never justify the time investment involved: fixing DVa's neck rigging.
This has bothered me for years now, but it finally took this project to motivate me to actually do it. Once this video enters post-production, I will need to take the time to update all of DVa's existing outfits to account for this new rigging. And then she'll be getting a public update, so everyone can enjoy the better rigging.
So yeah. Everything is humming right along! That's all for now!
Until next week, everyone!
Comments
Lord Aardvark
Yeah I'm rather chuffed with how it came out. The core animation of just elliptical up-down forward-back motion was pretty solid, but it looked a bit lifeless, especially from a head-on angle like this. Throwing a bit of tilt on the keyframes really livened things up, especially once I offset the position a bit to give it a bit of sway and then counter-rotated the body to keep the head in the same spot. Once the counter-rotation came in, that's when the magic happened.
Cuttingwaters
Holy shit! that hip motion is awesome!
