The Start of Something Potentially Terrifying

Ever since Syphilis Rice #2 was completed, I've been busy wasting even more time on Hitting Stuff at a Building. Growing up, I was not allowed video games, save for a handful of free ones that would run on our old Macintosh (the same computer seen in the Making of Empire video as a joke, until everyone took it seriously and thought that I actually use a 20 year old computer for postproduction). I've recently revisited these games in order to finally beat them, and upon completing the last and most difficult of these nostalgia trips, I was greeted with nothing but an empty room. No ending, no text, nothing. I was frothing until I realized that all of my games so far have pretty much had terrible non-endings as well. That's my justification for spending the last couple of months adding even more junk (including ending cutscenes) to the already underwhelming and embarrassingly derivative timesink that is Hitting Stuff at a Building. All that remains now is to program the "final boss" and bug testing.

So, with all that roundabout whining out of the way, I reach the current issue. For the last few years, I've been jotting down lots of ideas for Film Festival Project #1. Alongside various HSaaB work, I'm finally organizing all of these ideas, 'script' writing, and drawing concept art. And wow. Not only was this complex to begin with, but my brain is vomiting torrents of ideas into this. This went from a "film festival project" in the same way that the Closing Hour or Grumatorium were normal shorts that I sent off to a film festival to a "FILM festival project" because it is looking like it is going to turn into an actual freaking movie. If Empire of Sock, a glorified fight scene, ended up being almost 10 minutes long, I cannot even conceive of the runtime of this. To clarify, I say that as someone who has never released something longer than 10 minutes. I think 20 minutes is enough to make me faint, and I have no idea what this will turn into. Let's not think about the production time. Please. I'm having an awfully fun time digging this grave.

Since the basic plot structure of the movie has been floating around in my head for so long, I really expected writing and designing for it to be a fairly simple matter, but every time I begin to flesh out a new area, I immediately get diverted down tangents, writing little details and stories around minor background characters or constructs. I'm kind of terrified of all of these ideas coalescing into an indecipherable mess, especially considering the primary venue of distribution will be theaters, in which it can only be watched once, when it's threatening to become something that will require multiple viewings to fully appreciate. I guess I should take inspiration from my own characters, enthusiastically throw caution to the wind, and microwave this car battery already. I'm in this primarily for myself after all.

Instead of trying to animate the entire thing in one go, or splitting it into production blocks (as with Empire), I'll be approaching production by picking whatever scene I want off of the storyboard and animating it in full. This means I get to see finished product on a regular interval which is great for my morale, and it also means I can release an exciting reveal trailer (that I've been choreographing in my head for some time) relatively early on.

Since you're A) reading the production blog at all and B) still following my work, it stands to reason that you know the drill by now. Scarce comic updates, production blog posts consisting of nothing but complaining about long production times, the works. Thanks for coming along with the ride so far, and let's hope you survive this next one. I'll see you next time with that "new" game release that might have been exciting if it had been released three years ago, but now resonates with me on the same level as discovering dried cat puke of an mysterious and indeterminate age.