Mom was gonna come down and visit today. Then the weather weighed in. The entire state is getting dumped on – the phones are dead, there’s no immediate work on deck. I’m broke and even if I wasn’t, for christmas I promised myself The Wagon for at least a few weeks. This status report is being written at the outset of what will hopefully be the first ALL ATC ALL DAY work session in… uh. Years!

TV.2 (Return To Color) Production Status

All 24 pages have been laid out. Extensive in-page script revisions have been made to several pages; all pages outside of the first rendering block still need to be “framed” and lettered.

Pages 07 through 15 have been rendered. 10 through 15 are pretty much ready for line art, 07 through 09 will need some extensive post-rendering digital work in addition to line art. Renders finished earlier this week, consuming 100% CPU for roughly two weeks. Rendering ops resulted in 342 files totaling 4.07 gigs uncompressed in the PC “00 TV2 Renders” directory. The mac-side data is compressed – LZW for the tiffs and .zip for the 3d files – and weighs in at 2.28g compressed counting the page files.

All work that can be done with entirely existing assets has been done. Pages 2.01 through 2.06 and 2.16 through 2.24 require assets that are either in development or ready for it. Work has started on the environment for 2.16-2.17 though no appreciable progress has been made within the past week or so due to work and render ops. Further development has been pushed back in order to focus on assets required for 2.01 through 2.06. I sunk a good amount of time into modeling work yesterday and plan to get a hell of a lot more done today. I don’t know when (or even if) I’ll have this much time to throw at CG work so I plan to make the most of it.

Properly nerdy details would be pretty spoileriffic at this point. Sufficed to say I’m grinding away on a major asset. CG requirements for TV.2 scene one are such that the best-case estimate for asset development is “January.” If you were reading ATC back in ’07-’08 you know that a CG asset typically takes me 2-6 weeks to develop with a metronomic day job financing production. Three years freelance has complicated my schedule considerably, and it’s worth noting that the asset in question already has a couple of weeks of here-and-there effort invested in it, most of that in 2008 and 2009.

While my phone or inbox could still produce a work-related distraction, hopefully today I will find out just how much I can accomplish with a focused blast of effort.

While doing laundry earlier this week I did some thought exercises to see what ATC production would look like on a regular schedule. If I rolled this thing out weekly instead of as fast as possible, I’d have a total of seventeen weeks from GO! to develop the assets required for the back end of the chapter, and an additional seven weeks to finalize the TV.3 script and start work on layouts and assets. While production almost certainly won’t go down this way, it remains a possibility… and it wouldn’t surprise me if 24 pages wound up taking six months to produce from GO!. Heck, this thing’s already been in some stage of development since September. Of 2008.

Back to the fish mines!