the dualist : Progress (not the lack of it)

posted 2009.08.13 at 17:54

It's time for numbers!

166 : number of pages remaining (not counting covers and supplemental material)
08 : number of pages that are Brand New For Sure.
158 : number of pages remaining in the First Edition.

That 158? That's the important part. For this post, anyway.

73 : number of pages pre-formatted as of this post.
85 : number of pages that still need to be pre-formatted.

Pre-formatting in this case means that the page has been transferred from the first edition 3:4 aspect ratio to the second edition 6:9. So far this has largely been a matter of cropping and scaling, though there's also been a good amount of "raising the roof" (that is, extending the sky or digging up the original 3d file and over-rendering the top of it to fill space), a few replacement renders, and some minor photoshop cleanup.

While I could go nuts and spend time scrubbing every page, I've kept the amount of photoshop editing as minimal as possible, restricting myself to Ornix's shirt and the most egregious of otherwise-unrepairable panels. I did more cleanup work for any three pages of the first two chapters than I have for the last 73 pages I've crunched. Which is how I've managed to pre-format 73 pages in a fortnight.

I call it "pre-formatting" instead of "formatting" for one simple reason - I don't know if these pages have been formatted or not, and I won't know until I've started to lay down the dialogue. As no part of Expulsion (the last four chapters) has been re-written yet, any one of these pages could be a potential land mine - I may have to rework panels, pages, maybe even scenes. So I'm not formatting - I'm pre-formatting. Odds are most of these pages won't need to be touched - but some of them probably will.

Those 73 pages? I ignored the first page of Chapter Four and have been going from there. Hunt and peck, bits and pieces, here and there. Working my way through some easy pages, some tough pages, some time consuming pages, then some easy pages again. With the one exception, all of Chapters Five and Six have been pre-formatted. Six is the short one (22 pages!), which is why the number is 73 and not, say... 79 - a number I hope to hit tonight or tomorrow. The halfway point on pre-formatting.

I'm probably tackling chapter Eight next. It's straightforward and like chapter Seven will require a good amount of rendering correction and a good amount of Ornix Shirt Replacement. I'm heading for Eight instead of Seven in order to buy time for the PC components to arrive - Seven is going to be a problem chapter. While Eight will certainly have its hurdles, the story is solid and the corrections will be aesthetic. Roof raising, mostly.

Seven is a different animal. The first sub-scene ("insertion") will be a straight-forward pre-format. The rest of the chapter... not so much. I'm going to be adding stuff. Right now I'm thinking a couple of pages and several panels to pages - the former to give the story the Crazy Visual Near-Climax that it completely lacks, and the latter to flesh out a narrative thread - a point b - that is implied to exist but that as yet does not. Those of you who read my IRC prattling know what I'm talking about - if this thing is new to you than I'm not going to spoil it for you.

So Eight is straight forward and the first third of Seven is as well. I'm going to bust those bits out as fast as I can. The goal here is to get as much of the second edition pre-formatted as possible, so that when pages start showing up again they'll be doing so en masse. This is the boring part - final tweaks and laying down the type is much more enjoyable.

I've been working like this for awhile now - stripping pages, pre-formatting them, cleaning them up, then adding the dialogue. Until now I've been doing it a scene at a time, dragging my feet on each little bit, stumbling around, letting the rewrite hold me up. Things have changed a bit - the order of operations at this point in time is to get as much of what I can do done as fast as I can do it. Any mistakes made now can be fixed when the page comes 'round to dialogue.

Of the remaining 85 pages, I can pre-format 51 of them now without having to worry about adding panels or pages. Adding pages mucks up the numbering something fierce.

So that's what I'm going to do. That's where my head is right now.

Later for everything else.