Greg’s assignment to the Hemera is a direct result of Thad sinking a chainsaw into Beef’s neck.
Voice Procedure is not exact. Given the overall quality of Heirotus signal hardware (they are a market leader in communications equipment) such language is typically used only when comms get hairy.
Signal distortion in panel one, James is saying “Line of sight blocked by a freighter, switching to hemera loop. repeat, switching to hemera loop.” – LOS comms laser between Helios orbital and Greg occluded by a bigass ship. The Hemera is on a relay loop with Orbital and Greg has switched to that. He could just as easily have tapped into the Helios STC equivalent of The Big Loop, but the Hemera loop is “eyes only” and encrypted.
20121110, 14:54 – Environments forever ago, CG assets for this page and the next Thursday night, pencils and inks Friday. Made the command decision a few minutes in to do digital inks on both pages – the MMU is a crapload of detail and there was no way I was going to pencil it, ink it, and throw most of that work out on cleanup. This evolved into the streamlining of line art for the next page.
There’s still an absolute ton of digital line art to do – at this point panels one and two are inked. Should have some time to throw at the rest of it today or tomorrow.
21:14 – Well, that was quick. Rammed through digital inks, flat colors and initial assembly in a couple of hours and now this page and the next are ready for shading.
20121113, 01:38 – A work-heavy couple of days followed by an opening late this evening; looks like I’ll be able to get 6 and 7 out this week, and hopefully have time to get 10 rendered. That’ll leave 8 and 9, which I haven’t thought about in awhile. That’s where the production values dial-down needs to happen so they could be done before the end of the month, if I’m lucky.
It’s worth noting that the initial draft of this scene was generated the same night OE.1 sprung into being. While OE.1 made it into production with only minor tweaks, the script for this page and the next went through half a dozen drafts from a few different perspectives, all of which sucked, and the shipping script was ultimately rewritten on the page. It works, which is more than I can say for the initial iterations.
As per SOP I’ll be sitting on this until the afternoon at the earliest – I plan to get the next page shaded before I hang up the work thing for the night and post both after I’ve slept on it.
14:42 – No adjustments necessary; go for posting.
Mastering notes, 2016.12.05 – Minor adjustments to wording in panel three.
