2012 03 04, 14:57 – Line art pencilled inked and cleaned up late Friday night after snapping out of a coffee fugue; integrated and made ready for shading Saturday afternoon. Had to re-work Aleph’s neck in three out of four shots – while the dummy I’ve been using for DCR is a massive improvement over the placeholder I used for the tail end of The Dualist and the first chapter of Transitional Voices, there are still some deficiencies that need to be remedied. Shoulders, arm length, neck articulation. Possibly some kind of textured-on eye-line indicator, as that’s the single most common bit of repair work.
That’s on the pre-production to-do list for Transitional Voices chapter two – DCR will finish out with current CG assets for the sake of consistency. As TV chapter one is now nearly four years old, there’s going to be a visible jump in line art quality no matter what production resources I utilize, so further tweaks to the “perspective aide” are definitely in the cards. Right now it’s a question of starting over vs. tweaking the base, learning bones vs. sticking with existing techniques that work-but-just-barely, and seeing how all of that fits into a reasonable production schedule. There’s no “back to the drawing board” with DCR – no more R&D. I have two more environments to develop for the story and I intend to keep this story’s CG laundry list from creeping beyond current expectations.
2012 03 10, 18:54 – Shaded yesterday, with some noodling and cleanup this morning and evening. Pittsburgh Zoo for the Penguin March with mom and my sister in between.
Penguins are cool.
As to the plotty bits… well… Foreshadowing. Foreshadowing out the ass. This scene is a bit of an oddball – while it results in the setup for the next chapter (which in turn finishes the setup of The Dualist begun in DCR.3), it also heavily foreshadows future bits of the story (being a bit of a Chekov’s gun) and acts as production-order setup and foreshadowing for the hypothetical would-be-nice-to-have-but-isn’t-strictly-necessary “Book One.” All of the Aleph-era regressions serve this end. Chronologically, “Book One” starts milliseconds after the next page.
In terms of production, despite “Book One” being a reasonably important (and short) part of the story, after a couple of years of dedicated slog on Dead City Radio I’m a lot more interested in going forward than I am in going farther back. By the time DCR is complete, DCR and The Dualist will lay out pretty much everything the rest of the story builds on. Even if some critical bits are mentioned Exactly Once, even if huge chunks of it are inferred. Forward can be accomplished without concern for period accuracy, without giving relatively minor characters additional screen time, and – hypothetically – at a faster pace.
Assuming I can keep the lights on, of course!
