Log inEpisode 5
So, here we are,
The month after my last, declarative update, where it’s now time for me to bravely step forward to have my directorial debut.
Today, I show you what a full unbridled MJ was so obsessed with. What it was that consumed me so.
At the time of writing I have stood, facing the completed, ready to release version of this piece for nearly a week now, paralysed by the decision to release it.
A week is a long time to do nothing.
I'd like to tell you it was productive, that I was doing final checks, being professional and thorough about it. What actually happened is I opened the file, watched it through, found something, closed it, and then didn't open it again for two days. Then I did exactly that again.
By about day four I wasn't finding new problems anymore, I was just visiting the old ones. Which is, I think, the point at which you have to admit you're not reviewing it, you're stalling.
The trouble is, and I have found this to be a repeating pattern, you always learn so much when you make something.
Thoughts occur, ideas spread, you animate the scene at first, and it's like, insanely hot, you've never been so absurdly turned on in your entire life, even the untextured test shots are impossibly perfect.
You can't imagine what could go wrong.
Then you spend weeks working out the technical details, getting it all to just, finally work and be acceptable, you tell yourself those little issues in the sim won't come out in the render, it'll be fine. It's not worth another 24 hours to fix it.
It wasn't fine, at least once.
It wasn't fine, at least once.
You get used to assessing it on a technical level, you lose the magic of the moment, you, in effect, destroy the fantasy of it.
In producing a piece, I am in effect, giving away one of my fantasies, I provide it to anyone else who cares, in the hopes it might be appreciated.
It's normal, we're always going to want to do the 'best' version of whatever we want to create, you must set realistic limits, it is not, at this point, worth another week to add those little extra details just for that .5% only you can see COULD be better, it's gotta be called, good enough, let's ship it.
And I do feel I've met that, with this piece. I try to simply ask myself:
"Is this the best I can do?"
The answer is almost always no. And that, weirdly, is the good bit.
If I finished something and genuinely couldn't see a single way it could be better, that would mean I'd stopped learning, and I'd be making the same piece forever. Every project hands me a list on the way out.
So it could be better. It could be longer. It could have alternative endings. But it's here, it's ready, and it's good, and the version of me who's learned all that is already looking at the next thing.
The problem came when I started to cut together a trailer for it.
It didn't work,
It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why.
This piece isn't punchy. It doesn't escalate the way you'd expect, and there isn't a moment I can lift out and put in front of you as the moment. It's built on pacing and atmosphere, it takes its time, it wants to be watched properly and in one go. Which is exactly what I wanted from it, and also exactly why thirty seconds of highlights makes it look like nothing at all.
So consider this the trailer. It's slower than my usual. It's an experience rather than a hit. Go in expecting that and I think you'll get a great deal more out of it.
There's something else going on here, and I've been trying to work out how to say it without sounding grand about it.
This is mine.
All of it. The characters, the world they're in, the way they move, none of it is borrowed, none of it is me doing my version of something that already exists. Every decision in this piece is a decision I made, and there was nobody's house style to stay inside and nothing I had to get right for anyone else's sake.
This is what I'm making now. More of these characters, more of this world, and no borrowed faces. If that's what you're here for then I think you're going to have a very good year.
I didn't expect that to change the work as much as it has. But it turns out that when it's all yours, you stop asking whether you've done it correctly and start asking whether you've done it well, and those are completely different questions. You push on the bits nobody asked you to push on. You spend the extra week on a detail because you want it there, not because someone would notice if it was missing.
It's more exposing, obviously. There's nowhere to hide behind a familiar face. If you don't like her, you don't like something I made up.
But it's also, by an enormous margin, the most fun I have had doing this. And I think it shows. I think there's more of me in this than in anything I've put out before, and that's going to be true of everything that comes after it as well, because this is the direction now.
Which brings me to the part I've been circling.
I'm taking some time.
Not because anything's wrong, and not because I'm burnt out or fed up or any of the other things a creator usually means when they say that. It's simpler than that. I've built a world I actually want to live in, and I've been making things in it faster than I've been thinking about it. That's the wrong way round.
So I'm going to go away for a bit and think properly. Who these people are, what happens to them, what this place actually is. There are things I want to try that I can't do in the gaps between releases, and there's a version of the next piece that only exists if I sit with it first.
I'll still be around. The Discord isn't going anywhere, I'll still be posting bits as they happen, and you'll see progress rather than silence. It just won't be a finished thing for a while.
And then I'm coming back with something absolutely filthy.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO PAY TO SEE THIS PIECE
It has no exclusivity period, you will be able to watch the full thing on my newgrounds page, as soon as it's done uploading and transcoding, which will be within a matter of hours of me posting this update.
There's a separate post for this release under the 'tip' tier.
Unlocking it will give access to a copy you can download and keep forever, I will host it on newgrounds, but with the state of the internet today, I cannot host it without generally putting it behind some kind of ID verification wall, that requires some degree of payment.
There's a separate post for this release under the 'tip' tier.
Unlocking it will give access to a copy you can download and keep forever, I will host it on newgrounds, but with the state of the internet today, I cannot host it without generally putting it behind some kind of ID verification wall, that requires some degree of payment.
You are technically getting a slighly superior product by paying to download it from here, but there's no 'pixel peeper' version of this one, it comes in one format, this is the best quality copy of this piece that exists and everybody gets the same, no matter the tier, it's the same version I will upload to newgrounds, they will apply some compression.
It's already available in the archive for any existing level that has access (see collections) along with my entire catalogue, but if you are not, you can unlock it to download the file now, or check newgrounds or well, wherever you want really! You have permission to share.
But you don't have to to watch this one.
