Written Momentum and Process Retrospectives

Greetings, one and all! After last week’s milestone announcement, I made an unfortunate discovery: The script was losing momentum. This led to yet another unfortunate discovery: Every time this happens, it’s because I’m trying to be budget conscious in my writing. But it would seem the genre is not well suited for that. So I deleted a week and a half of writing, and then recovered the lost page count plus fifty percent in three days. I’m going to have to say that, given the rate of progress, this narrative direction makes more sense. The mixed result is it’s also making me realize just how long this story is going to be. We’re looking at a film trilogy, at minimum, or maybe a miniseries, we’ll have to see.

As a point of historical curiosity, I took a trip down memory lane to see what we were doing ten years ago, this week. Apparently the answer is creating the CG model for Solensgate, the villain’s stronghold in Gatewalkers. It’s kind of interesting to see how, a decade later and more confident in our skills, we’ve turned to making physical models more and more.

Probably because it’s easier to get accurate lighting on a model, as well as some of the randomness inherent in reality. Though I should note that this model work is still mostly in buildings, spaceships, and other non-elastic structures. For the ocean shot and the automaton in Chaos Crown we’re absolutely going with CGI.

Which kind of brings us full circle, because as I’m writing this new and somewhat expensive script, we’re still talking about how to simplify and economize the process. For instance, would a two-legged alien mount be easier to animate than a four-legged one? What should the lighting be for this desert night shot? Things like that. It should be interesting seeing where all this leads.

Well, that’s about all for this week. Until next time!