Random Dungeons & Dragons bullshittery - Update #1

Good evening all.

It's been a week of partial downtime I'm afraid. For as mentioned in the last post, I was rather hoping to upgrade my editing/streaming PC this week. The parts for which were researched during last week and started arriving on Tuesday.

This PC build turned into something of a headache. Mostly due to the windows boot USB freezing without a clear indication as to why. But I can report that I was able to get the process completed by Thursday evening. And everything is now fully operational. Hooray.

On to the next project.

I'd very much like to do something a little bigger this time round, having completed three previous bullshitteries. I'm looking towards resolving something painful on the back burner. And what more painful project could there be than Random Dungeons & Dragons bullshittery?

For the new Patrons, Dungeons and Dragons bullshittery was an attempt to animate a D&D game in late 2016 into a full video for the channel. I've been working on and off on it periodically. But it has languished in a state of mostly edited for years.

It's production is absolutely stuck.

There was a crude pre-visualisation made over the course of about a week in May 2017. It's available right here for those interested. The plan was to use this as a blueprint. And then properly animate it scene by scene, character by character. A process that's completed about 7 of 9.

I could talk for hours about all the things that went so horribly wrong trying to get this bullshittery done.

• I could talk about how the previs set some core structural decisions that negatively impacted later work.

• How my severe lack of experience in Adobe After Effects made numerous baked in mistakes.

• How certain assumptions about how something would be animated just didn't survive contact with reality.

• And how a 24:39 animation with 9 characters is a monstrously huge workload for just one person. Especially when those 9 characters often have 2-3 different animation stats.

But the real problem that existed, and still exists, is that I do not possess the ability to draw. My imagination outpaces my talent in a very clear way here.

This meant that all assets had to be drawn externally by those who were kind enough to let me commission them. Which by necessity, put multi-day delays on every step of the process.

For example, if I need to animate Lump (my character in the red shirt) talking to the onstream dialogue. And because I don't want them standing stock still like a statue, I also need their limbs, head, eyes, etc all on their own layers.

That might take a few hours to define what photoshop layers I need, to an artist via email.

Then there are drafts that need to checked and approved. The actual final assets might take days to come back. Some hours to export and assemble. Some hours to test with the dialogue.

Maybe something isn't quite right or looks a bit funky when actually talking. Go back, rework. More days of waiting for a possible fix.

And that's if the artist is even available. They might have something else on, or be on holiday, or at work with their day job.

Rinse and repeat for every character in every scene. And by 2-3 weeks in you're aware that people are hankering for a bullshittery video and this is going to take much longer than you have. And you've got multiple blockers that you can't resolve yourself.

Additionally, being self-conscious for a moment, the pre-vis sadly served as perfect "morale poison". For many voices said, and continue to say, that it was enough. And the MS paint style had its own charm and could be readily be uploaded to the channel.

And I agree with those people. I feel they are right.

And as a creative, though it may seem silly, the knowledge that it might all be a waste of time is an extremely effective morale drain. The question of whether or not the time is even worth it? That'll only be something that only future me can decide if I get this done.

But enough with the negatives, what is my plan to dig myself out of this stuck project?

I have the following three moves:

1.) This project might need a similar treatment to The Forest video-essay. In that rather than stopping and starting and losing track, I might just need to knuckle down and dedicate whatever time is necessary. Most of it IS animated now. Though there's still an extraordinary effort left. I might simply need to grab this one and wrestle with it, for months if necessary. Acknowledging that it's going to take however long it takes and seeing if the Patrons would be willing to give me the necessary time.

2.) Recruit many more artists. I was reluctant to do that initially because I didn't want the art styles to clash. But if that's what it takes then so be it. I've already got 3 artists on board and I'm asking a 4th. I can have one take the background tweaks, one take character X, another take character Y, etc. Another take transition shots between animations. Get more hands on it.

3.) Some of the work is actually time consuming but relatively simple. The mouth shapes for example. That's definitely something I could outsource to a couple of willing humans. Becoming a case of here's the comp, here's a slider of phonemes, please put the dots on the thing until it looks convincing, paid by the hour. Freeing me up to work on the more complex animations.

So at the moment I'm making a big google sheet trying to keep track of precisely what's remaining, what I can outsource, what is urgent. Whilst also applying some of the efficiency learnings I've made in After Effects in the last 8 years I've been using it.

Let me tackle this for the 3-4 weeks I normally would do a project anyway. Let the rubber hit the road with this plan. Then I'll report back on how well it's going. And let you all decide, via polls, whether you give me leave to continue. Thank you all.