April Update (The Final TB Edit progress)

Hey gang!

I know, I know, I haven’t quite made the deadline, but man, did I try.

What you’re looking at here is almost a full video, about 85% done- but we’re still missing some key elements that are not only leaving it feel unfinished, but sloppily thrown together in places. This next month is about polish more than anything else- we’re really close to my original vision for this whole thing, which is great, so I hope in the end it’ll be for the best. Your main takeaway from this is that the next time I update here will be to say when it's out. No exceptions.

There’s a few reasons as to why this has happened- part of it is how long it took to create the individual sequences leading up to this month. (I haven't revealed exactly why that is yet, but I hope when you see you'll go oh, THAT'S why this took so long.) Beyond that it was really quick to assemble most of the visuals for the narration, but I realised I needed to rewrite a few parts, which changed some of the choices, and my audio hasn’t quite been where I want it to be, and has been a real pain to try and figure out (recorded this whole thing at least three times now). A big decision has been deciding how to display some of the panels and art in ways different to the Fantastic Four project- a major criticism I’d see was how quick and kinetic those panels were displayed, many extreme zoom ins to hide comic book speech bubbles for immersions sake, and I’m trying something different here where we respect the form of comics a little more, while making it easier to read what’s on the screen quickly, inventing the style as we go. It’s important for me to settle on that because it’ll inform the visual language going forward on the rest of the episodes, even as it evolves, and hopefully having that system resolved will make editing future instalments a little quicker.

There’s another thing that happened- I got mad fatigue. I’d been taking a lot of caffeine to get myself through this every day and that, plus not really going out as much to compensate for the deadline, took its toll on my sleeping pattern. Would wake up way too early with boundless energy and then just crash a few hours in and be completely useless, even if I took a nap. I’m working to ease that off and I’ll probably have a little health break the month following this release as previously mentioned, not so much mental but physical. Even with those extra working hours I don’t know if this would be finished, but they definitely took some time out of the last two weeks or so. I really have to apologise, my body just did not want to keep up with me on this one.

The last component was that I did, in fact, take a peek at what was going on with the movie. In the end they had an early screening (in London, of all places) and I paid attention to what people were saying, trying to seek out a few reliable spoilers to some of the key things I thought they might be doing. Then, literally today, a friend of mine saw the movie and I asked them some simple yes or no questions on things I wanted to know without completely spoiling the movie, just to see how they lined up with my plans.

We are definitely of the same mind on one element- which even now is so shockingly coincidental, and I am worried about. I feel like nobody is going to believe me that we came to the same conclusion on this and that I’m copying their work, but again, we’ll discuss all of that later. Otherwise, it sounds like the first episode isn’t undone by their choices in any way. Part of me is baffled by that, but another is relieved. My original worry was, if they got the jump on me with the sources premise, it’d kill the way I was telling it in the video and what I had to say- but it sounds instead like we’re running very different approaches to the original concept, and that makes me feel less like a lame runner up. Either way I’m booked to see it on Friday, and putting my interest in the comic aside I’m quite excited for what sounds like a good time for the MCU. Feel like they’ve needed something like this for a while.

Anyway, sorry to leave you all waiting a little longer and for the excuses- I’ll be honest, I had no idea I could even do this the way I’m doing it and now that after being a weird dream of sorts in my head it actually exists, but I just wanna get it across the finish line. Whatever happens it will be done within this month. Too many things I need to get onto, and we’ve all waited long enough. Thank you all again for the continued support to help me get this to where it needs to be, I think, or at least hope, you’ll like how this one turned out.

Til then ;)

-B