March Update (Big news)

 Hi everyone!

 Okay so, usual business out of the way first- quite a bit of writing and planning done on some of the larger video essays, though nothing that was ready to hit the edit bay. There’s one short video I’m smoothing out and another I’ve been gathering footage on, just trying to see which of those projects might be coming together the fastest. I also have finally completed the Timeline Tour for the Return to Monkey Island video for my Usher tier patrons and above- not hugely extensive, but enough insight in there to give you a better idea of my thought process putting it together physically. 

 What’s been taking quite a bit of my attention this month, however, is quite exciting. 

 I’ve finally begun production on the Marvel project.

 It was this month that I decided enough was enough- I had the vast majority of writing complete for my planned multi episode series bringing yet another comic book to life, with the exception of the final video, and figured it was time to just get the ball rolling. I have contacted half the cast, some from the previous project, some brand new, and been absolutely swamped sending emails and making connections, while formatting scripts so that everyone has the correct material. The process is a little different than last time, in a really cool way, so I’m documenting as much as I can to also make sure you’ll see how this is coming together when it finally launches, and really, I think it’ll be even better than what I did with the Fantastic Four.

 Now, as a result, I’m in need of some serious funding. Not a huge amount, but enough that I’m going to be making some efforts to stay on top of that. I’ll have to start pushing forward on those smaller projects, maybe do some streaming, make an announcement publicly that production has begun to potentially boost some interest in the Patreon and other methods. Before any of that, I’m obviously very grateful for everyone contributing here first and foremost- you’re the reason I’m able to get as far as I can at the moment and you’ll hopefully be able to see exactly where the funding’s going for this particular project. I’m currently doing some number crunching to see what the budget for this ultimately amounts to beyond the actors- and I figure, if some questionably spiteful 18 year old can get funding of almost 100k for his Spider-Man fan film while others are making easy money off of AI generated messes, I can probably ask for a lot, LOT less to make this come to fruition, and pay the artists involved fairly. 

 I’m still reluctant to say what it is out loud- one reason being that I don’t want people to pre-empt the effort. There’s been a hard trend recently of people running with other people’s ideas on Twitter and YouTube without credit for who started the conversation, if not outright plagiarism, often changing the shape of people’s perception of the topic rapidly in quite a dangerous way (Like, ‘B Mask just started talking about X, but look at what happens on this page in X, wow how craaazzyyyyy give me lots of likes as I’m the first person who ever thought to say this and now it’s all anyone will ever say!’ Etc etc) and I don’t want to risk that happening here, I’d like to be in control of my own thoughts on something I care a lot about before people start altering the conversation around it for good, a conversation I don’t want to have to address until it actually exists. When the FF video came out, nobody was talking about it in that way, if really at all, and I’d like the same to be true here. When enough work has been done, you will absolutely see a trailer emerge- there’ll be no going back after that. 

 And that’s all I have for you this month- should be back next time with a few more goodies and news to share. Thanks again for helping me pull all this together- I’ll keep you all posted as to how things are going. S’gonna be big. 

 - B