Q&A: April 2023

Hello again, dear readers! Time to ANSWER some QUESTIONS.

As always, thank you so much to all the patrons that took their time to ask a question! And good news, we are finally getting to those questions we didn't have time to tackle. Rejoice! 

Let's get into it:

1. In terms of personality, how is lunar sway determined for players in Vast Error?

EDDIE: Well, the timing of this question is very auspicious, because we'll be getting into some of the dreamself stuff in the actual comic pretty soon! Unfortunately, this means that we'd be veering into spoiler territory here, so you're just gonna have to hold on tight and wait for us a little. Give it like... a month or so and then we'll talk.

2. What's the age of majority on Repiton, and does it come into play when dealing with the fractured justice system?

EDDIE: Repiton doesn't have a proper governing system other than Corporate oversight, so technically what counts as an age of majority of sorts is the six sweeps threshold, when Corporate stops handing out financial help to young trolls. Past that point, they're expected to start fending for themselves and are legally registered into the workforce. It's pretty fucking hellish! But there's no regulations in place that state hey, Mr. Corporation, you can't do that! Child labor is unethical! so it's just the way it is.

I guess what little there is of a "justice system" would be the ways in which Corporate chooses to settle work disputes, be they internal conflicts between worker-consumers, something related to products not working as intended, their workforce being impeded to labor by this or that reason, or having the constant threat of being let go hanging over your head to make sure you behave and "do your part". 

Failing that, there's always regulators to handle the more extreme cases that threaten Corporate interests. And we all know how it goes when a group of people is given the power to be jury, judge and executioner (it's not great).

3. If it's not spoilers, what were Seinru's origins? How did Edolon come to meet them in the first place?

EDDIE: I'm so sorry to say that you may have just hit the jackpot on most spoiler-heavy questions someone could ask! We don't want to just leave you with nothing, though, so here's something to chew on:

Now, fate isn't a real thing in Vast Error, but a lot of characters choose to believe in fate in order to make themselves feel better or justify whatever it is that they're doing. That said, Seinru and Edolon's meeting is probably the closest thing the comic has to a proper fateful occurrence.

4. What is Edolon’s rank in the Harbingers? What is the ratio of cultists to Corporate workers on Repiton?

EDDIE: Here's a fun tidbit, Edolon didn't have an official rank in the cult up until Seinru's death! He was sort of their sneaky secret weapon - still wielding an internal amount of authority, but with no publicly defined role. If you wanted, you could think of "the mouthpiece to the end" as an unofficial title, per his introduction page. After Seinru passed, though, he inherited her title, thus becoming the new High Priest of the Harbingers, which is the position he's currently occupying in the comic.

As for the cultist-to-worker ratio... I don't know, probably a tiny comparative amount of cultists? These are VERY fringe organizations, though they have a central role in the comic itself. Plus, the Harbingers' numbers got significantly bolstered once they started being able to recruit horrifying creatures from the hell dimension to help out, so I don't think they had an insane amount of people to begin with. 

Do the hommunculi count as individual members? Who's to say.

5. In Arcjec's scrapbook on pg. 1079, we see a picture of 8 of the main 12 at the end. Where were Sova, Jentha, Occeus, and Calder when this picture was taken?

AUSTIN: Sova was still in captivity, Jentha was completely self-isolated, Occeus was either in the middle of a breakdown or a breakthrough, and Calder was having issues with multiple of the attendees. Hope this helps!

6. To Austin: how do you know so much music, and how do you discover new bands and artists?

AUSTIN: Years upon years of cultural osmosis mixed with having more than my fair share of radical experiences with completely in-touch music brained freaks and geeks. I actually do have a very vested interest in music! Me and Eddie craft all of the VE playlists ourselves, and I still head a lot of the Vast Error Music Team efforts personally, to the point of being the one who names a lot of the track titles and dictates the album cc flow through the track listing. 

While I wouldn't say I really know how making music works, listening to music is the least I can do in order to further comprehend the artform. I've learned a lot just by searching up artists and seeing what makes them tick on recommendations from friends. That's one place a lot of new music passes through. I'd also recommend utilizing Spotify's Discover Weekly, Youtube mixes, random playlists and even apps like Pandora to start diversifying your sound portfolio. You never know what goodies you'll find in a grab bag of tunes!

7. It was said elsewhere that REW/FFD was centered around DEAD 2 RIGHTS; are there any prior animations (or any planned ones) that took (take) the flcl approach of "choreograph around the song"?

AUSTIN: That's actually pretty much how every single animation works! The song has to be there for me and Heather to visualize what's going on. Of course, we'll have loose plans for animations before we have the songs, but the music is what really makes everything come to life. Vast Error animations are nothing without the trusty accompaniment of the VEMT.

8. Favorite things to animate?

TYSON: If any of you are familiar with my stuff outside of VE, you may know I'm a seasoned veteran of the Warrior Cats scene. I'm used to drawing more feral-like creatures, and always have a great deal of fun getting to animate them. The panel of Af poking their head out of the sunflower was easily one of my favorites to do. I also greatly enjoy character acting with lipsync, which you can see a little bit in the intro to REW/FFD. 

9. How's the animation process split up? I know you guys mentioned that the jobs are rotated, but what are the jobs themselves? (Like storyboarding and color and inbetweening and all that)

TYSON: For the flash itself, not too different from regular panels! The pipeline goes: Boarding > Sketching > Characters > Backgrounds > Corrections > Compositing. We have people board, sketch, and finalize sections that were either assigned or they decided to volunteer for, corrections are done by either me or Eddie to make sure details are consistent throughout the scene, and then finally passed off to our own little crew of Adobe Animate users who polish and composite the whole thing together. REW/FFD was separated into 6 sections, and we’ll delve into more detail on who took which parts in our eventual behind the scenes post for it.

Anything that's hand drawn, frame by frame animation (in REW/FFD’s case, Mimesis and the FX animation throughout) I do entirely on my own from start to finish. This is usually the case for regular panels as well. 

10. How do you decide which panels have some animation (ie Jentha's time on her land) vs which ones are stationary?

TYSON: To be honest, it largely depends on how much time and opportunity we have, and what we have in mind for the panels! Jentha’s section took place shortly after I joined the team, and since Jentha's design was by far the easiest to animate out of the main cast, we were kinda testing the waters for what I could push for updates in terms of animation.

Because I do all of the animation on my own, it also largely has to do with how busy I happen to be that week. When boarding for updates my rule of thumb is to make sure the more animated panels still make sense by themselves, so if I don’t have enough time to add some fancy animation to them the update can still be pushed out without any issue. The panel of Dismas drinking from the flask was one that was planned to have some extra animation, but had to be cut due to my schedule that week. (a bummer too, I was excited for that one :( ) 

Unfortunately the frequency of the more extravagant animated panels will probably be fewer and farther between from here on out, due to me now having to juggle more duties as a part director. Not to say we still won't have any, though! Some very cool animation stuff is planned for the future, no worries about that. 

11. This one's geared more towards design, but is Calder's weapon a combination of his wine glass and a sword? I'm sure there's a specific reason for this, but given his disdain for wine in general it seems like an interesting design choice!

EDDIE: Yeah, that was the base idea for the weapon! I won't be going into the details here because we're leaving all of the stuff related to REW/FFD's concept art for the actual commentary post, but there was a lot of thought put into all of the cast's weapons, so be on the lookout for that later this month!

12. Will we eventually get the uncut version of [S] MURRIT: REW/FFD?

EDDIE: Worry not, there was no actual "cut" version of the flash - what you're seeing on the site and the YouTube mirror IS the entirety of the animation! The only difference is that the YouTube mirror has some extra special effects in two scenes (the intro with Mimesis and the last shot with Gaiaeon), which we had to remove from the site version in order to get the dang thing to load reasonably, but they're very missable and don't actually impact the final product that much.

That's all from us for now! We'll be touching base at some point next week for the REW/FFD commentary. In the meantime... stay cool, everyone.

- Eddie, Austin & Tyson