Progress Update: The View

G'monday, all you helpful humans!

Hoooo how the days fly. If I could make seconds minutes, I'd be a lot more accomplished and I'd be a lot younger. But since I struggle simply not to let the minutes become seconds, y'all are getting one final update of this nature before the first video of the Terry Pratchett series comes out.

A little more than that as well, because I have things to show you this time. Actual, tangible, ogle-able matter.

I also have some interesting ideas for the Patreon, just to keep things fresh and manageable...

So, let's talk about it, shall we?

Where are we now?

About 5-6 days out from uploading a brand-spanking new Tale Foundry video. Seriously. It's been a long time coming, but we're standing on this precipice, waiting waiting to plant our flag for 2019.

And I think it's going to be a positively tremendous start. The view from up here is fabulous. Have a look yourself:

There he is; the man himself, tumbling through the clouds, hard at work. You can't see it here, but there's some slight, pleasant animation in there; flip-flapping hat brim and waggling computer tower. Apart from that, imagine the cloud whipping upward past him.

If you don't quite know what to make of this, a little context could be helpful—this an animated recreation of the cover art for Pratchett's non-fiction anthology: A Slip of the Keyboard:

A bit thinner on the details, because I had to make it manageable to animate. Let's ignore the lack of a computer monitor for now, shall we? 

I thought this would be appropriate, because this serious about Pratchett himself rather than Discworld. So instead of focusing on that, the biggest part of his body of work, I wanted to focus on the man behind it. And this was the best homage I can think of.

I think it's an excellent bit of animation and art, and I'm extremely pleased with the work Felipe's done here.

What's next?

There's plenty more than that, but since we're so close to release anyway, I think I'm gonna keep a lid on it for now. Needless to say, I'm ridiculously excited for all of you to get your eyes on this thing.

This video took a while, but that's also in part because I wrote the episode/list scripts together, which means the list video is going to come out (comparatively) ridiculously fast after this. Unfortunately, the short story is still going to take some time after that. But for the SCP series, the plan is to write them all together in one big swing, then launch into production.

Apart from that, there are very likely going to be some changes to the Patreon in the near future. Mainly, I've been feeling a bit of pressure from the Patreoncasts, and they've been feeling largely impersonal to me, because I'm just talking to a wave form on audacity. It's not natural, and I'm not sure I quite love it.

So I'm presently playing with the idea of replacing the Patreoncasts with a weekly livechat with you guys. Just an hour, once a week, about nothing in particular. Unlike Forge sessions, which are about coming up with ideas  for the show, these would really just be quality time. We've talk about our ideas and ambitions, hold Q&As, invite guests on to hang out for a quick hour or so, possibly play some games if it's not too much effort.

What do you guys think of this?

Lemme know in the comments!

—

That's all for this week.

I can't express how absolutely stoked I am to finally be delivering another video. It's been so long and you've all been so patient. Now, at last, your patience is finally going to pay off.

Now I just have to figure out whether we want to use Youtube's fancy lil' premiere feature to celebrate this... 

We'll see?

—Benji