Pathologic, For Those Who Will Never Play it Pt. 2 - UPDATE - 07/12/2012

Hey ya'll, hope you're doing well!! The first peek at the next half of our grand play is finally here! I'll be posting it for all the $3+ Patrons immediately after this post goes live, but wanted to provide an update on the overall status of the project to everyone first.

As noted in the title, it is a very rough cut with quite a few assets missing at the moment, including:  

-The majority of voice acting from other performers

-Sound effects on the transition cards

-A full rewrite and reedit of the section with Grace

-A handful of various minor tweaks and edits  

Realize that may seem like quite a bit to some people, especially the lack of voice acting, but I can assure that you this is roughly 95% the way to being the final product. As I've said before, I never post any previews I don't think aren't worth watching, which is why this one has taken a hot minute to put together.

I know this took a lot longer than expected to come to fruition, so I wanna take a second to talk about why that is, the unique challenges a project like this poses, and what that means for this project and ones like it going forward.

Obviously, something as big as this has a lot of moving parts, each of which need serious time and consideration. Writing, script editing in cooperation with collaborator, my own vocal recordings, my own editing of my own vocal recordings, footage capture including pick up and cinematic shots after the fact for maximum polish, and all the kinds of stuff that are the sort of things that are time intensive on their own when I'm making any piece of content like this.

However, the massive scale of this project, with it's 3-4 hour run time, makes it it's own challenge in a way: Making sure that, in all that lengthy time, I'm still not wasting any time or repeating things already established, not repeating jokes already told (unintentionally), that it's all coherent as individual Day-by-Day stories as well as the complete whole, and presenting things in a way that's both entertaining and true to the spirit of the game, just to name a few. Also, turns out, trying to record 35k words with all the energy this script calls for, while fun, is by no means gentle on my voice. Whoddaguessed.

Perhaps most importantly though, it also effectively requires me to work as, for want of a better term, a Director. I have spent a lot of days contacting, communicating with, and providing the necessary resources to the over 30+ collaborators who have been gracious enough to offer their assistance. After Part 1, I knew this was absolutely, without a doubt, the first thing I had to get out of the way to make sure all contributors had as much time as they needed and so I could get the end products ASAP to start plugging them in to their respective places. If I didn't contact all the actors first, then there's a good chance that EVERY preview would have no voice lines save my own until a couple months in and I wanna make sure I'm giving ya'll something more fun to watch than that as we move along. 

However, all of this isn't quite as simple as hitting people up in the DMs and copy-pasting the relevant lines. As you know by this point, Pathologic is a very complex and often obtuse story, and this means that I am basically required to make sure that every actor has all the essential context and instruction needed to make sure they understand what the hell they're saying, how they should say it, and, most importantly, why they're saying it.

Ya know. Being a director and all that. (or producer. or any pretentious title you wanna pin on it really, whatever, dealers choice)  

As such, I've taken to creating Direction Sheets for every single role/actor in the story as my main method for providing the performers with everything they need. Let's take a quick look at just one, specifically the sheet for Maria Kaina. Each of these sheets are made up of 3 parts:   

-A general overview of the character, their personality, their goals, and their relationship to the world

-The lines transcribed from the game

-Detail context and direction on each line

As you can see in the doc, these can easily get quite involved and detail. This one is on the longer side over all, but needless to say, even the comparatively short ones do still take time to put together and make sure I'm conveying directions properly and making the lore details coherent to people who may otherwise know nothing about this story, and then send it off to the respective performer. And I've had to make around 30 of them.

Now, you may notice that I've been talking about these sheets kinda way longer than is arguably reasonable, and this is where we come into the two major mistakes I made in the early stages of this production, one bad and one good:

1) I drastically underestimated the amount of time needed to write each everyone one of theses sheets. I'd assumed that it would take a week at very most to put all of them together, but failed to account for the fact that there are just way, WAY more spoken lines in this part than Part 1. In total, it was probably about 15k words work of original writing on it's own to get all of them together.

That may seem like overkill, but for a 4 hour production with this many distinct roles, I couldn't find any other way that wouldn't inevitably be sacrificing quality. And all of this still isn't including the act of actually contacting every one of those actors nor the time I've needed to coordinate with the various other creatives that will be contributing (more on that next time <3) but, trust me it's involved.

This is, by and large, why this first part has taken so long to put together, and that lesson has been very thoroughly learned.

This, fortunately, brings me to my second, Good Mistake:

2) I severely overestimated the amount of time I'd need to actually edit all of these things together once I had my hands on them. I was, again, basing this off of my experience with Part 1, but as a result of now knowing the game as well as I do, having things like the general story structure, conversation formatting, framing device, etc. already figured out and planned, I found that things came together fairly rapidly once I had my own recordings edited and was allowed to prioritize being an Editor instead of being a Director.  

Now the ball is rolling: Every direction sheet has been written, every role has been filled, nearly every actor has been contacted, and I fully expect to be receiving each actor's contributions over the coming weeks and will be able to put them to good use right away. Additionally, I've recorded and edited all of my own lines up till the end of Day 9. So, now that I'm secure with that knowledge, I can safely say that, I'll be revising my production schedule for the remainder of this project:  

For the remainder of this month, I will be focusing on wrapping up my responsibilities with the majority of the collaborators, getting the rough cut of together Day 7 and the actual intro put together.

Next month, I will be editing Days 8-10.

If all goes as intended, we'll full early cut by the end of September.  

May take a week or two after that to polish thing, make it as good as it can be and implement feedback, etc. and I'll be setting the premiere for at least a week beforehand to give me all time I need to get subtitles in order cause...hoooo boy are there gonna be a whole lot and I really wanna make sure they aren't garbage. That said, I'm now very confident in saying that this will be going living in October, at latest.

Anyways, with all that now said, probably time for me to get back to it. Hope the preview is worth the wait despite it's roughness, but gotta say, I think it's coming together exceptionally well in my incredibly humble opinion. Am only getting more and more excited to see all of this come together and share with you all the cool stuff I have in store, as well as all the surprises I've yet to share.

Know it's been a long time coming, but this is gonna be something really special, and I'm deeply grateful for all of the patience and support that has allowed this to happen.

Future looks bright ya'll ^^  

See ya again real soon,
Peace ✌️