Production Cycle As It Stands In 2024

I've had a lot of people ask the same questions about the production cycle over the past few months. I thought the last past explained it sufficiently, but apparently not. So let's try this again.

This way, I won't have to repeat myself every time someone asks about the production cycle. I can just link them to this post.

I operate on a schedule of bouncing back and forth between a single large production, and various unrelated short productions. The primary goal is to release a new video every 3 months. I discuss this more under the Read More. The current main production is Overbreed Episode 1. The next main production will be Blue Star Episode 4.

After Blue Star Episode 4, I do not know what the next project will be - I won't be making that decision until Blue Star Episode 4 is heavy in production. It might be Rabbit.Hole Episode 4. It might be another Liziverse, or a sequel to No Gods No Kings. It might be something entirely new. Again, I don't know, and I won't know until Blue Star Episode 4 is in production.

Existing entirely outside of this cycle is the Frozen project. I will be chipping away at it in the weeks in between working on Short videos and working on the main videos. A week at most, usually. This means that the Frozen project is going to take a long time before it gets released, probably a year or two.

The reason for this is simple: The Frozen project shouldn't exist. It was done as an experiment on-stream. One I expected to fail in its first five minutes. Against all odds, it just refused to fail, and eventually a 50+ minute video ended up being made. Every single day we worked on it, I was expecting it to fail. It never did. And so here we are.

The Frozen video will be released, but it will not be finished. Again, it shouldn't exist. Truthfully, it should be canceled entirely. I want to cancel it, dearly. I am not happy with the final product. I am very pleased with it on a technical level - achieving a 50-minute one-shot project across 27 project files in Source Filmmaker is technically impressive no matter how you slice it. But as a film, it's easily the worst I've made to date. It has no story, no progression, no characterization, nothing - because, again, it was an experiment I expected to fail in its first five minutes. It was never meant to be a full film.

But I am not going to cancel it. The work as-is was already done. Canceling it won't give me back the year's worth of streams we spent on it. But the work won't be continued, either. As I've said before, it will get voice audio recorded, at the expense of several thousands of dollars that will not be recouped, and it will have nominal outfitting and lip-sync done. But the animations will not be finished, the sound design will be minimal. It will be released largely as it is now, just with voice audio. I will not invest any more time into a project that should not exist.

That's the most important stuff covered. Underneath the Read More, I will put some thoughts and elaboration on the schedule. But I have covered everything I want to be able to link to when people ask me about the schedule. Read on if you wish, don't if you don't.