Box Peek July Update (Patreon)

Beep beep! Sorry this is coming in a little late--it's hard for me to plan around Tuesday being the last day of the month, and then yesterday I wanted to finish filming instead of writing about finishing filming.

Scoops first: I just finished filming Episode 4 last night. Editing takes 2-3 days, so I'll be able to start Episode 5 Monday or Wednesday. What this means is that I'm finally willing to come to terms with the reality that I can't make more than one episode in a month.
With that in mind it is now my plan to divide Box Peek into two seasons of five episodes, which was actually an idea brought up in this very comment section last month. The Basic Plan (Subject to Change as Always) will be to premiere the first five episodes probably in late October (after a wedding trip I have to make) and then the last five probably in February. I could be facing a scenario where the last episode premieres one year after the debut of the first episode, blech. That's kind of why I'd like to get some eps out in 2018, just to feel like I've achieved something this year. I think 5 episodes is a bulky enough chunk to feel substantial, and while Box Peek isn't a cliffhanger type of show where Episode 5 will leave you dying to find out what happens next, the two halves separate in a way that isn't unnatural. As always I'm reading the comments, so if you feel something either way about this let me know.

Production Stuff: Episode 4 was beastly, and much like the 2011 classic film Beastly, much of making Box Peek means learning to embrace the suck. This month I definitely lost some to time to unbearable heat and regular depression, but each new episode continues to provide increasingly interesting and stupid challenges that I never seem to predict. A little behind-the-scenes nugget: I have used a new method for the boxes in every episode of Box Peek so far, and I'm going to try a new one for episode five as well. I keep improving the process in theory thinking I'm some kind of paper box genius, and then when it's time to shoot I discover all the new problems my new boxes have. These Episode 5 boxes are going to be perfect though.
Some shots take 40 seconds before I hit record and some take an hour. Sometimes something that's on the screen for one second took hours and hours of drawing, coloring, cutting, and assembling into a shot. Most of the time I'm prepared for this and I think it makes the project special--sloppy in most places, super neat in small spurts--but sometimes there's a thing that slipped through the writing and recording phases where I sit to do draw and go "wait, what? How do I make this??" or worse, I'm sitting next to the camera, staring at my completed set pieces and having no idea how to actually construct my foolish ideas.
I'm sure this is the stuff I'll appreciate later. This whole process is slowly making me better at visualizing the fog of my imagination. Human brains are designed to discard minutiae, and even this strange slopfest of Box Peek has forced me to be meticulous in ways I've never desired to be. It's good.

Episode 5 seems relatively non-beastly, but that's most likely my cyclical naivete speaking. I wish we could do all ten episodes back-to-back, but I'm also excited to show you some stuff relatively soon. Thanks again for your continued patience and support!

Love & Respect,
Kyle