Progress Report - March 11, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for once again completely forgetting to write the Progress Report yesterday. It didn't even occur to me until I went to bed that I forgot to write it.

There's not a whole lot to say about any one thing this week (sans Love and Degeneracy), so let's just quickly go over everything that's currently in the shop, and then end on a discussion of the series production, shall we?

First out the gate, Overbreed: it's taking my Zuricher friend a bit longer than he expected to get through it all. On Sunday, he reported he had gotten through the first 370 shots of the 567-shot transcript, so about two-thirds the way through. He is hopeful he'll be done by this upcoming Sunday. We'll see how things fall out.

Next up, the Micros release page. It is live now, accessible via the "Series" link at the top of my website, and currently houses two videos: the Love and Degeneracy chapter preview (more on that below), and the Marie Micro - which is the first time since its release several months ago that it has actually had a formal upload.

I spent a good chunk of the beginning of this week getting it ready, and after it went live on Friday, I have since added some more functionality to it. Namely, it now supports formatted text underneath video releases, which will be mostly used for credits and linking to related media (for example, the Primordium chapter 1 will end up linking to the Primordium video on my Films page).

Implementing that formatted-text mechanism was a journey in its own right. I ended up having to write my own lightweight text editor within the Micro Release Tool that can automatically generate HTML tags to pull it off. I spent longer than I care to admit looking for a ready-made text editor, but this ended up being the easier solution. It really shouldn't have needed to be.

I have also been doing some writing for future Series. Not committing to anything, since I already have all of 2026 booked. But I've been exploring future projects.

Most recently, I have revisited my old Demonseed idea, which I ended up putting on ice because it didn't really fit the original Micros construction. In the months since then, though, the Micros have evolved into the Series/Chapter/Episodes mechanism, rather than the original intent of a bunch of standalone videos. And that is something that I think fits Demonseed far more.

I put together a little mood piece for it the other day, further exploring the characters and their motivations. I had previously made pieces for each of the characters independently, but the relationship between the sisters is central to both the story and the plot of Demonseed.

Demonseed is unambiguously the darkest project I've written to date. The best single word I can use to describe it is "cruel." It is ultimately a story of hubris, of how even the best intentions can be corrupted if you are willing to throw away your morals and your restraints in pursuit of power. Come to think of it, the phrase "those who pursue power in the name of those they love will end up with neither" is a fitting marketing slogan for the project.

I don't want to go into details there, but as I said. The relationship between the sisters is important to the story and the plot.

Finally, the big Kahuna:

Love and Degeneracy

So first of all, in case you somehow missed it, I finally got the release mechanism for Micros underway! This past Friday, episode 1 of Love and Degeneracy was formally released into Early Access, with the full series being previewed at the 2160p tier. And I can't overstate just how excited I am to finally have it all underway!

My sound designer has been chomping at the bit to work on the next episode, and in fact he had already started work on Episode 2 before I even had Episode 1 formally released. He's fully confident he can hit the two-week stride, and every day I spend working on detailing Episode 2, I am becoming more and more confident of the same.

Over the past 4 days, I've spent 2 hours a day working on finishing up Episode 2, taking it from the blocked-out state in the full-series preview to the final quality in the Episode-1 Early Release. With those 8 hours, I have managed to:

Fully lip-sync the entire episode - Chloe, Max, David, and Joyce; dialogue and non-dialogue both.

Swap out the old static bed with the new rigged bad, and added some more good-ole-fashioned rocking-and-rolling (you can see it in the post preview, highlighted with Chloe's foot moving back and forth with the mattress a lot more).

Upgraded the character models to use the new Animation Layers system, going from 1 layer to 5 layers. I split out all of Chloe's existing layered animation into two layers: the motion layer, swinging her head around to look at Max and what-not; and a "corrections" layer, which is needed so that those extreme motions don't look weird. Max never had any correction animation, so her existing layer just became the motion layer. Joyce and David never had layers, so I didn't have anything to migrate for them.

(Nearly) finished adding the dialogue layer, which is the character heads moving about to emphasize their speech. This is what the preview image for this post is highlighting, with Max's dialogue layer on the right. I say nearly, because I ran out of time last night one sentence short of finishing all of the dialogue layer.

I'll be finishing up the dialogue layer today, before shifting over to adding the noise layer. Hypothetically, this should actually be extremely simple to do with the new Animation Layer system, with a dedicated layer (Layer 3) reserved just for detail animation. I should be able to generate the different frequencies of noise on a single shot, and then just copy-paste it between shots. The fact that the layers underneath (and above, in Chloe's case - Layer 4 is her corrections layer) change and move around shouldn't affect the noise layer at all. It should all Just Work™.

After the noise layer is finished, I need to go back and add expression animation to the faces. Right now I have the mouths moving, and the heads moving, but I don't have the eyes or the upper face moving. That'll likely take a full day per character on its own, penciling in David and Joyce together into a third day because their section is short, only 4 shots.

And then after the expression layer is done, I think it's just lighting and camera choreography. I might add some root-motion noise to them, but I'm not sure it is necessary - I think between the noise layers, the dialogue motion, and the camera choreography, there will be more than enough moving around as it is. I'll have to play that by ear.

Laying it out into a schedule then, would look something like this:

March 11 (today) - Finish dialogue layer, add noise layers

March 12 - Chloe expressions

March 13 - Max expressions

March 14 - David and Joyce expressions

March 15 - Lighting and camera choreography

With a scheduled release date of March 19, I would like to be ready to hit the Big Red Button and get the 4k renders going by the time I go to bed on the 18th, so that they're done the morning of the 19th and I can spend the day putting everything together for the release.

All in all, this schedule is looking pretty solid. It has a few days of wiggle room, and if the 15th comes and goes and I am still not done, then I can take the shackles off and spend full 10-hour days cranking things till they are done.

And that's all for this week!

Next week's Progress Report, which I will hopefully remember to write on the 17th this time, should have everything more or less ready to ship in regards to Love and Degeneracy. And it will hopefully have all of the Overbreed naturalization finished as well, meaning I can begin reaching out and orchestrating the voicing of everything. Fun times.

Until next week, everyone!