PROGRESS REPORT - August 11, 2026 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

Today's Progress Report is going to be rather short, as the only thing I've worked on over the past week is the Marie/Honoka intro sequence. So let's just get right into.

Right up top, I mentioned last week how my mental health this week was either going to be in a very good state (I finished the intro), or a very bad state (I didn't finish the intro). In reality, it's in overall a pretty good position, though it is definitely strained a bit.

I managed to get all 18 animations for the intro sequence built (note to self: never write an intro sequence that involves an 18-animation montage again 💀), and have stitched together the final Series intro sequence (teased as this week's preview image). You can click here to watch the full sequence, though obviously the renders themselves are not finished.

Since I assembled that cut, and sent it off to Tonedeaf to do his magic with, I have been focusing on finishing the scenebuilds for the sequence. As of right now, I have 14 of 18 scenes finished, and plan to finish the last of them by end-of-day tomorrow. Then I need to go through and polish the animations, and the sequence will be done and ready to render out in 4k.

As of right now, here is what each of the finished scenes look like:

And I have to say, as the scenes come together, I'm starting to feel pretty good about them. Is it still an obscene amount of work for a 30-second intro? Absolutely. Is it still a bad idea to openly flaunt the plot of the entire series through the montage? Almost certainly.

But do I think it looks freaking cool? Honestly, yeah, now that I'm seeing it in its splendor. It looks pretty freaking cool.

Beyond the intro sequence itself, I also cut together the raw draft of the first* episode of the series and sent that off to Tonedeaf for sound design, and cut together the trailer for the Chapter. You can click here to watch the Chapter trailer. The first 30 seconds are the same as the standalone Series intro, so you can skip over that if you've already seen it above. It's just included there to give a sense of how it would all flow.

Do be aware that, unlike the Series intro, the Chapter trailer does have sound. And it is completely unmixed and sounds terrible.

So yeah. In retrospect, over the past week I have:

Finished all 18 Series intro animations

Built 14 of the 18 Series intro scenes

VFX composited the first Chapter episode

Cut the Chapter trailer

Sent the Series intro, Chapter trailer, and first Chapter episode for sound design

That leaves the path forward pretty clear: finish the Series intro, finish the Chapter trailer, finish the first Chapter episode. In that order.

It is at this point that I feel obligated to put all the chips on the table, in the name of transparency: in the wake of the first episode's Early Access release date being 10 days away, on August 21, I am not wholly confident I can get everything done on time.

I've mentioned this brutal calculus before in a previous post, but if it comes down to the wire, I am going to prioritize the order I set out above: Series intro, Chapter trailer, Chapter episode. And the reason for this is simple:

Come August 21, the Series intro and the Chapter trailer are going to be seen by thousands of people, as they go public to announce the series and that Episode 1* is available for Early Access.

By comparison, come August 21, only at most 300 people are going to see the Chapter 1 episode, because that is how many people have access to it.

I'm of course not counting the pirates over at Kemono and f95zone and whatnot, who love to hound my Patreon and immediately rip and post the early-access videos as soon as they go up and then sit around jerking each other off by saying how shit of an animator and writer I am while spending all of their free time bitching about free porn that they pirate anyways. Love you guys, keep up the free publicity, every time you guys whine about my work, it brings in new Patrons.

And so, when weighing which to prioritize - the Series intro and Chapter trailer which will be seen by thousands, or the Chapter episode which will be seen by a few hundred at most, the math falls out pretty easily.

Obviously it isn't ideal, and I will be striving my damnedest to get it all done. Thankfully, Episode 1* itself is actually a pretty simple sequence, with very little narrative animation, and only a single character (Honoka) to lip-sync. In theory, I could probably get it done within a week, rather than the usual two I give myself.

Which is good, because I might only get a week to work on it, considering everything else I have to do first.

Hopefully all of this calculus will be for naught, and everything will get done on time. But I just felt that it was fair to share the reality of the situation with you all.

Oh, and as a final note to wrap this post up, the final runtime for A Short Love Story Chapter 1 is 17 minutes. Almost exactly the same final runtime as Love and Degeneracy Chapter 1 was. Sheer coincidence, though the fact that the latter was 6 episodes and the former is 7 episodes, it makes sense they're clocking in around the same runtime.

*What I am referring to as "Episode 1" in this post is technically actually Episode 2. A Short Love Story is a series being retroactively pegged onto the standalone 60-second Marie Micro that started off this whole Micro-video experiment. That Marie video was originally intended to be a one-off, but I later decided to write a series around it, and retroactively pull it into Episode 1. As such, and as you can see by looking at the Series page on my website, technically Episode 1 of A Short Love Story was released back in March of 2025. For the sake of everyone's sanity though, I am going to refer to this batch of 6 new episodes being produced, while technically episodes 2 through 7, as being episodes 1 through 6. Just because it's really confusing referred to the first episode of a batch as episode 2.

At any rate, that's all for now, everyone! Until next time!