I’ve been stuck with the scenes taking place at the Infinity Beach Bar for so long, that I was very happy to finally draw some new characters and backdrops for this very short scene with Emperor Zaggerty Fong (5th emperor of the Democratic Empire of Gaia). The reason why I had to spend so much time with those initial scenes was that I learned a lot about how I should have rigged my main characters in the first place, and accordingly had to re-rig them, and heavily modify them to make things work at all. So I lost more time than I anticipated. I thought after my long 3-week winter holiday I’d almost be done with episode one, alas, I’ve only got the first 5 minutes of a 22 minute episode finished.

Now I’m mostly done with all shots for the Infinity Beach Bar internal scenes and I have to start creating and rigging new characters again. Also creating backdrops turns out to take way more time than I thought. My normal drawing style that I’m using for some of the coloured storyboards/animatic images is quite different from the actual more flat and oddly angled backdrop no-outlines style I want to adapt for the series, so I always end up having to redesign many details. It’ll take some time until I can make that kind of illustration style my own. It’s a first for me, too.

Bridging the time with teasers…

Now that the pilot won’t be done for at least another one or even two months, I thought I’d best bridge the time with some teasers, with fake interviews “on set” with the main actors and me. I thought it was a nice idea, but of course nice ideas do not subscribers make, so I’m still down in the three-digit range regarding subscribers and let’s just not talk about view numbers. It’s depressing. I posted the video on YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Dailymotion and Instagram. Access numbers are just sad. Screw it! I gotta churn out the pilot. Without that nobody will be paying attention to this vapour-project. Gotta hang in there.

Scripts

The script for episode two is done. I had to shorten it so I had to remove a somewhat long scene that I found particularly fun, but it wouldn’t add to the story and it would make the episode probably a few minutes too long. Well, I guess it’s generic enough that I can just add it to any other episode that isn’t long enough…

The ending of episode 2 leaves some room for speculation, so I thought I could have this unfold to something bigger later, but when I started writing episode 3 with this in mind, it became so big, that I though “I’ll never be able to a) produce the visuals for this and b) tie up all the loose ends that I’ve been creating willy-nilly”, so I binned the idea for now. The story I have planned for episode 3 will likely be one about Phungus’ background, his race and why he says some of the things he says in episode 1 (trying to keep everything spoiler free makes it hard to talk about any story lines or development…).