There’s a slight tweak to the plan now: it’s still going to be a series of shorts made more or less in story order. I’ll generally be attempting to work in ascending order of difficulty with chosen technical targets to achieve as I go.
I’m in pre-production on the first short now. I’ve got soft script lock – the assets (characters, sets, etc) are pretty much set even if the dialogue isn’t. It’s far enough along to allow me think about production design, conlangs and conscripts, character design and other development/pre-production concerns alongside dialogue polish.
Production design and art direction in particular are kind of daunting. I’m not a trained designer so instinctively that makes me want to work with as few elements as possible – at least at first. The coming to me in disjointed abstractions – concrete, dug-out rock and frosted glass/plastic are a start. Rounded corners. I want something iridescent in there as well.
I’ve been researching architecture, specifically high-density living. I’m casting around for somewhere high-tech but not extravagant but not derelict to put my main character as a living space. I might find more inspiration in Japan or maybe Korea than Hong Kong – the clutter in some of those little apartments in HK is utterly amazing.
To give myself a better sense of what virtual materials I’ve got to work with and what sort of rendering times I can expect if I use them, I’m jumping into the Cycles rendering engine and either brushing up on procedural texturing or just generally playing around. (Speaking of Cycles, Blender 2.69 is in release candidate phase.) I guess materials and textures fall under post-production moreso than pre-production, but if something’s utterly impractical because it means I’m waiting 30+ minutes per FHD frame for rendering, I’d prefer to know ahead of time. Also, discovering cool new things that the technology is capable of is often inspiring in and of itself.
Like knowing I can get nifty procedural iridescent insect chitin without a huge amount of waiting, that’s pretty cool.
The conlanging – language construction – is off to a fairly casual start. The first word I made up for the main character to say is trr. It’s his “contemptful noise” equivalent of pft because he can’t say pft because he hasn’t got lips that work like that. The nice thing about doing the voice work myself is that I don’t have to train an actor how to do a uvularised voiceless alveolar plosive with lateral release – basically a cross between a T, an L and hocking up phlegm. It’s hard to even write using IPA – probably tχˡ comes close – so a tailor-made abugida is in the works too. So far I have a general idea of what I’m doing – I have a symbol for the letter r in onset, nucleus and coda positions. I can thus write the hypothetical word *rrr. Very useful.
So yeah, the next couple of days will be reading up some more about production design, doing another pass on the script to make it funnier, researching compact living spaces, sussing out procedural materials/textures in Cycles some more, and generally trying not to lose too much sleep.
Finally, have a picture of a mulgara.
