And now for something completely 2 to 8 February.

I wrapped up the main story mission of Far Cry 4 back on Wednesday. It’s a fun romp with a wonderful baddie-in-charge but denouement that falls absolutely short. Without wanting to be too spoilery, if I can still kill a major character it’s not time for the writers to knock off.

This week I’ve gone through a few script polishes. The short now includes a good old fashioned cause-and-effect gag which ties everything together nicely. If Pointy’s stuck in the sun, he sags and loses his ability to speak. This leads to much entertaining indignity for the self-styled “friendly neighbourhood entrepreneur”.

I’ve recorded a scratch pass to test out the script. For the first time I’ve also cut in temporary music. Until today I didn’t fully appreciate how much humour can come from the way the music gets used. Even a rough temp score has brought the scratch up another level.

I could thumbnail this scratch pretty happily. Kind of want to so I can show it to the people I’ve been showing previous versions to to get their feedback. It’s been nearly a month since I’ve had a new rough animatic to show them, after all…

Speaking of sound, I’ve been tossing up whether to try a fortnightly podcast. I spent most of Saturday messing around in Reaper and it feels like it would be worth a shot.

I’d like to do something a little bit different – a bit more quickfire, flash and fun – so that I’m not just reworking the same territory as Blender Podcast, Blender Guru Podcast, Open Source Creativity Podcast, etc. The working title for the project is Radio Free Quollism. Segments and features I’m consdering:

• Interesting Blender news and happenings
• Handy Blender tips (stuff that doesn’t need screen capture)
• Blender-related satire (dramatic readings of BlenderArtists posts, etc) to make the crappy stuff more bearable
• Media reviews (films, short films) with an advisory scale that goes from “picking up the gold-leaf collector’s edition” to “decrying this horrible crap to whoever will listen”
• Chat about making an animated short film solo – progress reports, edited journals
• Sketches with characters from abandoned projects
• Stuff about quolls, of course!

I don’t want it to get in the way of making the film so I’m not intending to spend any more than a few hours a week on it, but it could still be fun to produce a podcast. I’m giving myself a few weeks to produce a pilot then depending on how that goes, I’ll take it from there.

So. Busy times!

I’m off to spend the rest of my Sunday evening drinking cider, eating pizza and playing “fill in the blank bits of the rough animatic with crude sketches”. Have a good week!