Monthly Update: June 2021

Source Filmmaker animation about a lady getting fully engulfed (part 2 of previous animation video) is hitting some ups and downs.

The intro scenes that are done look like these:

The scenes I wanted to get more into were like these:

And several more cluster-phobic angles like those from different body parts and angles. As you can see, you can't see much.

It's visual art. So seeing is kinda important.

So I started experimenting with different angles with more open views like these:

The set settings are not finished with those. But imagine those with a lot of tentacles and maybe slime effects (if I can find one that I can use flexibly).

You can see more. But it also defeats the purpose a bit for me. I wanted it to feel like her body is pressed against the foreign flesh all the time with little to no space to move. This is one of the main issues that are commonly found amongst visual vore scenes from other artists as well that I have yet to solve other than writing the story or covering them up with organs and let the audience imagine after showing its innards for a bit.

More seeing parts also means more things to animate, which is another work I wanted to reduce.

At the moment, it is getting a bit too ambitious.

I'm losing the plot with this one, trailing a bit too long, and been wanting to go back to story writing and comic book ideas. So I'm debating whether I want to just cut it short and make it a simpler animation or take a longer time (months) making it look as close to what I envisioned.

Another reason for the rush is that I wanted this to be my last work with Source Filmmaker. It is taking quite a bit of space in my SSD memory drive that I need to use and the outdated state of the program was making the work process quite clumsy, glitchy, and slow. If I'm continuing 3d animations, I wanted to go either Blender or Unreal Engine. I also wanted to play more with a newer 2d graphic animation software that I purchased a while ago. There is also pixel animation that I do enjoy making that I definitely should make more use out of.

So hopefully I can make that all happen sooner than later. Need to decide what to do with the Source Filmmaker project first.

On a bit more productive side, I'm recently studying/practicing anatomy from the ground up. Down to the bone, muscle, nerve system, poses, clothes, hands, feet, faces, expressions, and hair.

This is how much I've done about it so far:

Yeah, didn't go too far in the list. I started it last week. But at least it's something. I know about bones than ever before at the moment, though I need more close-up details with hands and feet. And I'm quite excited to get into muscles. I always wanted to learn that one.

Also, when I got bored with the Source Filmmaker animation I was working on, I decided to make a quicker short story with a comic book frame.

And I've gone to experimenting with the visual styles and processes.

These two example pages are the first page of that short story.

This is how my older work style looks like:

It's faster and feels more organic to work details and maybe better for grittier textures. But it gets messy on the edges of the objects and it became very difficult to refine sharper details. So it's fun to work with for a bit. Then it gets frustrating to look at after a while and I got no clue how to fix it. I know that some graphic designers can speed paint like this and make everything look amazing. But I'm not quite there to make it look consistently decent.

So this is the same page with the comic book style that I was practicing before:

No shading in there yet and took quite a bit longer for the stage that it is at (especially with the thinner lines than my previous comic book practice). But I think it already is much more comfortable to look at (if the monster doesn't upset anyone) and tells a better story. And much easier to control the shapes and colors. I got a clearer idea of what should be in which shape.

Looking forwards to keep practicing this style.

On the broader side,

in the past few months, I've been getting some inspiration from a few video game stories and settings. Returnal, The Medium, and Journey To The Savage Planet were those.

The character situations with Returnal and The Medium were quite usable for me with my horror/mystery fantasy setting. Journey To The Savage Planet was more of monster inspirations and comedic body horror society background along with it.

I've been writing down some ideas that popped into my head in between those inspirations.

Then yesterday, I just decided to start writing the draft of the full comic book series story.

I got some interesting situations and mysteries going on in the story and I got 5 chapters (episodes?) of the draft already finished. And I'm quite excited to see what follows on the chapters afterward.

Once I finish building up the background elements where the story takes place and finalize the story to make everything decent and coherent, I will start working on painting parts.

I'm estimating the whole story to be about 10 chapters with 10 to 20 pages each with 1 to 5 images framed per page.

This will be the paid comic book content. And I am still deciding where to post it and how much it will be. Gumroad was one place that I found appearing on my radar fairly consistently among other artists I know. And maybe $2 per chapter/book?

I have been seeing some paid erotic images going up to $15 for a few pages. And some suggested I should do it too, the expensive stuff makes it look things exotic and etc. It is normal for sexual content to be a bit overpriced as well if you think about strip clubs or some porn site materials.

But my logic was, I'd hesitate to buy a video game that I can enjoy for over 100 hours if it is over $30. Or 2 or 3 hours of decent movies, I'm not watching it if it's over $10 (movie theaters are out of the option for me). Nowadays I can watch one for $6 on YouTube.

So a comic book with a dozen pages, that's like 5 to 10 minutes of content. Maybe 20 minutes if you read really slowly like me and each page have hundreds of words. But no matter how good they are, I wouldn't want to pay for that if it's over maybe $5.

For reference, major comic books like Batman series seem to be in the range of $10 to $25 per volume on Amazon. Saga is up and down around $10 per volume. Although, it is hard to tell how many, eh, chapters (episodes? I can't quite say "book" because comic book sales world seems to have another meaning for that word) a volume would have because it seems to vary. But it is showing that Saga has 9 volumes total and I remember that series has about 60 chapters (or episodes). So, yeah, I think that's a lot of illustrated and written pages per dollar in that measurement regardless.

So my thought trailed into making each chapter $2 read. And maybe once the whole series is out, I'll call it a volume and say the whole thing is $10.

And free to anyone who has a record of supporting me on Patreon since they were supporting me at my earlier growing days without asking much back and essentially everybody from there has already paid more than what my comic book chapter will cost anyways. I'll do some counting with that system later and send the supporters a free download link in the messages there.

That's my thought so far about how to put my works into the market.

If anybody has other ideas for how to price it and where I can post it to put it on sale, please do share. Like, how these things are generally calculated or where your personal preferred website to pay and see contents like the ones I'm making.