Status Report - HERO: Week of 03.19

Outline Excerpt

Aloha travelers! I've got another couple months of updates to share with you, though visuals are sparse. I finished the outline for all three Acts at the end of February and moved into storyboarding at the beginning of March. Act 1 is about 80%, The first half of Act 2 is about 60%, while the remainder of Act 2 and Act 3 has yet to be done. I will be going through the storyboard with a second round to bring those numbers up to 100%, filling in the gaps.

Storyboard Excerpt

What's the difference between the outline and the storyboard? The outline describes each chapter of HERO thematically. The storyboard describes each chapter chronologically. There are a handful of themes that carry through the story from start to finish, so the outline lays out how those themes need to advance in each chapter. The storyboard lays out the chapter from beginning to end in its entirety. I developed a framework to manage this information so as not to confuse myself with all the data. Within a given chapter, each scene has an eight digit number that serves as a timestamp, examples depicted in the image above. The first two digits indicate the route; there are seven and each is significantly different enough in detail even though the events are mostly the same so once the routes split they are tracked separately. The next two digits indicate the chapter, which lasts one day, increasing incrementally. The final four digits are a twenty-four hour timestamp indicating when the scene begins. With this framework, I know when any given scene occurs and how long it lasts. It gives me flexibility to add or remove scenes without impacting any other. If there was a scene at 0900 and the next scene at 1100, if I needed a scene in between them it is easy to add 1000 without having to do any renumbering or reordering.

A HERO Manufacturer's Logo

Moving forward, I project having the storyboard completed sometime in April. At that point the next phase of development will begin. I'm planning for a multi-pronged approach to write the script and produce some base assets at the same time, with full assets to come after the script is complete so I don't spend time making unneeded assets. Until next time, and thanks for support as always!

All images are unrendered, raw SketchUp models.

Nick