Surprised? As I’ve mentioned in my previous blog post, I’ve been in the Simming zone and have tried to keep up Sims activities so that I could stay on track to work on episode 10. Guess what? It worked! In an effort to catch up (somewhat) to the five month hiatus between episodes 8 and 9, the next episode has arrived and is available on the main movies site and AinD. As a thanks to my mailing list subscribers, it is being released early to them only and is available on AinD Backstage. The rest of you will have to wait a week for the general release on my main movies and AinD sites or you can subscribe to my mailing list and gain access to Backstage. Episode 10 is entitled “Crossing Lines” and looks at Emma’s and Ellen’s respective relationships. Thanks to my awesome cast: Artcgrrl, Jixs, Carisa, AtomicSpaceKitty, Blessed, Dave.

Yes, it’s time again for the warning. Do not read further until AFTER you have watched the episode. I do think knowing what happens prior to watching spoils it. Ok, now that the dirty work is over with, on to the discussion! I don’t know if I’ll have any energy left to work the next episode right away. This ep. isn’t long clocking in at a bit over 8 minutes but the last scene really whooped me. First, the fighting animations are sooo cartoony in the game that I had to come up with overlay hacking solutions to bump up the realism. Second, I debated over whether or not to show tears. Emma is clearly crying (a lot), and I thought it be silly to show her without tears. On the other hand, they are obviously not animated so I risked them looking unrealistic. I ended up downloading tears on MTS2 and shot the whole Emma sequence. Well, it didn’t work. Then I downloaded another set, modified and tried again. That didn’t work either and I ended up modifying them about two more times before I got the right look, reshooting the sequence each time. In addition to shooting headaches, I know you guys know how exasperating it is to boot and reboot up the game and Bodyshop with tons of custom content. Anyway, the point of all this whining is to ask if you thought the tears worked- i.e. that last scene worked. I’m hoping I cut quick enough shots of the tears that it didn’t give you too much time to notice they weren’t moving (it also helps the tears were all the way down the face instead of stuck mid-stream). It seems too that upon viewing the rendered version, they are even less noticeable than I originally thought, making them a bit more inconspicuous. By the way, what happens with Eugene shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; the clues were there from the first time they met. Also, if you friends don’t like the guy, then he’s no good for you.

The other scene I wanted to mention was the ending to Ellen and Nate’s scene. The song I used is called “Only So Long” by a band called The French Kicks. They have a unique and very unusual sound and they definitely don’t appeal to most people. Anyway, I love that song- I think it’s so romantic and the lyrics are just perfect for Nate and Ellen’s situation- “There is only so long I can do without it, wait a little bit more, I will come around yet.” I’ll put up the full song on the radio blog after I’ve released the episode to the general public.

Oh, and one more thing, a lot of you know how it was done but for those of you who don’t, the last scene of Emma crying on the bathroom floor was done using Paul’s Reaction Tester- set prefer overlay and the mild cry over the aspiration failure breathe loop from my action hack.

**Seems my mailing list program or webhost is having issues. I will send out the emails as soon as I am able to. I had to install a new program that can handle the number of subscribers which I’m not exactly happy with but it seems to have sent out the mail. Hopefully, you got a notice.