“I was talking to some students and they were saying things like ‘How do I get an agent? Where do I get my headshots?’ And I just thought, shouldn’t the first thing you’re thinking about is ‘How do I be good?’” (Steve Martin, Masterclass 2017)

The production diary here is really more of a visual record of things made, remade, unmade and just the operation of getting ideas out of my head and into the project, but this week the project turns a month old, so it felt like an appropriate moment to pause and take a look at the past 30 days.

A lot has been made, and I’m really happy with the progress and momentum so far. The early work has a marked difference in quality from the work being produced now, both as a result of changes in rendering and upscaling at MidJourney of course, but also of my confidence and proficiency with the craft and iteration of a good prompt. The faces are getting a lot more believable, especially with the addition of the casting section last week, and I feel the ability to revisit some of the older items with a fresher, more nuanced lens and lift them up a bit has been helpful. In particular I’m really, really happy with the evolution of the stories, which can be challenging to assemble, but look really great when you see them all together. I thought a lot about how ‘linear’ these should be, or whether it’s OK to simply assemble a collection of fragments, small windows into these worlds I’m creating, and to let the user assemble the narratives and connections between them all themselves. I’d binged all of Twin Peaks over the summer, and subsequently inspired, opted for the latter version. This gives me more freedom to create individual narratives in the 6-panel format I’ve settled on, but also draw pieces together that fit more obviously, as well as take the story in directions that at the moment feel more out there on their own.

Here’s where I am with everything so far:

• Built the website and began publishing and assembling all of the work into distinct realms and buckets of content

• Tested out some Instagram promotions and learned how to work with their ad infrastructure to be able to promote once launched

• Settled on 1.15.2023 as a launch date

• Made material quality progress, especially in character development

• Created a number of large-scale environments including a Crimson City, an Ivory rainforest, and a Cerulean wasteland

• Highlights so far have been the casting, the notebooks, the food, and the creation of the initial set of narratives

• Tested out a short video sequence with a narration from a professional voice actor

• Created 20 stories, and began to assemble them into Seasons. Each season will be 30 stories long, which is more a restriction of SquareSpace’s collections tool than anything else

• Assembled a number of promotional materials and did some fun experiments with poster mockups around New York

• Created an initial inventory of social promotion elements

• Created a language and set of typographic scripts for each realm

So where do I go from here and what happens next? The main thing I’m focused on is trying to improve the quality of the environments, and build out a more robust set of architectural, natural, and geographical elements. The worlds need to feel more lived in, more expansive, more connected. More like places where these adventures would actually take place. But this doesn’t just mean large-scale depictions of rainforests, deserts, jungles and cities. It’s also in the minutiae of the unseen corners, of the flora and fauna which inhabit these places, especially when no-one else is looking. How they change during the days, the seasons, and are informed by the actions of their inhabitants and protagonists. My goal is to have at last a base of 30 different elements for each realm’s character design, environments, and one other ‘type’ of thing that exists there. It might be transportation in the case of Neo York, or food in the case of the Cerulean Council. If I can get to that base of coverage by Thanksgiving, I think I’ll be in pretty good shape for an early 2023 rollout.

The website’s live, but password protected behind a simple promo homepage at the moment, and I need to figure out when best to actually publish everything before unlocking. I also need to really tighten up how all of this works on mobile, especially if I’m going to be using Instagram ads for traffic.

Overall, I feel pretty good about where things are right now, and the momentum behind everything. School and ‘real’ work are ramping up a bit at the moment, so the challenge will be to keep this going as more demands are placed on my time and mental bandwidth, but so far so good.

The Age of The Realms has begun.