This is our final and arguably most productive week.

The best thing that’s happened in our world is our Building Virtual Worlds projects are now complete and no longer diverting time and attention away from Managotchi, which means all seven of us are 100 per cent committed to seeing our vision through.

And this means a lot of long work days.

We cramp ourselves into the Blue Room, Jeff and Anshul sitting on beanbags in the back, busy programming, Clark sitting at a desk drawing with his Wacom tablet, and Ryan, Nick and Ryleigh shooting, directing and setting up Jordan for every action. It’s a long, tedious process filled with a lot of visits to Subway.

For the shoot, Jordan wears the same clothes for four days in a row, and markers are left throughout the Blue Room to ensure the camera tripod and lights always remain in the same position. There’s an advantage to shooting indoors with artificial lights, we realize, as the environment is much easier to replicate day after day.

By the end of the week, we’ve completed our principal photography, with well over 900 shots of Jordan against a white screen.

Jordan himself begins the arduous process of going through every single shot, determining which ones we’ll be using. Once that list is whittled down to a respectable 200 or so photos, he begins “cleaning” them up – it seems some of the shots have taken on a yellow tint that needs to be manually and individually erased in Photoshop.

Clark, using a Wacom tablet, begins drawing out some of the elements in our items list, while Ryan, using Clark’s backup drawing tablet, begins sketching out all the icons for our buttons. Jeff and Anshul continue to work hard on the programming in Flash, editing their code to allow for a number of new decisions made by the group.

Meanwhile, Nick and Ryleigh sign up for a number of web sites that offer royalty free sound clips (i.e. Freesound.org, Freesfx.co.uk), and start downloading near 100 stock sounds we’ll need for the game, everything from the sound of Managotchi eating salad (crunchy) to him eating baby food (soft, gloopy).

We can see it all coming together, we just know there’s a lot of work ahead.

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