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The last days of a roman woman

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Author's commentary: Part 1
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Well folks, this has been quite the journey, after two months and a half months, and uhh... wait, let me get glasses... one... two... ALMOST 300 MANIPS/RENDERS? HOLY MACCARONI!

While asking for advice, @Wragg recommended me to not to go the illustrating every frame of what is happening way. I thought it made sense and thought lets not go crazy on the images, and after 289 pictures (not counting a few scrapped ones), I cant help but wonder if I am a clinical masochist.

Before I moving on to the next topic, O want to comment about the ending of the story. It felt weird to just leave it at "Kieara died, roll credits". Also, to be honest, I'm not sure if I want to do this again so I made a plan.

If it turned out that I don't want to continue, someone that wanted to continue the story would be able to. The ending is open, and since Alice has been photoshopped to death (pun not intended), she was a good pick for Valeria if a continuation ever came to be. If you ask me, I have zero plans to crucify Alive/Valeria, at least in what I picture for this parallel universe, she deserves a break, but like I said, if I don't continue the story, whoever wants to take over it can feel free to do whatever with the story under one condition: Don't make Kieara swear, curse words aren't exactly part of her character.

Now, back to not being sure about making a sequel. After spending September of last year making the thread on the passion of the christa, I thought to myself that "wait a minute, i have at least the basic skills to achieve the dreams of Bruna on an outdoors setting". That was the only goal, that and coming up with a new story (I wasn't particularly comfortable just using the female christ concept), kind of a cheesy story, more of an excuse to crucify Kieara. To my surprise, y'all enjoyed it a lot, I cant thank you enough for that.

I started the project by spending the month of October on research and testing to see if this was doable, the tests were mostly successful, enough to greenlight the project.

It was November, December and half of January making 5 manips per day, and looking back I can only ask myself... why?

I don't know how, maybe it was a mistake, maybe not, but the challenge of making five manips per day made me learn a lot.
Normally I would only make it a quarter of the story at most and then drop it, heck, I even almost dropped it like four times, but there were two things that kept me going.

One was my fanboy-ism for Bruna, but the second and most important was:

You guys.

Every time I felt burnt out and about to quit, your reactions, feedback, comments (even if there are some things I don't fully understand about the comments on story threads) all of that, it was the motivation I needed to bounce back.

I can't stress this enough, thank you, really, thank you for your love and support!

I will keep making comments here and there, and I'm also opening a QnA, feel free to ask anything you want.
Also, after I take a long and needed break, I can break down the making of this series, hope it helps others want to start their own manips.

Stay tuned for a little bonus surprise for tomorrow!
:ARMS1:
 
Author's commentary: Part 2 + bonus
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One of the things that surprised me of the positive feedback was the fact that I made some creative choices that I thought would not be popular. Until this point, Bruna has been what I could call "The forgotten crux legend". Sure, she is the most beloved actress of Ramon and among the other big names, but the limited things one could do with the films she was in and the absolute nothingness of information about her made Bruna a crux legend that is kind of on the sideline. However, this point may not be as true as I thought, once you take out those two things, especially the gigantic task of taking her out of the dark indoors of her film, Bruna is quite a good pick for photomanipulations.

The other creative choice I thought would mean shooting myself in the foot was the cheesy elements of the story, but that was more of a me thing, since I'm not used to writing this style of stories, that turned out to be better than I give it credit for. Also, you may have noticed that what the story is very toned down for what is usual in this kind of stories (not too cruel, little to no sexual topics or cursing, etc. etc.). My tastes in this topic are really moderate, so I thought that maybe it would turn down that the most violent I could get was slapping someone with a napkin (in comparison, I don't have a manip of Bruna being slapped with a napkin... what the hell am I writing).

Then we have the elephants in the room, first the loincloth. The loincloth v nude discussion is one where we have to be honest, we can assume about 2/3 of the folks here prefer full nudity. The idea of taking off the loincloth of Bruna was one that made me really uncomfortable, oh and also, photoshopping what is under the loincloth, I don't know and, yea, still uncomfortable.

And the last elephant in the room, a thorn in the shoe (no pun intended... again...), it's the infamy of:
the wrists.jpg

Oooooh boy, I picked a detail to like that sparks discussion, since I got to admit, the rope + nail combo is a match made in heaven for me... heaven? Why it feels wrong to say heave-AHEM.
Among the most common things in this forum, the nail position debate is one seen quite often. In an nutshell artist paints nails on palms, artist depiction not historically/physically accurate, the whole shebang. Now that I think about it, it's a weird paradox that this forum is mostly fantasy, yet we question how historically / physically accurate some things are. Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting talk, I'm just overthinking things.

Where was I? Oh, right, the wrists.
Besides personal preference, I thought that adding the task of photoshopping the hands and wrists to an already big list of tasks (if you want to read a checklist to feel my suffering, just ask) was going to be not just shooting myself in the foot, but maybe in the whole leg, it would have added around 30 minutes to each manip... mental note, I could calculate how much time I spent working on this, don't forget to remove the mental note from the post justarandomguy.

So, the nails stayed on the palms, but just that also got into my nerves. I understood the limitations of Ramon's film, but adding the ropes would hopefully ease the debate a little and also hide some stuff in the manips that would be a headache to fix.

And yet, you guys still showed your support... you just don't stop surprising me.

I don't deserve you guys :lol:

So, the bonus I told you guys yesterday, there is one thing where I can deliver fan service... sorry team nude, I can't remove a loincloth of Bruna :shakehead:

...but I can experiment on what if she was crucified in the more accurate nailing places :D (at least from the little I know).
TLDRW_Bonus1.jpgTLDRW_Bonus2.jpg
Surprise!!! Hope y'all like it.

That's all I got to share before my loooong rest, this project took way more time of my life than I would like to admit, and while I really REALLY enjoyed making this, I need to be more organized with my time. If I eventually made another one of these, I would definitely take the advice of not going nuts on the pictures. :grazy:
 
On the scrapped renders, one of them was a funny accident.
I wasn't convinced by the lightning, so I changed it and... forgot to replace it in the final post.
TLDRW_03.jpg Here is the one that's published.
TLDRW_03A.jpgHere is the one that should have been released, oops


Hangnail said:
Can this epic tale be made into a PDF and immortalized in the CF archive?
Click to expand...
Wragg said:
He does, but I am in the process of setting up a pdf and working out how to make it available as it will be >2MB.
Click to expand...
:eek:
Pinch me, I think I'm dreaming
 
Author's commentary: Part 3​
Kieara? Diana? Valeria? Why those names?
To be honest, the character names were the las thing I though, literally as the renders were uploaded to the post, I sat down looking at the screen thinking if I should go with the name of Bruna, but I decided to check out the meaning and origin.

Bruna is a name that means "dark haired", the origin? Italian... oof, barely close to latin. So I looked for latin names for a dark haired woman, and one source said "oh, yeah, it's Kieara". It was just one source but the name stuck anyways, so Kieara it was.

Diana could be related to other meanings, but the main reason was that Diana is a roman goddess of hunting (and other things), so I think you can see the connection... and it sounded good.

Valeria means to be brave, strength, and well, it kind of fit in. Most of the other names I found didn't convince me too much, I was surprised that a lot of names just meant "the first, second, third [...] to be born".

While I will still reply to anything, I think that will be my last planned post on this thread.
I hope that by February I'm recovered and I can open a thread where I share the making of this story, the tips and tricks, how to make an indoors shooting look a little more outdoors, it's no magic, but it helps get close.

Once again, thank you so much, and I will see you on the next post or thread
stay tuned
 
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