Road Trip Picspam
So, it's that time again, for Behind the scenes of the chapter, I haven't done one of these in about 4 months I don't think, since I didn't do one for 4.13.
Aaaanyway, here's the thing, I don't have the entirety of my picspam and here's why. The picspam folder I was keeping in my files was moved to my external hardrive and I dropped my external hardrive on the floor the other day, and now it doesn't work. Hopefully it'll be able to be fixed soon because my Legacy Hood is on there too (If it can't it's not a huge deal, I haven't really done anything important in there since I switched computers and so I can just recuperate the copy from the old nearly defunct laptop). So basically what I did was go back through all the megahood slides and pluck the slides I wanted back out. However, the copy of the megahood currently on my computer isn't the latest one with all the slides because I switched back to a copy that was backed-up while shooting the party to shoot an additional scene for said party, after I had shot everything following the party and some scenes from the montage that were reshot. And all these pictures are in another copy of the megahood which is on my external harddrive. Yeah I know. Are you confused enough yet?
Moving on from the boringness, have some of the pictures that I do have and some blabbing..
So! Roadtrips! Megahoods! Buses! Oh My. My only justification for taking all these guys to the megahood, was that it was just for fun really. I didn't really need to for plot reasons, there would have been other ways to sort out plot-wise what was sorted out in this chapter. But I got the megahood back when I bought free time a few months ago and started playing with it. And soon after that I got the itch to share it. But obviously I'm not going to start a whole new story centered around the megahood, since, you know, I'm sort of committed to my Hippy childrenz at the moment. At some point it popped into my head to make this lot roadtrip there. But as with all my plans what eventually came out in chapter form has metamorphosed enormously from what I originally planned.
I had a plan to sort of reveal what was going on with Rhapsody's visions from the time I started them, which I wasn't entirely happy with. I'm not sure how it got into my head to take her to Pleasantview to sort this all out but the orginal plan was this. In her research to figure out what was going on with Rhapsody, Em would discover some specialist in supernatural matters, Mortimer Goth, and they would try to go to Pleasantivew quietly, only to have the others catch up with them and all tag along in a big roadtrip, only to discover Mortimer was dead, but that his ghost therefore had insight on what was going on with Dee. Aaaanyway, sometime in the process of shooting last chapter this idea was supplanted with the one that you all saw in this chapter, of having them travel to the Megahood to discover a cure for Phoenix and have the discover of what was happening to Dee be incidental.
Of course what Mortimer Goth explained was not the entire story to what's going on with Dee, for some reason I've decided to reveal it in stages, so more of that coming soon :)
So here's what all my kids looked like when I popped them into the Megahood as adults. I started off putting them all in appropraite clothes with Dee, and then decided that was a waste of time so I just left them in whatever horrible clothes they turned up in. Oddly I think the Island Girl look suits Cayenne.
Strangetown was the first part of the story and the first thing I shot (even though I had to reshoot some of it), pretty much nothing else was shot in order though. But Obviously Strangetown was going to come first since they're coming from the desert.
It was at first for purely aesthetic reasons that I decided to set Strangetown up with a late 50s look. I had 50s and 60s preppy/Grease outfists from allaboutstyle that I downloaded a while back for a photoshoot I never ended up doing. I wanted to set up the look just by setting a sort of dated scenery as they drove in with the various stuff they passed. It sort of seemed to fit the vibe I've always gotten from Strangetown, maybe because of the strong Military/Space Race elements present there.
But I sort of developped a secondary reason for wanting to do this. Bohemianism is really a counter culture, the Avant-Garde Bohemians in the late 19th century were definitely a minority (and a very cliquey and self congratulatory minority, but that's not the point) and since my Neighbourhood is flooded with Bohemians, they are hardly a Minority, and have nothing to really be counter to as a culture. What I wanted to sort of do with this whole roadtrip was set them in contrast to societies far removed from theirs, so that they do represent a counter culture in coming into these other places.
Specifically I wanted to set up a sort of Cold War, Maccathyist sort of society in Strangetown. And like a few people have already pointed out in comments, a sort of thing like LOST with the black and white, vaguely off kilter video.
The Video came about as a result of trying fruitlessly to get the opressive outdated vibe of the place to be communicated to the Bohemians via Dialoguie with the teens.
The escape was almost the last thing I shot. I knew that the way I set up the town they wouldn't just be able to drive out peacefully. But I coldn't find a crossing barrier. But! I was finally able to dig one up a MTS as a decorative sculpture, and just made it horizontal with the OMSPs and built a little booth for it between the fences.
Vis-a-vis the bus changing colour. The original drivable bus is by Fresh Prince over at MTS, and is yellow. There were several recolours over there, but that were all block colours, and I wanted something a bit more creative to serve as my gang's ride. Orikes and Ndainye were nice enough to to this cool multicolour patchwork here :) I thought about revealing it as they all stood outside in the morning after their night in the factory. But I decided I liked the idea of it being revealed as it drove by the Grunt household, much to the General's bafflement.
Belle leBus was named that for 2 reasons. The first is a reference to the Belle Epoque, the period in france from the late 19th century to the beginning of WWI, during which many of the Bohemian artists in France were active. The second reason is that it's naed for "La Belle Otero", a.k.a Caroline Otero the "last courtesan", who was a star of the follies bergeres as well as a lover to the Tsar of Russia and the Prince of Wales and represents the type of women who were muses and lovers to the late 19th century artists. She was known as the Suicide Siren, because so many Lovers killed themselves over her. I figured she'd do as a namesake for this ride (And I couldn't just name the bus Priscilla Queen of the desert :)
Luckily though the scene I shot of the community lot in Strangetown was done when the bus was still Yellow. Basically here's what I learned. You can't put an actual car on a community lot even if you own the lot and have the cars stuffed in your inventory. I tried it with the vitage cars I had to have the teens perch on and they just popped out of place and snapped onto the road and proceedd to drive on and off the the lot repeatedly. So I deleted them and replaced them with slightly less vintage cars which I have classified as sculptures. The yellow bus is among these. But because of tha I kind of had to lower people into the bus with OMSPs like so whe I was using it.
One thing about the bus is that it doesn't open where the actual door is, instead it opens where doors would be if it were a car, which doesn't exactly work, and sims shove themselves through the bus. It kept me from being able to get any good getting on/off the bus shots, which is a small thing really :)
This conversation was one I had to reshoot certain slides for because I wasn't sure the specifics of how it would go when I shot it, but I quite liked this slide of Turner flirting with Jill by helpin her out of the pick-up truck oh so gallantly. I put the "nice legs" line in instead, just because it felt like he would flirt with a few cute girls along the way, even though nothing will come of it.
Aaaanyway, the way I decided to set things up, both in Strangetown and Pleasantview was to have moved things forwards from where the neighbourhood started, so that the kids who were teens would be in College and the kids who were kids or unborn were the teens.
Since there wasn't the time to really introduce these guys properly in the chapter itself, here's a quick round up for your convenience.
Blonde on the truck is a teenage Jill Smith, she rolled up Knowledge.
The other four are her cousins the Curiouses, as you probably surmised, and they all have extreme alien personallities, but mostly with lots of nice points, which I attribute to Dee's abduction. Somehow she's infected the aliens with nice points. Anyway:
In the leather Jacket (formerly dressed as a bear) is Mars Curious, eldest alien baby of Pascal, Pleasure sim
0/10/2/10/10
In the letter sweater, with adorably pointy ears, is Pluto Curious, Vidcund's Alien Son, Knowledge Sim
0/1/10/10/10/4
In the Pink Dress Minerva "Minnie" Curious, Family, Pascal's alien daughter through his second pregnancy which resulted in twins the second of which is the boy in Green Mercury "Ricky" Curious, Romance.
2/3/10/10/10 and 10/0/10/5/10 respectively.
It took a while to get everyone abuducted, but I felt I had to get Vidcund adbucted, since that's the way it is in the original Strangetown, and Pascal rolled the want to meet Aliens, so I just had them both summon them.
But hey, totally worth it, look at the cuuuuuuuuuuuute!
And this is one of my favourite pictures of all time, Pluto, while visiting a house in Pleasantview, dumpster dive and being Oscar the adorable Grouch!
A few other people had some babies, among them the Beakers. I had lots of pictures of their boys, all of whom look like Loki, up close, but they are on the external harddrive so I only have this one of their surprisingly lovely but totally Evil daughter, Victoria (Incidentally both her brothers got 10 nice points, she got 1, but didn't get the brow!)
Next was Riverblossom, which devoid of Evil Susan in my game, actually is a peaceful little modern town. I was thinking about repeating what I did in Strangetown with the seting up the town by arriving thing, but nowhere else did it work quite as well as it did there, and so I just went with transition "Bus Driving through landscape" slides between locations.
Besides, this shot looked way too modern and not enough Country, in spite of the cowboy boots.
I also had a slide of the dog that they befriended while sleeping in the barn looking sad as his master chased off his new friends. Leod McGreggor's dog is named Scotty FYI :)
And then there was this equally unused slide. I took it because I thought I might want an establishing shot before they went and stole the pie, laughing about the experience in the aftermath of being chased and then detecting the odor of the pie.
Since Riverblossom Really does feel like a place that would have pie cooling on the Windowsill.
The kids retrieving their bus was one of my favourite shots, I wish I could have had a close up, but that would have revealed the flaws that are not as evident far awa, like that Turner is not really perched on anything and lookign the wrong way. I used one of the Kareoke options on the NL box to get him to hook his arm around the mirror and semi finger gun Leod.
One of the reasons this chapter took me so long was the amount of reshooting I had to do. I say had to, what kept happening was that I'd shoot a scene then get a new idea, or not be totally happy with whay I had and go back and do it over so it was perfect. Desiderata valley I reshot everything except the last sequence with Natasha Una and John Mole falling out of the tree.
The Idea was always to have him follow the Bohemians around in ridiculous costumes trying to "blend in" as they participated in Various fun stuff in the park. But initially I just had them stopping for no good reason at the park. It was only later I came up with the idea to have them camp out in the park and the bus get blocked in by a celbration happening. So I had to reshoot to get the party background right.
the only thing I somewhat regret not fitting into the new montage was this thing I had with Cayenne and Journey messing around with Instruments while the dancers...danced and having a brief moment of non-enimity after wards.
Desiderata was probably the hardest for me to shoot because I don't find it as inspiring as some of the other hoods.
Veronaville on the other hand I fun with. It was the first bit of the montage I shot. For some reason I decided on dressing them all as roaring 20s gangsters and flappers.
With the exception of the Summerdreams who got different outfits to distiguish them from the others. Looking back on this picture I wish I'd had Bottom in red too, but for some reason when I was dressing them that didn't occur to me.
For anyone who might not recognize them in their new dos, the blonde in the bob cut is Miranda Capp, her red head cohort Juliette, and the bored looking red head is Hermia.
The distraction that would fall upon the Bohemians in Veronaville was pretty obvious given the town, Theatre stuff. The actors are all Bin premade, the two dark haired evil people are the Lawsons from OFB, the kissing couple is the Travellers, and the blonde and brunet comic foils are the Picassos.
The Theatre I used was a really cool one from MTS, and I gathered almost all of Veronaville there, and made them selectable to sit down. Not all the Capps were sitting however, there were too many of them and too few seats, which was why the Bohemians were sat ont eh Monty side of the theatre.
Another slide I just didn't have room for, even though I liked the image of Antonio Monty ushering his children in past the Capp side of the Theatre. I've found that alot of the OFB customer interactions are great for putting arms around shoulders and stuff like this.
I cut a bunch of other stuff too, that I didn't think made any sense without dialogue, which wasn't happening in a montage.
The general staring reaction at the arival of the Bohemians was meant to be another thing to drive home the point that they were outsiders, on the fringe of societies that weren't their own.
One of the things that occured to me at the very last moment as well was to contrast Cayenne and Journey's stupid bickering with a proper feud, with violence. A concept that wouldn't ever occur to them. The guns I usually use are recolours of the fingerprint scanner which is great because they allowed me to get that WTF expression I used for them both looking at the gun without having to stage anything.
I just froze them and put the flowers there with OMSPs. Obviously this was why I was looking for a daisy, to mimick the classic Hippy puts flower in gun barrel image, but a rose works fine :) And you can see why the images I uses were framed the way they were.
I also really enjoyed shooting Belladonna cove. For some reason it strikes me as a very posh city, and that's what I ended up playing up, putting everyone in formal wear to wanter around everyday.
Here you have, from left to right, Armand DeBateau, Chasity Cere, and the Cleveland Woman whose name I can't remember at the moment.
the gas station I used I'd had for aaaages, I'd though about using it to kick off the chapter, but it didn't work out that way. But I got to use it in Belladonna Cove.
It was actually really hard to get the money speech bubble since I was having the conversation between Turner and Dee and everytime I had one of them change the subject to money the other one hated the subject.
Which actually worked out well when I wanted to have Turner protest about Gas prices.
The idea being once again to sort of underline Bohemianism in these guys by giving them a lower position in society than they have at home. It also sort of came out of the whole Literal Bohemian thing, which is to say Gypsies, playing or painting for Money, or in Turner's case scaming people at Pool.
Incidentally this would be a good time to point out that the Bohemians own A LOT of community lots, every single one I shot on. It was easy enough once I got the hang of it., though I had to moveobjects people who weren't supposed to be there frequently. And Dee had a perpetual stash of poseboxes in her inventory.
And yes, the empty house celebration was totally just an excuse to put them all in formalwear.
And check it out! Who needs M&G to make people slide down stairs.
A couple of random things I found out doing the Montage, At one point I clicked a suitcase and saw "Play with", out of curiosity I tried it. It turns out the suitcases are garden gnomes!
Literally every single time I moved this group to a new lot, someone was noogying someone. Which I guess can be expected. It happened quite alot on Vacation last chapter and Em, Journey, Turner and Elise have 5 nice points between them (Phoenix, Dee and Cayenne meanwhile have 28 among them)
And in the brief time I was in other lots to make people over, Journey still managed to steal a paper (With blood on his face no less)
Before I move onto Pview I want to talk about a couple of Bohemian moments. I really wanted to sort of mature Em and Dee's relationship in this one. Bring them even closer together then they were by talking about some more serious stuff. I had shot the scne by the fire first then decided to reshoot the scene in the factory to include Em, rather than have Dee monolgue.
The other was Phoenix, who I realized had been pretty quiet about his illness the whole time, letting his sister drag him around. i wanted to take a second to have an isightful moment with the two guys, one of whome is not really naturally insightful.
And then there was Pleasantview. Pleasantview is probably my favourite premade hood, and certainly the one I'm most familiar with. I'm not sure when I decided that Journey would be hooking up with Annie, but somewhere along the line it was decided that if they were going all the way to the Megahood someone should find love and Journey was assigned.
Anastasia Goth-Lothario has existed in evvery incarnation of Pleastview, all 5 of them. Most times she's married Beau Broke. Though I couldn't bring myself to have him punch out Journey for her, so he was not her boyfriend in this incarnation of Pview. But more on that later.
Annie is Popularity Sim, Aries, 7/7/4/5/4
Nick has always been her brother, in the first incarnation of the hood he was her natural twin, in this one they were cheescaked.
Nicholas and Anastasia were named for Russian Royalty, because when I first named them I drew a total blank on names and then saw Alex's name and though Russian Tsars for some reason. It either had something to do with the fact that I used to love the "Anastasia" Movie or it might have been after my mother had me make a Romanov Family Tree for the handbook when she was taking a group to St.Petersburg.
In case you're curious in Annie's full name she is named after Anastasia: Murdered Russian Princess, Belladonna: Partially for her granmother but mostly for the Deadly Nightshade, and Lucrezia: Lucrezi Borgia, a dangerous ambitious Renaissance Noblewoman
As soon as these two met this was ALL I saw constantly, I was often waiting for those to disappear so I could shoot a scene. I probably should've tweaked their turn ons or something.
But as you saw in the Update Annie and Nick have many half siblings other than Each other. Partly because Don Lothario Children are like Crack to me.
Leonardo Caliente is their only olderr sibling, and is Don;s son with Nina.
Cara Mia Caliente, their younger sister, Don's daughter with Dina, whose name literally means "My Beloved", as those of you who've watched the Adams family might know.
And Veronica "Ronnie" Pleasant, Don's youngest daughter with Kaylynn Langerak, Former Maid.
So to recap, Leo, Annie, Nick, Cara Mia, and Ronnie are all half siblings. Cara Mia and Leo are also cousins and Cara is also half siblings with Ingrid who is Annie and Nick's aunt.
Yeah it's screwed up.
Don really is an awesome Dad, he drops by houses where his children are constantly and gravitates towards them on his own.
He's even awesome to kids whore aren't his, even if he is underwear glad because he's just been banging their married mom.
(The little girl is Kayla Pleasant, Kaylynn and Daniel's daighter, and Don has just been upstairs helping to coceive Veronica)
Although Darren did find a gold chest, which is pretty cool as I'd never seen one before, and believe me I searched.
Then there's half siblings on the other side, Cassandra and Darren's kids David and Damien.
And Ingrid, Mortimer and Dina's extremely screwed up murderous chilld. Who was deliberately dressed in a slightly old fashioned and vaguely childish way.
Things really did play out as I said in playing, there was...
...Marriage....
...Cheating...
...and breaking up.
And Annie threw an absolute fit for days.
After the breakup Dina and Don's trashcan was never upright.
Meanwhile, back in the present, this what teh Goth house looked like the entire time I was shooting there, it was exhausitn and furstrating after a while, and it took me about 4 or 5 play sessions just to do the conversation with the ghost maybe more.
I kind of liked the dynamic that happened in this scene. Journey being the youngest of them is sort of like everyon'e baby brother. And in this scene Phoenix sort of took on the guise of protective older brother, while Turner was kind of the impatient Dad coming to put an end to things.
I'm starting to really like some of the AL animations, Here Turner is doing the knock angrily on wall thing to grab Journey's collar, while Journey does the ice skating slip fall.
I also used some of the lease signing animations to do this, which worked out pretty perfectly.
Now about Jim, though I adore Annie, clearly. I think she was definitely in the wrong on this one. With limitied space to deal with it, I wanted to put across the fact that Annie has some serious commitment issues, because of her parents. Jim meanwhile is a family sim and a bit of a commitment Junkie. But it's pretty undeniable that what she was doing was wrong. Cheating is cheating. Although I don't think it was Journey who deserved to get punched.
I think probably one of the reasons Annie liked Journey was because she knew it wasn't a commitment since he was bound to leave for home before they could be serious.
Returning to the subject of Death Mortimer Goth actually did die, in the middle of teaching Annie to walk...
(Actually so did Cassandra come to think of it, but we fixed that)
Anyway, everyone was suitably traumatized by Morty's death.
So I cheated and resurrected him, seeing as I needed him alive to be a ghost.
Like so.
Annie: "Uh-Oh...Hi Grandpa!"
There were actually several real ghosts too, mos of whom went after Turner for some reason.
Although it was Nick who had the accident.
I hope all the vaguely morbid stuff was clear, if not it will be clarified in the next couple of chapters. I'll probably soon write a whole big thing on it... But anyway, I had fun shooting it, as long as it took :)
And I will leave you with this question, how many Hippies is too many?
Just a quick note as well, my computer is going into Sony to have my wireless repaired tomorrow so I might be a little MIA in the next little while since I will be computerless :) Also I am working from tomorrow onwards, so you're going to have to bear with me if it takes forever to respond to comments.