Behind the Scenes Picspam BRRL Part 3
(Continued from Part 2 )
Making Magic or Shooting With those Sparkly effects can be a real Pain in the Butt
As most of you know the Witches and their magic comes with a certain amount of sparkly effects, when they change their shape, when they cast magic etc. However the difficulty of this is that when you freeze them in an animation, the effects don't necessarily stay in place. So it's a case of getting everything into place like you need it and then having the spell casting come last. Unfortunately you can't cast spells on sims who are on OMSPs or doing other things or frozen etc. So to make the subject of the spells surrounded by sparklies was kind of challenging I'm actually quite proud of how I ultimately worked my way through the problem and eventually became pretty good at getting sparklies wehre I needed them (are you going to kill me if I say the word sparklies again?)
The first shot I did with Magic was Sam repulsing the attack from Auguste. As you can see no sparklies, since at this point I had not yet thought around the problem. So as not to confuse matters I just used the good witch idle wave wand animation so that there would be no sparklies at all.
When I had them cast the "Love spell" in the ballroom I pretty much went the past of least resistance to get sparklies around the victims and just outright had them cast some sort of random spell on the two of them which momentarily gave me sparkles, and luckily in this case, gave me an animation I could work with at the same time.
It was around the point of needing to have them steal the souls of the orphanage kids that I started to improvise a bit. I figured out I could get sparklies close enough to them, if I had Sam and Kimberly do the beginnings of the transformation off the AL animation box and then position them so it looked, in a close up like they were in contact with the children to take their essences. But again, this only works for somethings.
Then when I was soul stealing from the actual Doran girls I figured out something that works very well. If you move a witch with moveobjects on while she's spell casting the sparkles don't move with her (same goes for the effects around the Magivestum). It's a very localized kind of sparklyness, and honestly it's kind of effort, but it's good enough to give the impression of something magical happening if you need it. I used it quite a lot in the finale, to torture Maddie, to put sparklies around the trapdoor when it "closed". And it's a good enough tactic that I think in the future if I ever need to shoot with witches I'll have an additional witch on the lot who won't be a participant in any kind of scene, but just be my "Special effects" witch. Things like this probably aren't a problem for people who actually have better photoshop skills than I do, but they're useful tricks I wouldn't have picked up if it weren't for this whole thing.
There's also the "Spells Shiver" Interaction which is quite useful for sparkly effects to a certain extent because you always get a shiver animation with the person who's doing it. It's actually the animation I was using on Eloise, combined with Kimberly doing a "good witch" transformation thing, and a few buyable special effects. You can see it very well on this shot above.
But on the shot I ended up using, it's almost superfluous, but I used this one because I liked the way the animations fit together, and how Eloise really looked like she was pulling back in surprise as Kimberly grabbed her arm and spirited her away. I was still sorry to lose that extra magical punch though.
But I'll just say this, thank god for those buyable effects too, when I needed a really in your face kind of magica effect. I used these a bunch of times in the finale, and I love them! And speaking of which this brings me to my final point of picspam...
I bet you're sick of listening to me talk by now right or The Finale
I knew the finale would have to involve some sort of last desperate play for the soul of the youngest Doran after the initial failure to devour the others as infants. And it was actually with this in mind that I gave Alice the power I did.
I'm actually genuinely curious if anyone else does what I find myself increasingly doing for sim story plots which is work backwards from an idea? And then by the time you work your way forwards again the idea you arrive at has completely changed from the one that you originally started with.
Basically when I was thinking ahead to the final conflict this summer, possibly before I'd decided Samantha would have switched sides, I thought "If I have x number of Doran kids facing down 2 witches, there should be a way to level the playing field" And so I decided there should be one of the kids with the ability to steal other people's gifts, and that he or she would take the powers from either Samantha or Kimberly, thus making it a bit more fair as far as power slinging would go.
As you guys know from reading, this isn't what ended up happening, Alice's power came into play because she took Sam's magic and further incapacateded their side of the fight and then I ultimately used it for her to get Eloise's soul back, which wasn't an idea I had floating around anywhere in my brain until the very end as far as I can remember. And John ended up playing the part of the witch on the good guys' side.
But planning the finale was the whole reason Alice got the "gift" she did and then it ended up branching into just a totally different ultimate resolution.
Before I get to fighting and things blowing up and what not I just want to talk really quickly about the first part of the finale. I already talked above about Maddie and Vee and Alice and Marcus breaking up, but I just wanted to touch quickly on why I did it which was that they had to be ready to leave. And this became particularly important after they'd been established as being in a place in their lives when they were completely happy with everything. Just when everything is going their way it shifts and they get the relationship rug pulled out from under their feet. I did this at school because...well for one thing I apparently use Belladonna High for everything (It was at least 4 seperate sets in the course of the RR) but also because it gave me a perfect opportunity to fairly organically, put both girls in a situation that highlighted what was going wrong in their respective relationships, at the same time.
The scene itself was pretty crowded I guess, but it was actually not that complext to shoot, I just teened up everyone in BC who was lingering around the kid or todder stage and CASed up a few extras for the visiting team and then summoned the whole lot of them to the school and filled up the bleachers.
I don't know if I actually got either of these two in any shots specifically but that is Sofia Baldwin, Marcus's sister, and Etsu Cho, who is a toddler initially and who I never really played much but Day-um does she ever grow up pretty.
And so with Maddie and Alice clear of relationships it left them independant and ready to jump into action to save their sister and left Eloise being hte only one needing to get her heart broken when they left. Which again, I do feel bad about but whatchya gonna do, it was all for plot. Which gets me to the final finale part.
Another thing that changed from what I originally wrote to what I ended up shooting was the Pumpking people. Originally I planned to use the spectral servants that witches can conjure up to do housework etc. as the attack drones.
I was never planning on having the actual spectral creatures be the ones I used for staging, as I'm fairly sure that even if they could be made selectable, which I'm not sure they can, it would fall under the Umbrella of Potential Game killers.
What I actually planned to do was use the invisible skin thing from MTS to create them and go from there. Unfortunately that made the hair look quite bizarre so I had to scratch that idea.
Then playing around in CAS for alternatives I came across the pumpkin heads from the Halloween Store Stuff, which also looked weird with the invisible hack, so I switched back to a normal skin and went from there.
I got a tiny bit distracted along the way but that's beside the point...
What I do want to say though at this point is that I have to admit that the pumpkin head scarecrow thing was pretty much stoled from the "Human Nature" "Family of Blood" Episodes of Doctor Who.
Having had a look around the house I knew I would be staging in before hand I knew there were CC statues of knights, so I tentatively CASed up three pumpkin men and two knights in case I decided to have it be a "AndKimberly animates inanimate objects thing"
Why this got scratched and the knights were turned into pumpkins as well has entirely to do with the practical issue of "How would they get into the basement".
The whole reason the ladder got burned was because getting rid of the lader allowed me to seal up thr hole in the ceiling properly with ceiling tiles/floor tiles. SInce the ladder is a build mode object, it works the same as stairs and automatically creates an opining at the top, this was highly inconvenient for me to make it look like "Oh Noes they're trapped."
So what I did was that I elevated some statues where the underside roughly matched the stone tiles I'd put on the ceiling, and I glommed them all together on OMSPs so they would look like the hole was sealed. It was annoying and impractical long term, not to mention that I still had to be careful of my angles. So I had to figure out a way to get rid of the ladder, in this istance with fire, and then just sealed it properly.
Of course this then meant that I couldn't have the scarecrows be animated in the backyard and then come into the basement through natural means to join the knights who were in the basement and would have gotten animated. So the knights became scarecross and then everyone became witches, so I could have them Magivestum as if conjured from the air (which changed their clothes and then I had to change them all back again...)
Plus it meant that in the end I could use one of the Pumpkin shaped lights to make it look like the disolving head.
They were actually a lot of fun to shoot with, I mostly used Zombie animations on them to make them look a bit creepy and supernatural when they moved, and a part from some angles where you could see a human face under they were very easy to shoot with actually. I hope they were sufficiently scary :)
Speaking of the ladder, getting 3 people to look like they were climbing it at once, while simltaneously in contact with Alice was...challenging. As you can see above, from anything but a tactful angle it was an absolute mess. I knew after a few tries that she would have to outright pick up Melusine, so I used the prop hack box to crook her arm as if I was going to add the stack of books prop and then just nestled Melusine in there after freezing her midway into a hug. After that Alice is just doing the running animation and Eloise is climing the mast I think. It's actually one of the shots I'm most pleased with even though it took some angling to get it to look like not a mess.
Getting rid of the ladder helped with another problem too, it managed to keep the wolves out of the basement.
Didn't stop them from coming onto the lot though. I had 3 simultanously on the lot at one point, who kept breaking into fights on the lawn. It got a little distracting. And apparently you can't clear pets from the lot with the summoning bush.
Speaking of basements, the mansion I used actually had a readdy good one which is why I chose to set up there. It even had a seperate little space for me to gradually fill with pose and animation boxes and what not. However, have you ever tried shooting a big scene in a basement? I do not recommend it. You can't really get down the level you need to when in build mode so I kind of had to do a lot of approximate eye balling when I was setting stuff up and then go into camera man mode to get a non elevated view and see what it ultimately looked like
Knowing this would be an issue I did consider setting up in the attic, and the main reason I didn't was because it would mean I'd be unable to drop people through the ceiling.
And speaking of witchifying people. Thank god for the creature creator painting, I used that thing way too much for the finale. I fist had to de-witch then re-witch Samantha in order to get her into a white witch's outfit, since you can't buy it as an outfit. She did get one when she orginally became a witch but she left it in the wardrobe at Kimberly's when she moved into the Green house apparently so that was that.
John actually makes a very adorable witch all things considered in my opinion.
Incidentally Melusine has a massive leg up if she wants to be a witch later on. Thanks to her 10 nice points she already has the idle animations down.
And then Alice became an infallibly good witch for a while.
Purely so that I could get the full on sparkly animations all around her. Because how do you know that someone is literally brimming over with power unless they're glowing somehow right?
And finally Tara was very briefly made into an atrociously evil witch for one pure and simple reason, which was props.
The cauldron I was using belonged to Vampire Auguste. In game, he was actually the resident of the creepy gothic mansion, and when I was setting it up I needed an evil witch cauldron and I figured, eh he's already a vampire, might as well go two supernatural in one. So I witched him and plundered his inventory for the cauldron.
However by the time I got to shooting the final scene, I'd done so much messing around with people's levels of witchyness that the cauldron changed from autrociously evil to Neuteral in appearance and all of the ones in Kimberly's inventory had changed to Neuteral looking as well.
So I needed an evil witch on the lot, Tara was the first sim I clicked on and she got me proper looking props for the last scene :)
"Everybody lives, just this once, everybody lives" or Yeah I'm a wimp, and I didn't kill anyne in the end
I put 3 people in mortal danger in the finale and didn't end up killing any of them. A cop out? Maybe, if that's how you want to look at it. I'm not ruthless enough at the best of time to kill off my legacy kids. Hell, I have trouble letting sims die of old age. What I am good at apparently is temporarily killing off innocent teenage girls. Eloise is what...the third one I've done this too, second and half (Snow counts as a full kill off, Dee a half one maybe...). I wasn't going to leave her dead very long, it's just not in my nature, and I couldn't bring myself to blow up Alice's mind either.
This kind of just cracked me up though, a lot of the kneeling and what not that happened in the finale was done using the dig in the dans animation from the BV box. While briefly unfrozen I got this effect, with Tara sprinkling sand down on Eloise's head. It reminded me of one of my favourite poems as a kid, "Always sprinkle pepper in your hair"
Always sprinkle pepper in your hair,
Always sprinkle pepper in your hair.
For then if you are kidnapped by a Wild Barbazzoop,
Who sells you to a Ragged Hag
Who wants you for her soup,
She'll pick you up and sniff you,
And then she'll sneeze "Achooo,"
And says, "My tot, you're much too hot,
I fear you'll never do."
And with a shout she'll throw you out,
And you'll run away from there,
And soon you will be safe at home a-sittin' in your chair,
If you always, always, always,
Always, always, always, always,
Always, always sprinkle pepper in your hair.
It felt appropriate for the situation to say the least ;)
And as for Kimberly...well she may have been my villainess but I loved playing her so much, I had to give her a happy ending too. So she got to live as well...or un-die...or something...
What really saddened me though was the idea of Tara and David having to stay home in an empty nest. Even with all the first alive there always comes the theme of seperation at the end of a part of the RR. So I decided that instead of staying home Tara and David would move on too. I liked the idea of them being together forever, travelling much more than I did them having to sit at home in the house they brought up three girls in and miss them.A big part of Tara going into the SCIA was so that she would then have the need and ability to disappear off the radar, thus giving them a concrete reason to go, as well as making her fit into the final conflict. And this way I got to leave it on an adventure.
And that pretty much sums things up actually. If you made it through that. Congratulatsions, have some cake. And I hope you enjoyed my rambling thoughts/over abundance of pictures in this. I had fun developping these ideas and making them happen so I'm glad I got to lay it all out in Behind the Scenes, even if I do talk too much, thanks for letting me spam your flists and what not ;)
Making Magic or Shooting With those Sparkly effects can be a real Pain in the Butt
As most of you know the Witches and their magic comes with a certain amount of sparkly effects, when they change their shape, when they cast magic etc. However the difficulty of this is that when you freeze them in an animation, the effects don't necessarily stay in place. So it's a case of getting everything into place like you need it and then having the spell casting come last. Unfortunately you can't cast spells on sims who are on OMSPs or doing other things or frozen etc. So to make the subject of the spells surrounded by sparklies was kind of challenging I'm actually quite proud of how I ultimately worked my way through the problem and eventually became pretty good at getting sparklies wehre I needed them (are you going to kill me if I say the word sparklies again?)
The first shot I did with Magic was Sam repulsing the attack from Auguste. As you can see no sparklies, since at this point I had not yet thought around the problem. So as not to confuse matters I just used the good witch idle wave wand animation so that there would be no sparklies at all.
When I had them cast the "Love spell" in the ballroom I pretty much went the past of least resistance to get sparklies around the victims and just outright had them cast some sort of random spell on the two of them which momentarily gave me sparkles, and luckily in this case, gave me an animation I could work with at the same time.
It was around the point of needing to have them steal the souls of the orphanage kids that I started to improvise a bit. I figured out I could get sparklies close enough to them, if I had Sam and Kimberly do the beginnings of the transformation off the AL animation box and then position them so it looked, in a close up like they were in contact with the children to take their essences. But again, this only works for somethings.
Then when I was soul stealing from the actual Doran girls I figured out something that works very well. If you move a witch with moveobjects on while she's spell casting the sparkles don't move with her (same goes for the effects around the Magivestum). It's a very localized kind of sparklyness, and honestly it's kind of effort, but it's good enough to give the impression of something magical happening if you need it. I used it quite a lot in the finale, to torture Maddie, to put sparklies around the trapdoor when it "closed". And it's a good enough tactic that I think in the future if I ever need to shoot with witches I'll have an additional witch on the lot who won't be a participant in any kind of scene, but just be my "Special effects" witch. Things like this probably aren't a problem for people who actually have better photoshop skills than I do, but they're useful tricks I wouldn't have picked up if it weren't for this whole thing.
There's also the "Spells Shiver" Interaction which is quite useful for sparkly effects to a certain extent because you always get a shiver animation with the person who's doing it. It's actually the animation I was using on Eloise, combined with Kimberly doing a "good witch" transformation thing, and a few buyable special effects. You can see it very well on this shot above.
But on the shot I ended up using, it's almost superfluous, but I used this one because I liked the way the animations fit together, and how Eloise really looked like she was pulling back in surprise as Kimberly grabbed her arm and spirited her away. I was still sorry to lose that extra magical punch though.
But I'll just say this, thank god for those buyable effects too, when I needed a really in your face kind of magica effect. I used these a bunch of times in the finale, and I love them! And speaking of which this brings me to my final point of picspam...
I bet you're sick of listening to me talk by now right or The Finale
I knew the finale would have to involve some sort of last desperate play for the soul of the youngest Doran after the initial failure to devour the others as infants. And it was actually with this in mind that I gave Alice the power I did.
I'm actually genuinely curious if anyone else does what I find myself increasingly doing for sim story plots which is work backwards from an idea? And then by the time you work your way forwards again the idea you arrive at has completely changed from the one that you originally started with.
Basically when I was thinking ahead to the final conflict this summer, possibly before I'd decided Samantha would have switched sides, I thought "If I have x number of Doran kids facing down 2 witches, there should be a way to level the playing field" And so I decided there should be one of the kids with the ability to steal other people's gifts, and that he or she would take the powers from either Samantha or Kimberly, thus making it a bit more fair as far as power slinging would go.
As you guys know from reading, this isn't what ended up happening, Alice's power came into play because she took Sam's magic and further incapacateded their side of the fight and then I ultimately used it for her to get Eloise's soul back, which wasn't an idea I had floating around anywhere in my brain until the very end as far as I can remember. And John ended up playing the part of the witch on the good guys' side.
But planning the finale was the whole reason Alice got the "gift" she did and then it ended up branching into just a totally different ultimate resolution.
Before I get to fighting and things blowing up and what not I just want to talk really quickly about the first part of the finale. I already talked above about Maddie and Vee and Alice and Marcus breaking up, but I just wanted to touch quickly on why I did it which was that they had to be ready to leave. And this became particularly important after they'd been established as being in a place in their lives when they were completely happy with everything. Just when everything is going their way it shifts and they get the relationship rug pulled out from under their feet. I did this at school because...well for one thing I apparently use Belladonna High for everything (It was at least 4 seperate sets in the course of the RR) but also because it gave me a perfect opportunity to fairly organically, put both girls in a situation that highlighted what was going wrong in their respective relationships, at the same time.
The scene itself was pretty crowded I guess, but it was actually not that complext to shoot, I just teened up everyone in BC who was lingering around the kid or todder stage and CASed up a few extras for the visiting team and then summoned the whole lot of them to the school and filled up the bleachers.
I don't know if I actually got either of these two in any shots specifically but that is Sofia Baldwin, Marcus's sister, and Etsu Cho, who is a toddler initially and who I never really played much but Day-um does she ever grow up pretty.
And so with Maddie and Alice clear of relationships it left them independant and ready to jump into action to save their sister and left Eloise being hte only one needing to get her heart broken when they left. Which again, I do feel bad about but whatchya gonna do, it was all for plot. Which gets me to the final finale part.
Another thing that changed from what I originally wrote to what I ended up shooting was the Pumpking people. Originally I planned to use the spectral servants that witches can conjure up to do housework etc. as the attack drones.
I was never planning on having the actual spectral creatures be the ones I used for staging, as I'm fairly sure that even if they could be made selectable, which I'm not sure they can, it would fall under the Umbrella of Potential Game killers.
What I actually planned to do was use the invisible skin thing from MTS to create them and go from there. Unfortunately that made the hair look quite bizarre so I had to scratch that idea.
Then playing around in CAS for alternatives I came across the pumpkin heads from the Halloween Store Stuff, which also looked weird with the invisible hack, so I switched back to a normal skin and went from there.
I got a tiny bit distracted along the way but that's beside the point...
What I do want to say though at this point is that I have to admit that the pumpkin head scarecrow thing was pretty much stoled from the "Human Nature" "Family of Blood" Episodes of Doctor Who.
Having had a look around the house I knew I would be staging in before hand I knew there were CC statues of knights, so I tentatively CASed up three pumpkin men and two knights in case I decided to have it be a "AndKimberly animates inanimate objects thing"
Why this got scratched and the knights were turned into pumpkins as well has entirely to do with the practical issue of "How would they get into the basement".
The whole reason the ladder got burned was because getting rid of the lader allowed me to seal up thr hole in the ceiling properly with ceiling tiles/floor tiles. SInce the ladder is a build mode object, it works the same as stairs and automatically creates an opining at the top, this was highly inconvenient for me to make it look like "Oh Noes they're trapped."
So what I did was that I elevated some statues where the underside roughly matched the stone tiles I'd put on the ceiling, and I glommed them all together on OMSPs so they would look like the hole was sealed. It was annoying and impractical long term, not to mention that I still had to be careful of my angles. So I had to figure out a way to get rid of the ladder, in this istance with fire, and then just sealed it properly.
Of course this then meant that I couldn't have the scarecrows be animated in the backyard and then come into the basement through natural means to join the knights who were in the basement and would have gotten animated. So the knights became scarecross and then everyone became witches, so I could have them Magivestum as if conjured from the air (which changed their clothes and then I had to change them all back again...)
Plus it meant that in the end I could use one of the Pumpkin shaped lights to make it look like the disolving head.
They were actually a lot of fun to shoot with, I mostly used Zombie animations on them to make them look a bit creepy and supernatural when they moved, and a part from some angles where you could see a human face under they were very easy to shoot with actually. I hope they were sufficiently scary :)
Speaking of the ladder, getting 3 people to look like they were climbing it at once, while simltaneously in contact with Alice was...challenging. As you can see above, from anything but a tactful angle it was an absolute mess. I knew after a few tries that she would have to outright pick up Melusine, so I used the prop hack box to crook her arm as if I was going to add the stack of books prop and then just nestled Melusine in there after freezing her midway into a hug. After that Alice is just doing the running animation and Eloise is climing the mast I think. It's actually one of the shots I'm most pleased with even though it took some angling to get it to look like not a mess.
Getting rid of the ladder helped with another problem too, it managed to keep the wolves out of the basement.
Didn't stop them from coming onto the lot though. I had 3 simultanously on the lot at one point, who kept breaking into fights on the lawn. It got a little distracting. And apparently you can't clear pets from the lot with the summoning bush.
Speaking of basements, the mansion I used actually had a readdy good one which is why I chose to set up there. It even had a seperate little space for me to gradually fill with pose and animation boxes and what not. However, have you ever tried shooting a big scene in a basement? I do not recommend it. You can't really get down the level you need to when in build mode so I kind of had to do a lot of approximate eye balling when I was setting stuff up and then go into camera man mode to get a non elevated view and see what it ultimately looked like
Knowing this would be an issue I did consider setting up in the attic, and the main reason I didn't was because it would mean I'd be unable to drop people through the ceiling.
And speaking of witchifying people. Thank god for the creature creator painting, I used that thing way too much for the finale. I fist had to de-witch then re-witch Samantha in order to get her into a white witch's outfit, since you can't buy it as an outfit. She did get one when she orginally became a witch but she left it in the wardrobe at Kimberly's when she moved into the Green house apparently so that was that.
John actually makes a very adorable witch all things considered in my opinion.
Incidentally Melusine has a massive leg up if she wants to be a witch later on. Thanks to her 10 nice points she already has the idle animations down.
And then Alice became an infallibly good witch for a while.
Purely so that I could get the full on sparkly animations all around her. Because how do you know that someone is literally brimming over with power unless they're glowing somehow right?
And finally Tara was very briefly made into an atrociously evil witch for one pure and simple reason, which was props.
The cauldron I was using belonged to Vampire Auguste. In game, he was actually the resident of the creepy gothic mansion, and when I was setting it up I needed an evil witch cauldron and I figured, eh he's already a vampire, might as well go two supernatural in one. So I witched him and plundered his inventory for the cauldron.
However by the time I got to shooting the final scene, I'd done so much messing around with people's levels of witchyness that the cauldron changed from autrociously evil to Neuteral in appearance and all of the ones in Kimberly's inventory had changed to Neuteral looking as well.
So I needed an evil witch on the lot, Tara was the first sim I clicked on and she got me proper looking props for the last scene :)
"Everybody lives, just this once, everybody lives" or Yeah I'm a wimp, and I didn't kill anyne in the end
I put 3 people in mortal danger in the finale and didn't end up killing any of them. A cop out? Maybe, if that's how you want to look at it. I'm not ruthless enough at the best of time to kill off my legacy kids. Hell, I have trouble letting sims die of old age. What I am good at apparently is temporarily killing off innocent teenage girls. Eloise is what...the third one I've done this too, second and half (Snow counts as a full kill off, Dee a half one maybe...). I wasn't going to leave her dead very long, it's just not in my nature, and I couldn't bring myself to blow up Alice's mind either.
This kind of just cracked me up though, a lot of the kneeling and what not that happened in the finale was done using the dig in the dans animation from the BV box. While briefly unfrozen I got this effect, with Tara sprinkling sand down on Eloise's head. It reminded me of one of my favourite poems as a kid, "Always sprinkle pepper in your hair"
Always sprinkle pepper in your hair,
Always sprinkle pepper in your hair.
For then if you are kidnapped by a Wild Barbazzoop,
Who sells you to a Ragged Hag
Who wants you for her soup,
She'll pick you up and sniff you,
And then she'll sneeze "Achooo,"
And says, "My tot, you're much too hot,
I fear you'll never do."
And with a shout she'll throw you out,
And you'll run away from there,
And soon you will be safe at home a-sittin' in your chair,
If you always, always, always,
Always, always, always, always,
Always, always sprinkle pepper in your hair.
It felt appropriate for the situation to say the least ;)
And as for Kimberly...well she may have been my villainess but I loved playing her so much, I had to give her a happy ending too. So she got to live as well...or un-die...or something...
What really saddened me though was the idea of Tara and David having to stay home in an empty nest. Even with all the first alive there always comes the theme of seperation at the end of a part of the RR. So I decided that instead of staying home Tara and David would move on too. I liked the idea of them being together forever, travelling much more than I did them having to sit at home in the house they brought up three girls in and miss them.A big part of Tara going into the SCIA was so that she would then have the need and ability to disappear off the radar, thus giving them a concrete reason to go, as well as making her fit into the final conflict. And this way I got to leave it on an adventure.
And that pretty much sums things up actually. If you made it through that. Congratulatsions, have some cake. And I hope you enjoyed my rambling thoughts/over abundance of pictures in this. I had fun developping these ideas and making them happen so I'm glad I got to lay it all out in Behind the Scenes, even if I do talk too much, thanks for letting me spam your flists and what not ;)