Illustrated DND Webseries The Best Available - Help Wanted!
Project Overview
Hello all! I'm Chesh, the editor and producer of everything you see on TheForeverDMAdventures. We're currently making a few TTRPG Actual Play webseries featuring some limited animation, a lot of editing for pacing, and a mood-setting soundtrack I stole from several thousand videogames (thank you Youtube for not flagging those!) Above you can see the first episode of our flagship series, The Best Available. We also have a Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader series titled Saga of the Voidmaiden, a few one shots in the works, and a TBA prequel titled Fire and Blood coming out early next year. Our creative team is small and passionate; most of us are doing this in our spare time between our dayjobs, so our production is slow and steady for now. I see plenty of projects go out on this site that are just starting up, and asking for an entire creative team from scratch. These projects are usually doomed to fail. We are a smoothly operating machine already; we just want to expand our scope! That's where you all come in.
There's three categories of roles we're seeking to bring on here:
1. Assistant Editors. I'm only one guy; I can only do so much. Passing off some of the smaller steps of production to others will help me focus my time on the jobs only I can do, which helps us make more videos, which helps us grow further.
2. Shorts Editors. Again; I'm only one guy. I'm pretty full up time-wise with the videos we're currently producing. Shorts are a very effective way of promoting our channel and reaching a wider audience, and so we'd be bringing you on to help create those more consistently and inflate our upload pace.
3. Volunteer Artists. We simply don't have the budget to pay a full time artist at the moment, but we're hopeful that we'll be there soon enough. If you're interested in volunteering your work to the channel, we would slowly create shorter mini-series with your illustrations behind the scenes, releasing them along our main series to supplement our upload schedule.
As a part of joining our team, you'll be expected to join a Discord server for production and communicate consistently with the creative team. You'll also be given access to our supporter-only community server where we run several TTRPG games every week, if that's your thing!
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There's a few components of the editing process, but the one this role applies to is what we refer to as "the fourth wall"; beneath the fourth wall (the frame) is our artist's illustrations and animated battlemap recreations, but above it are the portraits of the DND characters and the poseable avatar of the Dungeon Master.
Your role would be to go through the source audio provided (usually somewhere between 15-25 minutes long) and edit the PNGs so that they align with the speech of the characters. The portraits of the characters have a binary speaking/not-speaking switch, with some special expressions for laughter or being wounded. The Dungeon Master has a variety of facial expressions, mouth shapes, and arm poses; your job would be to make him seem as expressive as possible. This usually takes me around an hour, but I work very quickly, so I'd estimate most people would take two hours at first. I'm offering a flat rate of $40 per episode, but this can be negotiated with longer videos or if you've worked with us for long enough to build up some trust in your abilities. There's a certain minimum of expressiveness we want here, so if the posing isn't enough, you may be requested to go back through and add more detailed movement. Overall, this work is very simple; just tedious.
- adobe after effects
- adobe premiere pro
*Say something you think would fit*
You need to know how to use Adobe Premiere.
This is the simplest and lowest-effort role on offer: we have several videos already produced in longform. I will provide you a format to convert these into shortform videos. Your job would be to go through these longform videos and select short segments you think would make somewhat engaging shortform videos. You won't use every single second, but roughly ~70% of the original episode should end up as shorts. It shouldn't take more than an hour to go through one twenty minute video this way.
- adobe premiere pro
*Say something you think would fit*
This one is a bit odd, but effectively; I'm a self taught video editor. I've gotten pretty good at the visual side of things, but I'm going by ear for sounds and audio. If you are an audio engineer and have experience in Adobe Premiere, drop your contact information, and I am willing to pay you for a one-time consultation to learn more about this side of video production and standardize the audio design of the series.
- adobe premiere pro
*Say something you think would fit*
To be clear; we absolutely value artists, your work is invaluable. This is not one of those "be grateful for the exposure" situations, we just have almost no budget; our lead artists are volunteers because it's a project that is near and dear to them, and they want to see it be made. We can't afford to offer you enough to be fair labor; if you are interested in the project, we have a wealth of content to illustrate and produce. If you have your own DND game you'd like to make into a webseries, we'll be happy to work with you to make that happen as well. Realistically, though, this would be a leap of faith; we believe in our work. If you want to get in on the ground floor and grow with us, shoot us a message! Otherwise, I'll see you when we have a bigger budget.
The nature of the work is what you see in the videos; illustrating scenes and characters to represent the stories we're telling. As a volunteer, your time is naturally going to be limited; we would intentionally structure any production you are involved with to be slow and steady, giving you time to work on it in your spare time instead of being forced into a crunch. We're also interested in creating animatics of scenes from our games, if that is more up your alley.
*Say something you think would fit*
For the most part, we use videogame soundtracks to score each episode; no composer could create enough original music to keep up with the pace we have. We do, however, need a theme song for The Best Available. I have several ideas and references, and can talk extensively about what I'm looking for, I'm just not a skilled composer. We're looking for high-fantasy sounds, so nothing hyperdigital, synthesized, etc. Digital VSTs are acceptable if they are of acoustic instruments.
We'd be looking to commission a single song of roughly a minute in length to begin with; we would very likely commission you further to iterate on that theme for poignant moments in the series, using the skeleton of the song as a motif, creating tense dramatic versions, slower, sad versions, and the like. Pricing is negotiable.
*Say something you think would fit*
We're nearing the end of Season One of The Best Available; I'd love to be able to redo our intro sequence for Season Two. We have a 3D model of The Yawning Portal, (a tavern that the series is centered around), and we'd love to animate a sequence of the camera swooping through the environment set to the theme music. I'd also like to have several characters populate the tavern, but these would be 2D cutouts that rotate to face the camera, similar to Paper Mario. We would need to consult on this to determine the scale of the project, how much it would cost, and so on, before I can promise this project would occur, but it's something we'd definitely like to explore.
We have the modelled environment and a full creative vision of the final project, but lack texturing and know-how in Blender or Unreal Engine. If you have the latter, please audition with an example of your past work and we can talk about making this happen!
- blender
*Say something you think would fit*
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