User blog:Yterbium/The Stories of Real-Life BFB: Timeline of the final project (part 3)

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Real-Life BFB

Main info • Production info Yearly overview • Show timelines (Timeline of RLBFDI • RLBFDIA • RLIDFB • RLBFB before and after the split • RLTPOT • Extra scouting) • General timelines (pre- and post-1950) Differences from Pencil 2.O • Aesthetics • Methodology (Names • Nationalities • Heights • Ages • Colours • Accessories • Team portraits) • Beyond the 64 TL;DR: Info • Timeline of the final project (part 1 • part 2 • part 3) The (slightly un)official RLBFB yearbook! (Alternate takes)

Plan

^RLBFB Yearbook Planning Stage (updated)

Right now On Notepad/Flash Finish descriptions on "didja no" (done, 4 May) Compare to descriptions on Flash, modify if necessary (done, 5 May) Start thinking of ideas for the final page (done, 4 May) — thinking of doing the current team configurations, i.e. as of BFB 17 and TPOT 1, except they're wearing the colours of their old teams. Remake the final page; they look too different now. (done, 5 May) For the final page photos On Artbreeder Work on the older AB portraits, all this for consistency (done, 6 May) Start saving pictures! More specifically, the ones with a neutral expression (for the back page) (done, 6 May) On Photoshop Change background colours — keep consistent with team colouring as determined here (done, 6 May) Change shirt colours — ditto (done, 6 May) Change eye colours (done, 6 May) Adjust hairstyles (done, 6 May) Add modifications from the original final-image file (glasses, facial hair etc.) (done, 6 May) — Renata has glasses, and T.B. and Violette have different ones. Add voting icons in the top-right left corner (done, 6 to 7 May) On Flash Transfer them to Flash, resize them so that they are large enough to be possibly made into a tier list icon (done, 7 May) Save photo as "P. 9 - Final Page" (done, 7 May) For the main page photos On Artbreeder Work on each "senior portrait" (what I call the portraits for the main pages), making sure that they are noticeably different from the back page photos for authenticity — whether one is smiling, angry etc. plays a big part in this difference (done, 2 June) Hint: Look up which sliders need to be set for the least difference in appearance after changing expressions, and apply them to the new photos — don't save those as separate versions; the linked images will lead to the hopefully similar backpage portraits Start saving their senior portraits now! (done, 2 June) Actually saved more than once. Almost all images have at least one variant that needs to be merged with the original. On Photoshop Merge the different versions of each image, possibly keep the separate files and save them into another folder (done, 2 to 3 June) Change shirt colours — keep consistent with the most common colour of their clothing by other artists, as determined on 25 March (done, 3 June) Change background colours — either to the background colour of their voting icon or a neutral off-white; includes contrasts (done, 4 June) Adjust hairstyles, should be the same as above or enough to be recognizable (done, 4 June) Add the same modifications as seen above (glasses, facial hair etc.) (done, 4 June) Add accessories with varying degrees of realism (hair ribbons, earrings etc.) (done, 5 June) — I'll be using a different set of accessories from the ones mentioned on the other page. On Flash, again Transfer images... if the files are too big, do it via PS (done, 9 May) If necessary, edit the photos on PS — shouldn't want to do this, as the individual photos, i.e. the Flash-transferred ones, will be posted here While this is happening Finish the BFB 30 review (done, 8 May) Change everything on the old RLBFB pages! Much of it is now outdated (May not be done in time for yearbook's release.) Make a navbox for all the blog posts on this wiki, bookmark it for easy reference (May not be done in time for yearbook's release.) Make a page for the yearbook proper (The Stories of Real-Life BFB, blah blah blah), so that viewers know about the format without seeing the images yet (done, 7 June) Finally Post the final product of the yearbook (recommend that it be dine before either the 8th of June or TPOT 2's release! If it should come early, work on YB immediately...) Rename each file (from the computer) to something that makes it more obvious that it's from a yearbook — the template remains unknown for now but will be thought up later (done, 9 May)

In session

4 May

Guess who finally has a plan?

I was going to post a screenshot with an Easter egg containing some of the character descriptions, but decided to type them up here instead, that is, where I have the word "plan" written.

Leave it anonymous: Sorry, but you won't find out what I'm called on AB until everything's done! Don't want to get anybody spoiled.

5 May

Just finished modifying the descriptions and the whole last page. As the screenshot will tell you, it's pretty empty because I haven't done the image-saving bit yet. But I have written out all the text that needs to be written out.

I even have the obligatory copyright notice… I've noticed Jnj themselves are including it at the end of new shorts, so why not return the favour?

6 May

Made some clarifications to the plan. Also working on the back page photos... for realsies this time! The only reason I had to discard the first version of that page was that they looked too different from how they look right now. I'll still post it as a supplement to the yearbook proper, though I consider it to be an inferior version of the new one (despite the contestants' being arranged by 1969 team status).

7 May

Finished the back page shortly after midnight. Let me just say that I'm in love with it! I don't remember my first version being as good as this one is; maybe it's because they're organized into their new teams (so the colours are more spread out and don't dictate row placement), or that the colours themselves are so much brighter than before, especially the individual backgrounds and the clothes (Free Food's team uniforms, for example, are one step short of hot pink). Or that the non-full humans are all gathered in the top two rows, representing the EXIT. Whatever it is, I think I'm proud to call this my final final page.

They're mostly smiling now, but none of them are showing their teeth. That's going to change for the main pages, and I'm excited/scared to see how that will develop.

Gelatin and Flowery!: Yeah, they don't look like this now. Only vaguely. And that's okay.

I plan on spending today reviewing the rest of BFB 30. Because that review page included a picture of my 擬人化 forms of Gelatin and Flower (from the old back page), I'll post it here because it's rather outdated. Then I'll replace the old picture with a newer version with the brighter colours.

I won't start the saving the photos for the main page until the review is done, but I will tell you who will and won't be smiling in the yearbook (and to what degree). I had been saving this on a Notepad document since March! A lot of this is based on calculations of who smiled in an old yearbook (see here), so things might have changed or been overridden since then.

Default facial expressions of the ^RLBFB contestants, as shown in the contestant yearbook

Emotion	Expression	Male contestants	Female contestants	Non-binary contestants
Happy	Big smile (with teeth)	Ady, Frederic, Gabriel, Joaquin, Lothar, Marc, Rocky, Yitzhak	Belle, Bethel, Briselda, Honorata, Lela, Maja, Naily, Penelope, Ruby, Violette	Jessie, Pat
	Medium smile (with teeth)	G.P.	Lina, Nathalia, Peggy, Sana
	Small smile (with teeth)	Eddie, Leo
	Very small smile (with teeth barely showing)	Bilal, Jake, Spongy, T.V.	Abbie, Kathy, Paula, Renata, Thérèse	Venera
	Regular smile	Claude, T.B.
	Small smile	Columbus, Nick	Arbutus, Barbara, Iris, Phuong
	Very small smile	Blaine, Bomby, Joe, Terry, Woody	Astrid, Eugenia, Flora, Katja
Unhappy	Totally neutral	Donald, David, Frankie, Freddy, Roboty, Stefan	Dora, Lill, Lulu, Toni
	Neutral–angry	Khaled	Fannie
	Totally angry	Simon

8 May

One month later, and I've finished my BFB 30 review. Praise!

Today is dedicated to images: to embedding in the episode review, but also just to look at. I'm looking at the back page again and notice some interesting patterns that can only be coincidental. Not only are they sorted by their most recent team, but they're also in alphabetical order. So you get things like these:

• Joaquin is directly above Flora (different teams in the post-split), and Flora is above her robotic clone (The Strongest Team on Earth was the first one to be named).
• Simon really stands out among his teammates. As one of the shortest guys, Gabriel blends in with his smiling female cohorts, whereas Simon looks pissed off and is huge.
• Brothers G.P. and Joe are next to each other and you can kind of see how they look related, apart from their different eye colours.
• On the same team, married couple Eugenia and T.B. are also next to each other, looking more mature than everyone else.
• Bethel is the only one on The S! whose last name comes before "L".
• Renata Monteiro is the last one alphabetically on Death P.A.C.T. again.
• Frederic and Lela are relatively close to each other, but Lela is one space below and to the left of Freddy—the EXIT is still at the top of the page.

9–11 May

A few updates these days.

Count the individual hairs: At this size, you can see what's going on in his head the moment his picture's taken. The verdict: nothing.

• I completely forgot about this, but on AB you can save a picture in high quality. I wasn't sure if I should use it because the pictures will be in a yearbook (the pages have too many pixels already), but I also remember that I have to put them in individually as well. Well, at 400K, the pictures are big… perhaps too big. I tested it out by downloading G.P.'s back-page portrait, and, as you'll see in this very close preview, his eyebrow is 90 pixels thick. I'm sure that's fairly normal for Greek/Italian men.
  • You won't be able to see the rest of his face until later (which I'm sure he wouldn't be happy about), but I'm sure you've got the gist already. I'll soon adjust his eye colour just slightly, though I don't know whether to go in a greener or deeper blue direction.
  • Later edit: Yeah, the pictures are too big. I realize that if a contestant has glasses and their portrait is going to be of such high quality, then there will be a noticeable inconsistency since the images for the glasses have been scaled down already… and then there are the issues of the hair ribbons being manually drawn with the brush tool… okay, we're not downloading them in this size. Nvmd. Copy and paste from the site will do.
• Also, the contestants now have yearbook quotes! You won't find them in the images, but they will be on the page, typed out for easy manipulation. Here's G.P.'s quote before I change it out of dissatisfaction.

Goal!! Whoops, wrong sport.

• The Vietnamese name order for Pin is wrong. It's supposed to be Nguyễn Thị Phương, not N.P.T. After all, Thị is a middle name, i.e. the name in the middle.
• Working on my final round of modifications for the main-page photos. This time I plan on changing them not to the point that they're unrecognizable, but so they differ only a little bit from the back-page portraits.

12 May

Switched the glasses of Astrid and Violette. For some reason, I think a giant flashy pair would totally be Foldy's thing and not Book's.

Slow down a bit

13–17 May

I'm either on a break, working on the CHRONOLOGY page or working on a new secret something. If I keep lollygagging, there's no way that this yearbook will be done by its due date! Okay, that's a lie... it will get done, mark my words, but the pages surrounding it won't. And that's okay because, as you all know, deadlines are pretty flexible in the online world.

Kind of spoiled Terry's interesting fact: But you'll never know the name that it's under here!

The chronology is getting pretty interesting so far, though I'm still trying to find a way to standardize the information. I'm pulling it all from a fancy-looking Notepad document that includes all the birth dates, full names, name changes, death dates, spouse names, wedding dates and divorce dates of the contestants, their parents, siblings and, for some of them, children (even of those rejected from ^RLTPOT).

I should have also included some locational data, like when someone moves or something, but I decided to just wing it, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of me.

18 May

Time to make a second timeline! Though not right now because I feel like it's time to transfer some images...

19–21 May

Yeah, the transfer didn't happen. I was working on a separate timeline on a Google Doc, and now it's time to transfer its contents to this wiki for all to see.

Also, I'm back in the episode writing business! Kind of... today, on the 21^st of May, I will be releasing a special (crapfic) episode that I wrote. I'm really proud of the end result, even if it's not canon to any universe whatsoever. Now, why did I choose to post this today? Take another look at my TPOT speculation page and you'll see.

22–26 May

When does this take place again?: It's a good thing that TPOT includes a chronology at the bottom of the screen.

Working on the chronology by re-watching all BFDI episodes of each season.

27–29 May

This is eternal!

Since almost all of my school stuff ends on Wednesday, I've decided to transfer the images then... well, not here, but to Photoshop.

30 May–1 June

I wake up and find that the Wiki's format has changed on every platform. Goodbye Arial/Helvetica, hello, whatever this new-age stuff is.

But it's not really that bad... and I've other things to be worried about. Luckily, I'm done with the chronology (for now) and most of my school stuff, so I should be uploading to Photoshop all day today.

Saved!

Can't type in it!: For those wondering, "full" and "light shirt" are just variations of the same image, but a gene has been applied to the "full" portrait that makes the lighting more authentic to the era (at least I think so), but it also makes the colour of the clothes darker. We can't have them all in dark colours, no matter how trendy they are at the moment.

2 June

Good news, everyone... all photos have been saved and are on their way to Photoshop as of tonight! This might be on time after all!

A few tiny changes from the table above:

• Rocky and Violette do not show their teeth when they smile. It's just not fitting for Violette's personality, and Rocky only smiles with a curved line.

3 June

Finished the saving of the images. Now it's time to change the colours, one aspect and one contestant at a time.

4 June

Another preview!: This time, it's of all of the contestants (who aren't David, Dora or Roboty), combined into one face. It's not like the composite that was used to make Pat, since that was done on AB (with differences in face shape, mouth locations, hair etc. taken into account). Don't they all look gorgeous?

It's not that bad, actually. Because I'd done the same thing with the older pictures (i.e. for the final page), I didn't have to google "blue eyes men", "brown eyes woman" all the time.

5 June

Last night, I added the glasses to the portraits of eight contestants (totally not the nerdiest or introverted ones). They're mostly unchanged from those from the back page. I also adjusted some of the "hair shapes"—Kathy, Belle and Lina have more realistic flips. Such is life when wanting to depict the hairstyles of the early 1970s.

Today, I'm adding the accessories. Well, in 1971, hair ribbons were still a thing, though they were not as popular as they were a few years earlier (namely ^RLBFB's first twelve episodes). So, prepare to see some differences from the sketches on the AESTHETICS page.

Honorata's bow is vaguely inspired by Icing's bow.

Later edit: Just finished the accessories bit! Took about four hours, but now I've got

14 decorative earrings, 8 yarn hair ribbons, 8 hair fasteners, clips and ornaments, 8 pairs of eyeglasses, 5 headbands, 4 AB-generated earrings, 4 bows, 3 regular earrings, 2 plain moustaches, 2 vegetable crowns, 2 pieces of yarn tied at the bottom of the head to look like artificial flowers, 1 large hair ribbon, 1 semi-tiara, 1 "browband" and 1 piece of long jewellery that traverses the forehead.

After I do a few more minor adjustments, I think they're ready for transfer to Photoshop.

6–7 June

Crap, one day.

Yesterday, just changed some of the descriptions and the quotes a bit. I'll make the page right now, but hardly anything of substance will be posted on it just yet.

Today, I added sideburns on, like, half of the guys.

As an addition: although I find the new line-break formatting on the Wiki hideous (it only appears in the blogs, not on the pages themselves), I will not be adding extra blank lines to the blog posts that already exist here. I trust that Fandom's format administrators are good people and will fix this bug in due course.

Later edit: Just made the page and am including the character descriptions a day (or a few) early. That shouldn't be a problem, since I predict most will come for the pictures.

8 June

Okay, I'm not finished with the yearbook yet, which could be considered bad... but I've discovered tonight that you revert to the old theme using the Preferences function on this site. I'm still keeping the formatting of the top template as a compromise for those who have moved on to Fandom Desktop.

Also, my new place has signs written in the BFB font, the one that's on all of the text in the thumbnails and in the show. I'm not going to show pictures because that would give away where I live, but I still thought it was interesting anyway. You know you're a BFDI fan when something like that is the first thing you notice.

Can you find them?: Pencil and Pen are being quite intimate with each other at the top of this image.

9 June

Working on the yearbook... in Photoshop! Since all of the information is already on the Internet (specifically this Wiki), I might as well post a preview of what part of it is going to look like.

10 June

I've got good news and I've got bad news.

The good news is that I'm finished with the yearbook! I mean this in the sense of "hey, all the pictures are transferred to the photos I'm going to upload, complete with filters meant for mobile viewers". The bad news is that my week is so full that I don't know how long I'll have until I actually do the uploading.

11 June

Sorry for the delay again. The thing is, I've realized that something was really unrealistic (even for this show) when I was working on the extended family trees for the ^RLTPOT recommended characters (Kazzy has 26 cousins and I've only got six names for them). A lot of these contestants-hopeful are married, have children, whatever, and while that's happening, over 80% of the original cast of ^RLBFB remain single and childless. And they're meant to be old! It paints a completely fanciful picture of what a reality show should look like, even in the liberated seventies.

Of course, I could upload the yearbook pictures now and work on the families later, but I've a lot of things to do away from the keyboard, so that will have to wait. But I will tell you what's been addressed on in this headcanon that hasn't been before:

A number of contestants got married during the various hiatuses in the series, whose unions were otherwise glossed over by me (I wonder what could have happened... oh yeah, uncreativity). Note that these marriages are of the least frequently shipped characters in the canon, at least in my opinion. For example:

• Bilal, after ^RLBFDI. Now a dad of a boy and a girl.
• Barbara, after ^RLBFDIA.
• Jamie Blaine, after ^RLBFDIA. Now a dad of two boys.
• Frankie, after ^RLBFDIA. The fact that he is married and has a daughter is a closely guarded secret that only Honorata knows.
• Khaled, after ^RLBFDIA. While he was dead (in the object show sense, which is not the same as the sense en droit français), his wife divorced him and he now lives as a bachelor… although lately he's had his eye on Venera.
• T.V., after ^RLBFDIA. Now has one daughter.
• Donald, after ^RLIDFB.
• Lina, after ^RLIDFB. That she joined ^RLBFB before she could have a child made her feel #FOMO, which is part of why her maternal instinct kicks in when she interacts with Gabriel.
• Claude, after ^RLBFB 12. Now has one son.
• Peggy, after ^RLBFB 12. Now has one daughter.

There are also a few things that kind of give away who I see as a couple on BFB, so that's always controversial.

• Columbus and Phuong: In order for Phuong to stay in the States as long as possible (she's essentially an early Vietnamese refugee), she had to get married within 90 days of her arrival. There's a even show about that very process on The Learning Channel, I suppose because that's always a fun thing to learn about. So yeah, they get married in 1965 and have two kids during the following hiatuses.
• Ady and Toni: Got married as quickly as possible when they came home after ^RLBFB ended. They have a child on the way, conceived before episode 30 was shot... Ady wastes no time.
  • Toni was married after ^RLIDFB but got divorced during the hiatus after ^RLBFB 12. Her husband was seriously worried that she would ABANDON him, so he decided that the marriage was not worth keeping.
    • After Ady and Toni got married, they moved to a suburb of New York, but before they did, they went down to Texas to take care of some unfinished business. RIP, Toni's ex.
• Penelope and G.P.: Not a married couple like Fredlanda or Thomgenia, but they did interact with each other in a more intimate way during the post-^RLBFDIA hiatus. As such, they have one child together... that Penelope gave up for adoption after G.P. went back to Canada without knowing what he had done. Once ^RLTPOT is over (c. 1991) and G.P. returns home, he's going to find a young man and woman (the latter being from a relationship from his fraternity days) watching old ^RLBFDI clips together of the absurdly young-looking father they just discovered. Well, I'm sure he'll love them just the same.
  • Likewise, a number of contestants have some children outside of marriage that they never knew existed: Ady (before ^RLBFB), Joe, Stefan and especially Simon (imagine his hundreds of progeny over the centuries). Only Maja could be bothered to take care of her two.

12–13 June

Still working on the "statuses and locations" spreadsheet when I realize that Naily hasn't lived on three continents, only two. Got to change that one... she went to school in... Wales. We need a Welsh character.

14–15 June

After I watched Jnj's really funny "Thanks for 1,000,000 subscribers!" video, I have finished the spreadsheet! Sort of. Well, not that I'm going to be posting it here (how could I?); it's just there to calculate what a character looks like and how old they were on a certain date.

I don't speak German natively: … but I find it somehow more helpful if this is the language in which the column labels are written. Also Mahaliland is the new name for where ^RLBFB takes place.

In the meantime, I'm really starting to get things ready for the actual yearbook posting, and to prove it, here's a screenshot of what I've been doing for the past few days, including:

1. Two slightly different portraits of Woody (the differences between which will be discussed on the ALTERNATES page.
2. The spreadsheet that had been on my mind... but not any more!
3. A draft of the alternates page. Right now, it doesn't include any images and the entries aren't in order, but I still think I've got it down.

16 June

Just watch, I'll be working on the alternates page all day until after midnight, just like last time.

Well, it's clear to me now that...: This picture is pretty useless because you can't see Terry's face, which means you can't compare him with the other guy.

But while I was writing, I realized something that might be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (I don't think that's the right word, but I found it fascinating anyway). The guy who voices Tree looks a lot like Terry, who is of course Tree's human version in ^RLBFB. I found this out when I was randomly cruising down the wiki and wondering what the rest of the BFDI cast look like, because I think I'm relatively uninformed about such things compared to others. I don't even think I'm that much of an "object show community" member!

Well, maybe it's just the shock of the moment and tomorrow they will look nothing alike, but I just wanted to point this random opinion out before the yearbook gets published.

17 June

Spent the day working on the alternates page. The power went out earlier today for no apparent reason, which meant that work was hampered a bit, but I'm actually finished with the page right now! So the next step in this "page modernization" process is to do some editing to the yearbook descriptions, quotes etc., which should involve a lot of photo editing in addition to editing on the page proper. And this is after everything's been uploaded to PS. Sigh.

18 June

I haven't actually been quiet here. I was just working on the alternate photos that aren't just an image with a tiny watermark on it.

19 June

Happy Juneteenth! Taking a little break today to work on something else.

Notes

(Continue to the next page here.)