February Snapshot #2 + 'Productive Member' post mortem

Greetings everyone! I hope you've had a lovely February!

Now that the latest project has been published let's dive into some of the postmortem notes on how things went!

So being the biggest project to date my first main concern was upload size. The previous project I did ended up being around 17mb which was well over the upload limit to many sites as a gif. With this one I decided to keep the 480p resolution for file size compatibility, its worth mentioning that this will be the last standard option resolution for my projects moving forward, everything will be kept at HD as long as the platforms can justify the size uploads (or unless there are special resolution requests.) 

The next big question was color and while I briefly considered going about it in a black line with color backdrop I choose to try a similar off color line approach much like the illustrations seen around, since previous projects encompassing this had a positive reception I decided to go about it that way.

Finally bearing in mind slightly thicker line strokes I also had a fully rendered environment and one that animated, so careful planning was needed to separate the layers of content in the scene to help them work in concert while also making the workload a bit reduced as to avoid redrawing each one.

In practice this was all accomplished but in managing this there was some serious bottlenecks to address. Among them was the coloring process, what I had decided to do was render everything in a standard red hue so as to indicate it was an unfinished coloring of the frame, I would export the sequences into a 3rd party program for painting the lines and fill appropriately. This allowed me more color control over the figure but it also limited the editing for those frames since each change in the animation warranted a fresh export. Plus working between multiple programs when animating can be a surprising time sink.

The environmental animation required my manual input to inbetween the movement of the pipes, tubes and other machinery as there was no tweening features with the solution I was using for this project (that may change if and when I swap over to a blender environment). This meant that I would have to copy and paste a copy of the graphic in question, then edit any changes it has to undergo before locking it into frame.

As you can see from the timeline picture this illustrates just how complicated having all the moving parts working together can be. I am keen on animating with a thinner line stroke, no line weight and full color done in the same software to avoid any cross-overs, but this has offered me some valuable lessons. As a final note I also realized that the 40 second regime is interesting on paper but is an enormous amount of work depending on what has to happen. So I've decided that in future projects scaling up beyond 30 seconds would involve a small team and more involved discussions on how things are developed.

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With all that postmortem discussion out of the way I also wanted to include the other projects in the works, now that I've gone from 3, to 2 full-time projects I have more time to divide up between them for faster turn around. I've also included some weekend hobby project work that feeds into some of the experimentation like the 'Predator & Prey' remake involving animation shot on 1's, rough & loose sketches of characters as well as plenty of life drawing, some of which is posted here from recent sessions I've been able to get back into - the extra time allows me to further develop ideas, styles and skills in tandem with these projects so that I can use the ideas I think could work in animation with the commissioned works in addition to my own.

That's all for now, next time we'll be covering more material on the ongoing projects and how they are developing both with design and application analysis.