May Preview

Dear Patrons,

Happy May to you all! Springtime is upon us - at least if I am to believe my own eyes, looking out the window. Summer is fast approaching, and with that new endeavours for me in the form of moving and directing a new visual development session for Tales of Zale. The latter has especially been weighing on my mind recently. But I'm getting ahead of myself - lets look at one thing at a time!

THIS MONTH'S PREVIEW:

This month's preview is not quite done, but it's coming along. I've gone over the colors an extra time, and given some shots which hadn't had any comp done before their due treatment. There are still some adjustments to be made and inconsistencies across shots that need to be fixed. These shots with all the rain are quite heavy to work with and the task of making minor adjustments is quite daunting, so I'm taking it a little at a time. I've also noticed that this scene and a few others are a bit too dark on certain screens, so I will have to go over that an extra time either way.

EPISODE 3:

What you see in the preview is basically what I've managed to work on on episode 3 this month. In terms of output, it's not particularly impressive, but I did feel that it was worth putting more time into the preparation work for the visual development months coming up. I'm finishing my full time work at the end of the month, and at that point I'll have a few weeks before I'm going to Annecy and starting the new job up. I'm really looking forward to have a little bit of time to focus at that point, because visually it's not a whole lot of work that's left on episode 3 - it just requires that extra bit of focus to make sure that everything is consistently taken to the next level. I'm not particularly worried about that in terms of finishing to a September release, but one thing that I am starting to be a little more aware of is where we're at with the sound. We still have yet to land on anything concrete, since two of the project members have had delays due to personal reasons. That's part of the package when working on a low-budget loose project like this, and I'm sure it will start coming pretty easily together once we overcome this first hurdle - but I am going to have to push for that to start happening this month.

EXHIBITION:

Even if we end up with delays, I'm still planning on celebrating the episode release one way or another in December. I've been putting together a project proposal for my mom's drawing school/gallery in Copenhagen, and we've begun applying for funding to have things printed. It's going to be a behind-the-scenes exhibition about the looong journey of this episode, showing off some of the steps we take in animation to arrive at the finished product. Still, it's first in September, and may change form slightly underway, so I'll hold my tongue about the finer details for now.

TV-SERIES:

Let's get the less positive stuff out of the way first: unfortunately, it seems that the application for the forum I mentioned in the last update has fallen through - for reasons that are entirely out of my hands. It's frustrating, especially because I'd been led to believe it was possible right until the very last minute - and spent a good deal of time prepping and sometimes even stressing over it. Still, I already have other goals in sight, so I don't plan on lingering on this for too long.

Meanwhile, the prepping for the TV-series visual development if proceeding smoothly. We've found the local character designer and concept artist that we will have onboard, and I think it will really be a pleasure to work with them. Still, once we start, we will be very pressed for time, so we are trying to get down the majority of our style considerations now, so we can hit the ground running. I can't show any of the explorations the character artist has made, but below are a few of my own doodles that I made, just to loosen up in the way that I think about Zale's design:

One of the goals for these few months of visual development is to make a short teaser for the series in a style that is representative of the final product. Because of this, I have also been hard at work on the animatic for this teaser. It took me a while to get down and arrive at something that I felt good about. I had to drop a few iterations half-way through because they just didn't feel right. But I'm very happy about where I ended up with it. Again, it's something that I can't show you fully because of the NDA... But there's no harm in showing you just a couple of stills from it :)

ROUND-UP:

I feel like I may have forgotten something, but I think these are the major highlights from this month. At the end of the day, I'm pretty amazed at how much I'm able to get done despite doing another full-time job. I do need to remember to take breaks... but to be honest, some of this work also helps me relax a good deal. There's a lot that I want to do, and it's all pointing towards September in many ways. Gotta do what I gotta do to get there in the best way possible. And, uh, move apartments somewhere in the midst of it I guess, ugh... For now, one thing at a time! 

See you in the next update!

- Sif