December Preview

Happy holidays dear Patrons!

I hope you are doing well and in good spirits. Here, the snow has started to fall, so I've got my fingers crossed for a white Christmas (that'd be a first for me)! Some warm news all around, so let's jump right into it!

THIS MONTH'S PREVIEW:

We're getting to a point where there are only a few scenes that I haven't shown you guys at one stage or another. And I'd like to keep a few surprises, so I hope you'll forgive me if things start to get a little repetitive. I've decided to share the scene that has been under the biggest transformation this month, even though it's still a bit of an experiment. I started getting into color correcting and began going down the rabbit hole to see how far I could push things. I always intended for this episode to be pretty muted, but after looking at it for so long I might just have gotten a bit bored with that idea. I think, if my sense of grayscale values or layout were stronger it'd be able to carry the desaturated look better.  But that was never one of the battles I set out to fight, so I gotta work with what I've got. At this point, I just want to do a few test cases to see how I can work to make the colors pop more in some places, or increase the value contrast. There's a good chance that I may have to scale these experiments a bit back afterwards, because there are some scenes where it absolutely makes sense to keep everything pretty low-key. But I think it's worth a shot to see how I can push a slightly more interesting look anyhow. In this particular scene, you can see that I haven't gotten to the first two shots yet. And there are some shots where the tone isn't quite consistent. But I think it still looks a lot more interesting than before, and even if I do scale it back or adjust, I'll probably still be building on the work I've put in here.

EPISODE 3:

We're there. Or, well kind of. We haven't gotten to a complete 100%, but that's only because I thought it'd be more sense to go into some overall scene polish before finalizing the those last comps. But animation, clean-up, color, and backgrounds are all done, woo!!

Despite being more busy with teaching than I had expected, I actually finished these last bits up ahead of schedule. That is, just in time to be hit by another delay that has been the bane of my existence for the past few weeks. Now that all shots were nearly completed, I wanted to do an export of the full episode to get an overview of how it all flowed. It's been a little while since I last did a full export, but I had no reason to think that it'd be an issue - it's never been before! Usually, exporting the episode takes up to an hour and that's that. But all of a sudden I was looking at 16+ hours export times and they all resulted in errors.

So um, basically the error file and timecode changed every time so that was of no help, and I tried googling the issue to oblivion, but every fix took 16 hours of exporting to test out, so it was a very tedious process. Longer story short, I've finally managed to get exporting to work again by changing codec, sequence settings and export settings. I might still have to look a bit further into which settings will give me the highest quality export at the end, but for now the most important thing is just that it's functional. 

BECAUSE, I'll need to share it with the composer pretty soon! Yup, the OG Tales of Zale composer, Matthew Pablo has confirmed that he'll be available to score this episode too. And Nick Standing who's been doing the final sound mixing seems onboard as well. Now I'll just have to be on the lookout for a foley artist  and then we should be good to go! There's a lot of technical details I have to work out, and before any of that there are a few touch-ups I want to do to some of the scenes' timings now that I've been able to view it with fresh eyes again. But my goal is still to have all that ready by the end of the year and that should be manageable at this point! 

- Oh, and while I was working in Premiere Pro I also added the final wallah sounds and cleaned up the file so it should be all ready for sound mixing (once music and foley is in there too).

TV-SERIES PITCH:

Ready for some vague news? Well, one of my producers actually got to spontaneously do a  pitch to a promising contact from one of the major streamers while abroad. They've received the material and would take it further into the system. I try to tamper my expectations. Even if we were lucky and it would be a fit for what they're looking for, I don't expect that we'll hear back from a big company like that anytime soon. Especially not in the midst of holiday seasons. Meanwhile, I am also going to Copenhagen next week to pitch to another broadcaster. It'll be my first time at one of these sorts of meetings, so I'm both nervous and excited. Even if it's just a pitch to let them know that the project exists I still want to do my best, so I'm in total practice mode this weekend. These are some preliminary steps to raise awareness of the project, but they are not to be underestimated!

SKETCHES:

There's been some down-time because of all the export issues, and I've actually been spending some of that on figure drawing. It's been so long since I went back to basis, so I wanted to start putting some more work into my drawing fundamentals again. Those aren't all that fun to look at though, so here, have some Morpheus poses instead. It's a real Morpheus-themed-update, huh?

ROUND-UP:

The usual. Chugging along, planting seeds and seeing what might grow of it. This will be my last month of freedom before the full-time work start, so I hope to make the most of it and have things well on track before I get even more busy. It's going to depend a bit on how much work I have over my head, but I hope to do another end-of-the-year-wrap-up post just like last year. I hope you enjoy your holidays in the meanwhile!