Update - A Slight Delay

As you might've guessed from the still of Premiere pro above, the second reward - a continuation of Keeping Abreast of the Times is not quite cooked (the image above is literally the actual animation in progress, with about 95% of my work done on it).

With this animation I've been pretty ambitious - there are rarely scenes with fewer than 3 characters in it, and many with five or more. Now while that's something I can manage work wise with practice and knowhow, it is also something that cannot be shortened with rendering.

We run a render farm here of six powerful GPUs - normally on a regular animation the render time for one machine is about 5 minutes per frame. So a nice short 100 frame shot takes around 500 minutes, or 8.3 hours. However in this animation, the scenes with multiple characters and things going on in the background ended up on an average of 7.5 minutes, making the same scene now take 12.5 hours. A few hours many not seem like much, but this animation has over 13,600 frames. Believe me when I say there has been no point since about the 5th of the month when the whole render farm has not been rendering (or re-rendering scenes with errors) for 24 hours a day.

This is a very long way of saying that we're going to need a few more days. Normally I get close and can pull a rabbit out of a hat to hit deadline, as the thought of missing deadline makes me quite literally sick to my stomach. There is only one thing that makes me feel worse and that's providing a sub-par product. I could've set everything to super low res and have it out in time, but as I ask for your patience, I hope the result will be worth the wait.

So I apologize for the delay and will get it to you ASAP. We will send out the animation to everyone who was a member in July, to ensure that no one misses out.

tl;dr We need a few days to get the animation done and the reward will be sent to everyone who was an eligible patron in July a few days into August.