May Preview - Now with colors!!

Dear patrons,

As always I hope that you are doing well! First animated preview in colors in quite a while. Exciting, huh? Well, there's a lot more where that came from coming up! But for now, let's jump into the updates :)

TALES OF ZALE WEB-EPISODE 3:

I just love it when color comes on a piece of animation. That's usually when I get that rush feeling of "oh yeah, it's all coming together!". We're starting to get to that point. While I'm still holding back on compositing and final color corrections, just seeing the flat-color characters on the backgrounds feels quite rewarding. 

Unlike with the animation itself, (where I've been quite stubborn and often made things hard for myself), I've actually tried to be smart about the backgrounds and numbers of layouts to be done. That means that once I've drawn a full background, I can re-use it fully or partially in another shot... and that makes progress pretty fast! When I started mid-April, around 20% of the backgrounds were done. But we're already at 50% now.

I still don't want to rush things, and there may be some background elements that I want to return to later. But things are definitely coming along.

Also, although I've been holding off on too much compositing, I have been dabbling a bit in learning projection mapping. It's definitely something I'll have to take some more time to dive into, but I think I'll be using it for some of the shots.

TALES OF ZALE (TV) WRITING:

We rounded off the 3 months of funded writing last week. With that we've got initial synopses for  most of the episodes of the first season, plans for follow-ups and 3 sample scripts. Two of those scripts I would like to return to with fresh eyes a little later, as I still think they should be improved upon further before being sent out to any broadcasters. For now, I am however trying to take a small break from it all and am gathering feedback from a few different places to reflect on in the meanwhile. I am going to go to Copenhagen for a couple of month now, and when I return to Viborg I've been granted another spot at the Open Workshop where I'll be making those extra polishes. It's a TV-series-specific stay this time around where I'll also get a consultant who can help with some extra input.

I've really been learning a lot over these past months and sought out a lot of resources on writing to try and improve and gain some more perspective. I was thinking of gathering up some of these resources in a coming post, in case anybody else is interested in some inspiration for reading on the subject. Is that something you'd be interested in?

EXTRA PLANS:

We will probably be prepping another application for the Vest-Danish Film fund in August -this time for visual development. I'd really love to work closely with some additional artists over a longer period to nail down the TV-series style. For now, I am doing the prep work. Fingers crossed!

ROUNDUP:

So things are moving forward at varying phases as usual. Although I will have a change of scenery soon, I will be keeping at it as always over the summer. I feel like this part of the year always goes by in a flash, but I will try to enjoy the ride. Come August, I am very much looking forward to seeing where we stand with post the web-series and the TV-series. 

How are you all doing on your end?

All the best,

- Sif