April 2019 - W.I.P UPDATE

FEATURE ANIMATION: LIFEGUARD x STITCH: SOMETHING ABOUT FRUIT

It has been a quietly productive month for feature animation. We've gone from 21 minutes to 23 and a half minutes, which might not seem like a lot but the two scenes this covers have been the most complicated of the piece so far. We have a lot more moving parts now and they all need to be working perfectly in sync with each other in order to look right and this takes time do. We're animating at 24 frames a second and we need key frames every 22 frames and in-betweens every 11 to get it looking right, for three models over a minute and a half. This is why it's taken 6 weeks. But we're done now with the two opening scenes for Act 4. 

As previously discussed since we'll be cutting to position changes rather than animating the transition we are in the fast lane now towards getting this in the can. I plan on doing at least two more scenes showcasing  specific positions (which will probably run 30 seconds to 1 minute each) and then a montage of all the other positions I think will be interesting but don't really want to spend a lot of time on. Again, as previously discussed I want to ramp up the tempo towards to end and quick cuts is a nice way to do that. All in all I'm pleased with the progress made this month, the end is very much in sight.

 ELDAR NARN

Chapter 2 is done and uploaded, it was a short chapter so I was able to get this wrapped up nice and fast. A lot more text per panel in this chapter too. Since Ghilanna doesn't open her eyes or mouth her panels can get a little bit samey so I prefer to have her dialogue delivered in larger batches that require fewer facial expression panels.

Chapter 3 is well underway, first couple of pages are up on the website and i'll be uploading pages 3-9 very shortly. Have had a little delay in uploading the pages as I wasn't happy with Gizzielle's surname (which appears on page 3) and spent quite a while deciding on a new one and made six more pages in the meantime.  I have been looking forward to Chapter 3 since it features my two favourite characters, Wyn and Gizzielle. I really like their dynamic, with Gizzielle constantly exasperated with Wyn's  childish antics. Wyn being a magical fairy who can pretty much do anything she wants gives me total freedom to write entertaining shit for her to do, which is fun. This will be a long chapter since Gizzielle is the co-protagonist along with Meredhel I want to spend as similar amount of time introducing her character too. 

There may be some slowdown coming up in about a week since we are about to reach some panels that show short clips of events that took place the previous night that will take some time to setup so the rate at which the pages come out might slow down when we reach that point, but I'm really enjoying this chapter so I'm always keen to get back to it.

That's where we are at for April then and I'm happy with everything.I don't regret taking so long to get the animation right, the results have definitely been worth it. Expect pages of Eldar Narn fairly regularly and we'll see how close we are the the end of the animation when I check in next month.