September 2019 - W.I.P UPDATE (Patreon)

FEATURE ANIMATION #1: LIFEGUARD x STITCH: SOMETHING ABOUT FRUIT

Hello Everyone,

I have excellent news to report this time around everyone. We are very much on schedule to have the movie released by the end of the month! All the principle animation is completed and the first round of rendering is done. Currently I am correcting mistakes I didn't spot before the render. But that's almost done. I've a few corrections left to go in and fix but only a few and they usually only require 50 or so frames to be re-rendered so there's really not much left to do. Once that's done that only leaves:

• Text on screen
• Color Balancing
• Fade outs on scene end where appropriate
• Sound balancing
• Remixing and applying the background music

Most of the background music editing is already done. The first half has a more complex song because there are less vocalisations and so the quality of the song needs to be better because you can hear more of it. In the second half there is much more moaning and such so the music is a much more generic tune and it's only the second half I have left to do. Shouldn't be a problem. Color and sound balancing I'm going to have adobe do for me so hopefully that'll just be a matter of a few clicks (ha! I bet that'll work out perfectly first time and be really easy and not turn out to be some horribly complicated time sink!!). The text on screen and fade outs I already know how to do so that will actually be fast and easy.

All in all everything is moving forward right on schedule. Unless i have grossly underestimated the complexity of my post production stuff, it really seems like the October release date will be met.

While the second half was rendering (it took WEEKS) I found myself with lots of down time with nothing really to do, so i figured why wait and got started with:

 FEATURE ANIMATION #2: Mei in: Overcast 

Might as well put the time to good use. I've done the scene build and the lighting for this project now. It all takes places within one single room so the build wasn't that hard and the lights are setup in such a way that they shouldn't need to be moved very often. I've learnt a lot about optimising my production pipeline from the Lifeguard joint and i'm hoping that having this lighting all in place right from the start is going to save me some serious time later on. 

I've got Mei in position for Act 1 and the male actor (being played by Artur: https://sfmlab.com/item/3336/ ) all sorted too. Had to pull some shenanigans to get him dressed the way I wanted him to be. I've actually been working on him for months now, trying out different way to get him to wear clothes without having to resort to learning blender but I've finally cracked it and he is now production ready.

I need to re-record some of my dialogue for act 1 and I've added some new lines at the beginning so the next step is a little voice acting but once that's done I'm ready to officially start production. This means no downtime while I setup for the next film so I can get started right away. I'll go into more detail next moth about this project since it'll probably be the main one by then, I'll have some pictures and a more detailed synopsis but for now just know that this project is ready to go.

ELDAR NARN 

Eldar Narn has been on a very slow boil during September. I've really been focusing on the animations, making sure #1 gets finished on time and #2 is ready to start as soon as #1 comes out so it's not been getting as much attention. We've got 10 pages done still, it's not on hiatus or anything, but you can probably expect October to be similar while the animation work takes priority.

Content wise we're still in the first half of the chapter. The interaction between Erolith & Ohmbryn and the stall vendor will go on for a little while, there's a bit I want to play out between the three of them which will be what takes up most of the first half of the chapter. I imagine we'll still be on this bit when we do next month's WIP too, although from this point onwards (page 11) they aren't going to be moving about very much so the lighting should be pretty much copy and paste which will save some time.

When all is said and done September has gone exactly according to plan. I'm not going into the post production totally blind mind you. I've been doing some research into what I need to do and how to do it and I know how to apply the sound balance in Audition and have Premiere scan the scene with the most appealing natural color balance and then have it use AI to adjust the other scenes to match. If that works the way it's supposed to then that should be all I need to do. I remain very confident that this will be the last WIP about The Lifeguard and by the time I'm doing the October report it will have been released. And who knows, maybe The Lifeguard alone will be enough to actually muster up some patreon support and someone will actually read the next one!

Until then, this is goodbye for now friends,