January FUNKe Update 3 - Storyboarding and Animating (Patreon)

Howdy! Let's get into it. My video in progress, which will revolve heavily around the work of Junji Ito, is deep in production- albeit following a few learning setbacks. I tried a few different approaches to planning this video out. My first idea was to make a mockup animatic, so I could plot out the timing of the video. This was a bad idea. It's hard to try and plan out pacing without recording dialogue, and it's hard to record dialogue when you don't know what the pacing will be. 

After some time working on this animatic, I also found some of the video's conceptual ideas were too scattered and disconnected to fit together (too many b-plot threads to follow). So, I needed to simplify it down, and hone in on the important parts and, this time, take a broader approach. 

After realizing all this, I decided I would take a more industrial approach and draw out proper storyboard sheets. That way, I could write out the pacing scene by scene, I wouldn't waste any time recording temp dialogue, and I could plan out complex scenes without having to make too many rough sketches to illustrate it.

This was a much better plan, and i've gotten a few dozen pages of these storyboards done now. I've been working with @py_bun (bombi's modeller) to create some of these assets in 3D, and when i'm not storyboarding i'm building out scenes as I need to in blender.

The actual video's script is totally complete, i'm just boarding out the last quarter of the video before i'm in total animation mode. The good news here is, with the video being so predominantly animated, there's dramatically less post-editing to do. So, once animation is done, the video is- minus audio mastering- basically done. 

The best way I can describe the video is, it's bending the line between "video essay" and "original work". Foundationally, the video is a love letter to Junji Ito's work, drawing attention to several specific stories of his, and talking about how exactly he tends to write his 'villains'. But at its core, the video is also something of a mystery case that those stories of his indirectly feed new context into. Balancing those two sides of it have been tricky, but i've learned a lot through the making of it, and it's even inspired several videos to come following it, that is assuming people find this sort of video structure interesting/consumable. 

Release timeline still TBA. Honestly, probably late February. I'm still working largely alone on it. I know, I know. Bite the bullet already. Like usual, there is a possibility of a smaller video popping out before then. But right now, i'm learning a lot of things every day, so it is a slow start to perfect to the video format I want to make. I think it will be worth it. 

Later this week, i'll drop a more elaborate commentary on F2NKe talking about what i've been working on, learning, and planning. So if you're curious to hear more about what i'm up to, or what else i'll be doing, look out for that!