Production Update! 12.7.21 (Patreon)

Hello endearing patrons!

This holiday season, marking almost two years since the West Patch's creative conception, marks a lot of exciting developments for the show. Let's go ahead and peak at the stocking stuffers, shall we?

- Episode 3: The entirety of episode 3's rough animation is complete. This is our first time doing that entire stage instead of taking one shot at a time from start to finish! Now we can go into animation scheduling knowing exact frame counts, and background art knowing final poses! This also puts us at a whopping 25% completion, the rest being clean-up animation, coloring, and background art with a bit of post-production in there. 

- Possible future: Through the Stareable film festival, we've made connections with industry-involved people who are interested in signing onto the West Patch team specifically to shop it around to their contacts to possibly have the show picked up. We're keeping the wording here vague for now because nothing is set in stone, but what this could mean is much faster episode production at a higher quality, off of youtube. This is dependant on us finding a deal with somewhere that understands our intent for the show and shares our values, but it's a very exciting possibility that we never would've thought available to a little indie project like ours. A lot of experienced people love what the show offers and we couldn't be more proud. We'll also let you be the first to know that this might mean we private the episodes that are currently on youtube. They would still be available to you patrons and our discord server members as unlisted video links, and all the other non-episode media would remain, but our new friends think the comparatively low view counts could hurt opinions of possible interested parties (even though that's much more to do with our complete lack of marketing skills than anything else). This isn't for sure, but we do want to respect the advice of our new friends' experience with these things. We have been told we can keep producing the show ourselves, which we intend to since there are no guarantees of it catching the industry's eye. So you can always look forward to more West Patch, no matter what the future holds!

- Christmas: We're going to be mailing a little something to each patron, so if you don't have your address attached to your patreon, here's a little incentive to do so! It's not anything listed with your patron perks, just a gesture from us for your incredible support of our show. Without you, the above industry news and festivals and the like never would've been a financial investment we'd consider. It's been an amazing gift, so we're sending one in return! 

- The Book: We have a time in mind to fully take a break from animation just to finish this, depending on how faithfully we can follow our Episode 3 schedule. The place to print them has been picked out and our plans for the finished project will hopefully make the wait worth it, so for now this is to say they are still far along and have not been forgotten for those who have spent any amount of months in the book reward tier! 

With all that, we're straight back to the grindstone as usual! Merry Christmas to all our West Patch friends, and warmest blessings to you all! 

Stay warm, and see you next time!