work-in-progress Sublo animation! (Patreon)

Hey patrons, here's some animation I've been doing for Sublo and Tangy Mustard season 3! Nothing complete yet-- most of it isn't coloured, some shots are missing in-betweens or lip sync-- but I figured I should start actually sharing footage now that animation is underway.

This music is a dumb little joke I did a while ago, the Sublo and Tangy Mustard theme in the style of Neon Genesis Evangelion's preview music. Seemed appropriate for a little sneak peek.

One of the tough things about doing the show is trying to balance the big-picture producer view of "I need to put the episode out ASAP, it doesn't have to be perfect, just has to tell the story" with the shot-by-shot animator temptation to add some subtle acting, sneak in a few more in-betweens, an extra background angle for a particular shot,  etc... That stuff feels more important in the moment while I'm working on a shot, looking at it over and over, but when I watch the whole cartoon it all goes by so fast and I sometimes feel the extra work is unnecessary. I guess the right balance is somewhere in the middle, and different for everybody.

Another hard thing is always animating the very first shot of each new episode, especially if I haven't been animating for a while. I tend to procrastinate on it for a couple of days, picking off backgrounds and designs for other episodes, before I finally bite the bullet and start animating. I usually pick an easy one just to break the ice, because you build up momentum and overcome that initial fear of putting down a bad drawing pretty fast. For this season, it was the two shots of Sublo and Tangy Mustard playing video games you can see in the video above.

Anyway, I hope you like seeing some of this rough stuff! I'm reluctant to reveal spoiler-y stuff before the episodes are done, but I know half the point of Patreon is to share behind-the-scenes stuff so I'll try to get over it and I'll share some more footage soon!