Episode 11 Update - 06/04/24 (Patreon)

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Hello. I'm still deep in character animation but wanted to keep you updated with what’s going on. To be honest, I’m a little frustrated. Scene F has been far more vicious to me than I understood it to be.

Scene F contains the climax as well as the most special effects required in the episode. The plan was to completely finish Scene F by the time I got Scene D back from the animator working on it. That way, I could pass F along to a VFX artist while I focus solely on D. Both D and the VFX will take ample time, so I really need to get them going ASAP.

However, I wasn’t able to cap off Scene F. I’ve been trying to finish all of F for two months. I keep thinking I’m almost done with it, but stuff keeps coming up and needing to be adjusted. I fear I might be acting too nit picky, but at the same time I feel like this scene is really working now. It's come so, SO far. This scene contains many characters connected by string, moving in tandem, and my adjusting any one thing offsets so many other things. I keep wanting to say it’s almost done but now I’m afraid to jynx it. I have completed the climax of to the best of my abilities, but it still doesn’t seem polished enough for me to confidently pass to vfx.

Scene D has now been given back to me with one of the characters fully animated. The animator did fantastic work. Even though Scene F is not done, I have given it off to that same animator to polish up the climax for VFX. He is a very skilled animator and I hope he can pick up some of the areas where I’m lacking, but only time will tell..

I really wanted to finish Scene D in June. It’s more than half done and it’s the laaaast one. Although I am finished animating the climax, there are still character-focused parts at the start and end of Scene F that I need to do myself. There are certain characters that I feel like only I can animate correctly, given the acting I'm going for. As much as I want to move to D, I really think it’s important to finish scene F completely and totally so that the VFX artist can do everything at once. Once I finish F completely and totally I will feel so much more confident. That scene basically /is/ the episode.

Outside of that, the musician currently scoring A has juuuust gotten back to me. He’s getting it done slowly on account of being a show runner on a different project for the last few months. My notes there included major changes, but I really appreciate that some of the songs in this episode will sound like a professional film score, while others are things you could swear are actual Pokémon music. It’s really interesting. I’d really like to have this guy score F if I am able to afford it.

Lastly, I am tentatively planning on releasing a short music video about Starter Squad, featuring some in-progress shots from ep 11. I noticed that my channel on YouTube does not have a channel trailer and I feel like this would suffice for one. It also serves as a great little ad for the show. However, the music is computer generated, and I’m not sure if it actually works as a piece. If you check out my rough draft of it can decide for yourself if it’s something worth finishing and releasing. I was thinking of putting motion-graphics over it, displaying the lyrics with a little bit of flair. It'd be nice to upload something, but also, I don't want to upset those who have been patiently waiting for the episode with yet more filler content. If you're still reading this, I'd love to know what you think.