WIP: One scene left!

Good morning! It's a wonderful day today~

The reason for that is unrelated to XIV but I'm just going to gush about for a little bit and share that TODAY'S IS PAPER MARIO: THE THOUSAND YEAR DOOR RELEASE on Switch!!!! It's such a miracle that this game exists. Nintendo was all about disappointment for me these last years (I used to be such a Nintendo fangirl back in the GC days!), and as an OG Paper Mario fan since the N64 days I've had given up hope that they would actually listen to the fans and re-release the best Mario game they've ever created...and it only took them 20 years to do so. Yes, I'm old and spiteful about it now.

If you like RPGs and games with a fantastic turn-based system, brilliant writting, witty humor and a wonderful experience overall, even if you're not a Mario fan, get this game!!! It's still up there in my Top 5 favorite games of all time (and it might be objectively a better game than some of the top 3 ones, if I'm being honest with myself :P)

I can talk about it all day if you ask me, but that's not what this post should be about, so let's get down to business! (to defeat--)

There's only that one last scene that I consider the hardest to get right to finish! I...still have it in the layout stage, so now I've got to really focus on that one. Record reference for it an all, not be lazy about it. It's 10 seconds long as far as the layout goes (that highlighted part up there!), which is...more than I expected now that I had to count, but if I have to make it longer for the action to work, then I will.

To be completely honest, I'm still not completely feeling this video yet. Some of my last videos I was like giggling in excitement to finish it the whole way through, but it's not the case with this one...it could be because it's slower than any before, but I worry that it comes out as too boring. My main worry while layouting it and thinking about it was being able to convey their relationship during that time in a flashback, and making it fit that one ShB scene. Maybe I'm so worried about the technical aspects, getting the movement right, the camera not being confusing etc that I might not be enjoying the self-endulgement of it this time.

It may also be because it's taking way longer than I anticipated to. It's been officially more than a month that I'm working on it! It's not just about the scenes being complicated, but more so that I keep going back to fix stuff I'm worried about. I just don't want it to be bad, you know?

Like getting the miqo'te sit pose just right. The amount of times I went back to it until I was happy with it...

I do feel it's been a great experience as far as learning goes, and while animating it, I feel like I've been more attentive to details, while also doing some things faster than I used to. I've been watching some videos about camera placement and movement to make sure everything looks ok, so every single work counts towards that, which is always good. And that's the most important thing...I just have to keep reminding myself of it to keep things fun, that's what it's all about! Perfectionism is bad because nothing will ever be perfect, and I feel I kinda let myself down a senseless negative spiral there for a while with this one. Sorry about that!

That's why I really want to finish it soon, and because I already have a fun little sketched storyboard for the next one that would make much more sense to release it before Dawntrail! And it's 9 shots long, which is also a little bit long...but I tried to balance it thinking of easy to finish shots, so no lip-syncing or complex body mechanics or anything. I will be starting that one immediately after releasing this.

...and so I really, really want to focus on working on this. Which is going to be quite challenging since this weekend is going to be busy - not only I want some free time to play Paper Mario :'), but I have a bunch of IRL things scheduled that I can't postpone anymore, so not a lot of time to animate...let alone edit a sunday video. So I'm really sorry to disappoint, but I might have to skip this week's patreon video just this once. I'm actually really happy that I was able to release a weekly video here every week since I opened this Patreon, so breaking this combo is a bit upsetting, but I hope it means I get to finish this one soon as then have better material for the next one. As usual, I will be posting a public post about it here as soon as it's out, so there's still going to be something here but...yeah. I want to compensate for it in the future.

OH RIGHT. Speaking of patreon posts, I realized there's a lot of posts now since I started, and...I haven't been tagging things properly. So from now on I will tag them better and as I have time during the week I will backtrack my post and add the proper tags as needed. So if you're looking for a video about animation, there will now be a tag for animation, one for VFX, SFX, etc. And also an additional tag for the video I'm working on, so you can filter the Weekly WIPs by which video I'm talking about. Sorry for not adding that from the beginning!

So that's it for today, thank you VERY much for your support! And I hope I have a full video to share with you all very soon. :)