MOVIE UPDATE - WEEK #1

Hello everyoneeeeee!! Let's start 2026 with a first update on Temporary name: Project Nightbringer!

WEEK #1 Nooot really a week, I took the first of the month off so I've been working on it for 3 days. Let's disassemble the first update in section!

Storyboard, Planning, Script.

One of the major issues of the previous movies was the bad planning and management. This time I organised everything neatly in a folder with all the information I need. The script is almost finished, only lines for sex scenes are missing but those are usually written as I'm animating the scenes themselves :D I planned everything, all the assets I need, all the maps I need to make or assemble, all the characters I need to make and everything I need for each scene. Then I drew the storyboard to help me visualise and imagine the scenes, actually very important and massively life changing. Always. Make. A Storyboard.

Characters

On the first Day I worked on the characters I will need for the Intro. You can find the WiPs in the "Other Folder", I won't post all the images to avoid spoilering too much so just know that there's much more than what I'm posting heehheee >:D (Imagine some goblin noises) For the "NPCs" of the movie I tried to imagine "The faces of Sharrans". Cruel, Twisted, Evil, the followers of the Cult of Loss. I love character design, working on their personality, backstory, their role in the story and their look, I'd have so much to say about this but I don't want to bore you out of your mind on the first update LOL.

Shaders, Compositor, LUT

Planning everything ahead helped a lot preparing for this movie, first thing I did was to edit the character models. I implemented all the stylistic changes to the base model in order to have it ready for the entire project. This section is gonna be about consistency. The main changes were around eyes, inner mouth, skin properties and rigs, don't get me wrong, Nyl's models are SUPER good, all the changes are just to fit my personal preferences! :D I prepared a Compositor Group Node with a bunch of tweakable settings to use for the entire movie then made a LUT in Davinci Resolve to set a tone and colour, this way mantaining a constistency for the movie.

Animation progress

I started working on the Intro, you will find some WiPs in the "Other folder". So far I'm setting up the first scene which will be the Intro to the movie, I assembled the map and set up the scene: Lighting, Composition, Pacing, Cameras and base animation. I gotta admit it took me much longer than my usual, truth is I personally think "Walk animations" are the single hardest animation of all. The good news? I improved A LOT at it in these days and I'm now way more confident. It felt so good to practice it and seeing results, it really boosted so much my morale and I can't wait to finish it.

Alternating work with 2 or more scenes

I will likely take tomorrow off, I need a day of break not just to rest but also to detach for a day from this Intro. For those who don't know, it is actually very helpful to detach yourself from a project for a while. It helps you reset your mind and see things you couldn't see before and drastically improve the results. About this I will try experimenting alternating between working on 2 scenes starting soon from this month, it sounds like a very fun experiment and I will keep you updated about it too! :D

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk and reading all this boring text! I'm having LOOOTS of fun so far! Hope you'll like the WiPs!! :D