Sif Savery

2022 HIGHLIGHTS MEGAPOST

Added 2023-01-08 19:55:52 +0000 UTC

Dear Patrons,

2022 was a big year, so I thought it'd be only right to collect the highlights in one big mega-post. Enjoy!

TALES OF ZALE FLICKERING LIGHTS

Of course, the BIG highlight this year was that 'Tales of Zale - Flickering Lights' finally released. After 3 years of production, and even longer in figuring out what I wanted from the story, it was amazing to finally be able to call this little film done and share it with the world.

COMPOSITING

As the year began, I also started a new full-time job and started juggling it between the work on Flickering Lights. Luckily, at this point the production itself was pretty far along. Most shots were coloured and cleaned, and that just left some old shots that I wanted to redo, as well as A LOT of compositing to be pushed. This is what mostly kept me busy while waiting for the sound work to ramp up.

APPLICATIONS

Something else that kept me busy at the beginning of the year was application work. It's not all of them that ended up going through, but luckily the most important application to the Vest-Danish Film Fund, applying for funding to do visual development on the Tales of Zale TV-series with the animation studio, Nørlum, was successful!

TV SERIES DEVELOPMENT

I got to spend 2 months working with a small team of artists to revamp the character designs, make a 45 second animated TV concept trailer, as well as a bunch of really cool concept art. Since we are pitching it around right now, the time for sharing this work publicly is not quite there yet. But I've snuck a couple of screen shots in here on Patreon over the year, which I can at least share again:

Since there wasn't time for animatic and planning within the small budget, I made sure to take care of that well ahead of time. It's super duper necessary in bringing the vision to life. Initially, we'd only planned to have a couple of shots done within the time frame, since we only had the animator onboard for a very limited time. But I could jump in and fill positions like clean-up artist and compositor as needed, so we actually finished the whole production with time to spare. It was nice to get to direct while also having some hands-on time... I'm sure I'll talk more about this process once we can release the trailer!

A couple of years back, we made some initial explorations with a team of interns and color thumbs from Danfango. It's some of this work that we built upon during this round of style explorations. So these Miro board outtakes aren't representative of what we did this year, and there's a lot of stuff missing from them, but I thought it might still be nice to see to pixelated overviews to get an idea of what sort of work we've been doing:

EPISODE RELEASE

It's been really fun to follow the release of Flickering Lights, and finally have a finished thing to share with the world. Likewise, I've really enjoyed interacting with everybody on the social media platforms. Thank you to those who joined in my excitement over the rising view count <3

At the time of writing, we've just recently passed 400k views. I don't know what, but I'm going to have to do something or other once we reach that half million!

EXHIBITION

Regardless of internet success, I really wanted to mark the release in some special way to get that sense of closure from putting out such a long-term project. So together with my mom's drawing school and the Viborg Animation Festival, I arranged a behind the scenes exhibition, which also resulted in an art book.

MERCH STORE

With this Art Book made, it was only appropriate to open a small merch store. I was lucky enough to have some illustrators nearby who had plenty experience in making high-quality prints. And I had some cool wooden standees made as well. It's been real nice (and super helpful financially while moving and travelling) to have the store, but I also don't want to spread myself too thin. At the time of writing, I've just about run out of wooden standees, and there are only around 30 art books left. I won't be able print more art books (the only reason I could make these was because a Danish fund paid for print and design), but I'd love to make more standees and what-not. Right now the plan is to close down shop around February 7th, and then maybe have it return once I have made some more stock to sell. So if you're reading this in the future and find that the store is down or entirely sold out, that's probably why.

FREDRIKSTAD ANIMATION FESTIVAL

I didn't make 'Tales of Zale - Flickering Lights' for festivals. In fact, I hadn't even considered the notion that it could be shown at such an event. But during Annecy, I met some different festival representatives who convinced me to give it a shot. Happy that I did - travelling to Norway and, to my big surprise, winning the Children's Film award was definitely another big highlight this year! Though I don't think it'll be a fit for that many festivals (and I am shooting a bit blind on which ones to apply for sometimes), it's still kinda neat to be collecting some laurels.

ANNECY & CTNX

One of the things that really appeals to me about the animation world is that it is so global. I don't necessarily need to live abroad, but I'll start feeling cooped up if I don't travel a bit outside of Denmark's borders. So I'm super happy that I got to visit 3 different countries this year. Especially since Annecy (France) was my first trip abroad since covid. It's in Annecy over the summer where I first started warming up to pitch Tales of Zale again. Really got to train that elevator pitch, even though we didn't have any concrete goals with it other than to show it a bit around.

All of a sudden, I had the opportunity to have my first ever trip to the US as well, through talking about my creative journey at CTNX in LA. It served as a bit of vacation as well - although it sure is limiting not to have a car over the, nothing like travelling around in Europe. I was very fortunate to have some friends in the area.

PITCHES

Proper full-on pitching started to ramp up towards the end of the year. It's been a pretty positive experience so far, but I can tell it's going to be a while before we see solid results. It's cool to see the change that has happened since finishing the visual development and trailer though. I've pitched TOZ before back when it was mainly a one-person venture, but now it is received with a whole different air of seriousness. Right now, we are exploring options A and B and seeing if they lead anywhere. If they don't, we'll have to go down the list - or wait and see what opportunities arise later.

MUSIC VIDEO

While we had planned to release more Flickering Lights behind-the-scenes and extra material towards the end of the year, I think the team and I overexerted ourselves a tad around the release of the film itself. So we've taken one thing at a time. For me, the first goal was to release a music video for the ending song before the end of the year. This was mostly a matter of editing. Matthew and I are hoping to be able to release the full OST before long. If you haven't already, you can check out the 'Lose Her' music video here!

OTHER PROJECTS

In between the full-time work (which isn't really interesting enough to share), the Flickering Lights production, the trailer, the travelling, the art book writing, and the exhibition, I somehow managed to squeeze in a few freelance projects. It issss not healthy to multitask one-person productions with very tight deadlines on top of all that other stuff. But the first one was because I needed a creative break, and the second one pretty much funded the Norway and US trips. So I certainly don't regret having taken them on.

I also made a small peace dove animation around February-March.

And towards the end of the year, I started doing animation tests for an upcoming production and learning more of the hand drawn Toon Boom workflow. It's not 100% certain yet, but the plan is to start work as an animation supervisor in this new year, after the current full-time production wraps up. It'd be a good transition into directing, if the series all of a sudden takes off (is what the studio producer is thinking). On my end, I just want to make sure I can carry that if needed, so I've been spending some time prepping.

A very warm thank you to Patreon supporters and people who have been buying stuff in the merch store. It is only because of this that I was able to buy a permanent Toon Boom license. After having used the software during some of the full-time work this year, as well as for the Tales of Zale TV-trailer, I've been pretty convinced that this was a software I'd eventually need to master. Having worked in TVPaint for almost 10 years, it's kind of nice to have a whole new system to explore (even if it was a bit difficult to switch over to in the beginning). This doesn't mean that I'll stop working in TVPaint or with my old approaches, but it's nice to have more tools available.

SKETCHES:

After finishing Flickering Lights, I've finally been able to sketch for fun again, playing with different approaches. I tend to become very goal-oriented when there's a big project at hand, so it's been long since I could let my mind and pencil wander freely. I've had to draw Zale 'on model' for the whole short film, so it's been super nice to just draw him in whichever way I feel like! I'm probably forgetting some stuff, but here are at least some sketch outtakes: