March Preview

Dear Patrons,

Hope you are having a happy March! It's been another busy month - but again, busy in the good way! I think this is one of those months where it makes sense to go over things point by point, so without further ado...

TALES OF ZALE WEB-EPISODE 3:

It's a rather short preview clip that I have chosen to show this time around - and it has a big chunk in the middle that hasn't been cleaned up or fixed up yet! That's not because that's the only scene I've been working on. It's just that my work this month has been pretty scattered. I've been working on shots from all over the episode, so it's been harder to pick one specific preview scene. But so how is it going overall? Well, I can be pretty specific about that:

This is the approximate percentage level of "done" I am on each front! I dusted off the ol' excel document to gain an overview. It's calculated based off of how many shots are done, so it's not entirely exact. An easy shot weighs as much as a difficult one. But there are both some easy and hard shots ahead, so it kind of averages out. The reason that the total is only at 49% is because it takes coloring, compositing and backgrounds into account as well. Those things are generally be faster than clean-up though. It's really clean-up that is the killer... but with 78% done I'm starting to see light at the end of the tunnel! Although there are some real monster shots ahead still! The remaining bit of animation that needs to be done is very reliant on the backgrounds, so that's something that will come towards the very end. 

Want to see a time-lapse of a shot being cleaned up? Then click here :) 

TALES OF ZALE (TV) WRITING: 

Writing has been progressing nicely! For those who might have missed it, I am currently developing Tales of Zale as a TV-series together with the Danish studio Nørlum. It's still very early on, but we got a bit of funding from the Vest-Danish Film Institute to get a Writer onboard and take some dedicated time to develop the project. We've had out fair share of obstacles, but somehow we've been able to overcome them one by one and get the work to a point where I'm really excited about what we are making! I hate that I have to be so vague... but this is one things where it's going to take a while before I can show off the fruits of our labor. Still, thought I should mention it since that's where a good bunch of my time is going these days!

WOLFWALKERS:

Finally, I'm able to show some of the stuff I worked on on Wolfwalkers during my internship a couple of years ago! So far I've released 3 small videos: this one, this one and this one. I'm not sure if I'm going to put out more animation than that, because most of the other shots I worked on were ones where I animated Merlyn while somebody else had animated the other character in the shot. But maybe I'll make a video about bird animation at some point and show some of that there, who knows. Or maybe I'll figure out something else... it's hard to say right now. Meanwhile, I've attached a TVPaint file of one of the shots I did in case you're curious to check out the timecharts or what-not! Also, some Merlyn pose exploration:

ROUNDUP:

Has it already been a month since my last post!? I feel like time passed way too fast! I also had to go back to work on the TeamTo project for a bit over a week because of some notes. But that all feels so long ago now. I guess that might be the effects of being in writing-mode: things feel like they mode along quite a bit faster than when only doing animation. It's been nice to have both in my everyday life at the same time - it's a good combination.

For now, I continue forward with it all - let's get that clean-up tracker to 100%! (or at least 89% for now). I'll keep you posted. Take care!

- Sif