April 18, 2022
Welcome, old and new, to the production blog!
It's good to finally come back after a break. I feel more inspired, motivated, and experienced, and I'm ready to unveil the next (and final) phase of this project.
Here's what it looks like so far:
And here is the updated asset list and a new milestone document:
During my three-month hiatus, I worked inbetweening some more difficult shots and began laying down values for the color script. However, creating the color script convinced me to change the final production look of my film, from lined to lineless. It's a style I'm much more experienced with and will save me a lot of time when polishing the animation.
That being said, here's the color script so far:
And here is an example animated short I did a couple of years ago to show how a lineless animation in my style would look. The short was a fan-animated short I made inspired by the Netflix movie, Next-Gen.
Moving on to what I did for this week, I inbetweened two more difficult shots, and updated Runa's character sheet to fit the lineless look. Immediately, the work became much more realistically manageable when I updated the sheet.
Here are the shots I worked on:
And here is Runa's fresh new look!
The color is not final, but it helps by giving me a reference point to start from when I'll be working on coloring the backgrounds. I'll eventually update Milo's sheet as well in the future.
That being said, I also want to be transparent about my goals for the next three months. I personally don't expect to see this film completely polished and finalized by summer. Instead, this quarter I will be finalizing all of the animations, finalizing all of the backgrounds, and animating all of the special effects in the film (such as the map sequences, the sketching, and a 3d background sequence). There will be a watchable film by summer, just not the final draft.
It's been a fever dream of a journey witnessing this film starting from texts on a Notion page, to a literal animated movie. I'm still in mild disbelief that I actually made this. It's amazing to see how much work I can do in three short months!
I can't wait to see what comes out of it from now on. We're officially on the last stretch!
Thank you, so much, for reading. See you next week!
(p.s. Unrelated, but I also made an entirely new film during my hiatus. You know, like a sane person would do. Go check it out! It's interactive.)