August update: Zale animation breakdown!

Dear Patrons,

No ties this month! Well - except between second place. It's been a while since I shared anything animated, and it looks like you've missed it.

THE ANIMATION:

Credits:

Animation - Tore Poulsen

Backgrounds - Tanja Hass Nielsen

Additional background work - Nicole Di Fresco & Adriana Bica

Storyboards, clean-up & color, compositing - Myself

You voted to see an animated shot, and I decided to give you two, since they link up nicely between one another. 

This is from the teaser which we worked on at the same time as the visual development about a year ago. Now, I have a few caveats here. This is sort of a foundation and a proof of concept, but there's still some room for optimization. The background in the teaser were our first venture into this new background style, and the team definitely got a lot better with the approach as we ventured further into concept art later on. I also think that the animation style I was going for wasn't a particularly good fit for this particular animator, and since there wasn't a whole lot of reference material for this version of Zale and Alba animated yet, I had to do a lot of manual pushing and fixing up throughout the animation and clean-up process. That said, I do think we ended up with a very nice proof of concept, especially given that this wasn't at all in our budget (we were just supposed to do a couple of test shots, but some good time management and a bit of me filling in the gaps allowed us to squeeze a full 45-second teaser in there).

You can kind of see how the ambition grew from the initial "mission". At first, I just wanted to storyboard a couple of shots. But then I ended up thinking that I might as well storyboard the full scene and see how far we could get with it. 

There was this scene from our early test draft of episode 2, which I thought would make for nice little proof of concept, since it shows some of our main duo's dynamic and teases at the world and mystery. Of course, I had to cut it down and modify it to be a bit more stand-alone. You'll  see a bit more of how I went about that as I share more of the teaser down the line .

Back when I wrote the initial mission statement for the animation style, the plan was still to animate the series in TVPaint. Later on, we decided to give Toon Boom a go in this testing phase. While I have a soft spot for TVPaint, having worked in it for more than 10 years, I have to admit that even for frame by frame animation, Toon Boom offers some tools that would be difficult to live without in a TV-series production. This teaser was my first venture into Toon Boom, so there are still some things that could be improved about the work flow - and I do still want to test out a few different pencil brush settings now that I've become more familiar with it - but even so, in the long run there's no doubt it would help to create a more polished product.

You can watch the accompanying animation range video here. 

Likewise, I had a mission statement for the backgrounds. I think compared to where we started, we got quite far in developing this style. But just like with everything else, there's still some room for further polish. There are a few aspects in this mission statement that I'd like to hold a bit tighter onto when we get to the final product.

All in all, I think we accomplished all these missions and then some!

And finally, tagged on because I forgot to put them in the video, here are the color thumbnails for the two shots you've seen:

TV-SERIES:

We start writing this Monday!! I'm super excited. I even spent some of my summer vacation dragging my mom along to some relevant places for location research, so I'm soooo ready.

Where will Zale and Alba be going?? Bonus points if you figure out the location - though I'm probably not in a position to confirm anything!

But for an example of how location research feeds into the writing process, let's go back to the scene from this month's preview. Here's how the initial idea for that particular scene came about:

I started out with finding reference photos that could work into different locations, and then I would write little character scenes off of those photos and see if they could be built into the plot in some way. This is something that I really wanted to improve from the web-series. The world plays a big role, so I don't want it to just become a backdrop or a case of regurgitated inspiration. The more the characters can interact with the world, solve it's puzzles, and have their decisions influenced by there surroundings, the more interesting I think the delivery of the story will become, and the easier it becomes to be drawn in I think. Of course, one thing is finding reference photos on the internet, but I think it's even more ideal if we can do some on-location research at times!

BONUS BIRDS:

And finally, here are some bonus birds for you all. I was planning on sharing them together with Alba's design last month since they wouldn't make enough for a standalone post. But I forgot, so instead I'll share them this month. These are not completely on style, but are some very nice explorations by Paula Huerta who interned with us at the time. And I thought they were too sweet not to share:

ROUND-UP:

On my end, I've had a bit of teeny tiny vacation these past few weeks! Well, I've been working but I've been taking care of 3 different dogs and house-sitting at the same time, so it certainly felt like a bit of a break. Walked an average of 20,000 steps a day I did, so that was nice. But now it's time to get back into things. Finish things started, start things unfinished. Work is going to be very busy in these coming months because there will be 3 projects to juggle at once. We are still looking for the right person to storyboard the pilot episode as well, so there will be some balancing acts to perform. But one step at a time - I'm really looking forward to getting down to some writing!

I'm curious to hear what you think of these teaser clips? I'm so deep in the process, so fresh impressions are very valuable!

I will leave it at that and return to prepping for Monday. Talk to you all later!

- Sif