April Update:

Dear Patrons,

Greetings from the months-long "training montage" that I am currently undergoing. Things are still super busy with the supervising job, and it hasn't allowed for much head-space to work on personal projects as usual. But it should only last until June-ish, so right now I'm trying to take it in stride and learn what I can... That doesn't mean that there aren't any new Tales of Zale updates to get into though, so let's have a look!

TALES OF ZALE TV-SERIES:

We've been interviewing potential writers for the pilot animatic over this past month. There has been some good prospects so far, but we are continuing to take our time making contacts, and not rushing any decisions. We first need to make our final pick around June.

We've gotten the pilot animatic budget fully approved - although we are only really just getting started on the negotiations on what comes after... so that will be veryyy interesting to see unfold.

FMX STUTTGART:

As metioned in the last update, I'll be going to Germany to be a "Fresh Visions" speaker at FMX 2023. Now there's an event link to check out too, in case it's of any interest to any of you. Personally, I just think it's cool to get to travel around and see different places, and talk about stuff that I'm passionate about. I'm happy for the opportunity!

ILLUSTRATION BREAKDOWN:

One thing that I was particularly excited about is that because of FMX I've been allowed to publish one image from last year's visual development. And with that, I can give a breakdown:

With this one, we actually started out from one of the concept/color keys that I commissioned Danfango to do a long while back. He's a super cool artist with a great sense of color, and he's currently working on his own short film, so I warmly recommend checking out his work.

I really love this image as is already, so we wanted to keep the colors and general composition. The whole point of this development round was to define the style of the TV-series more though. And so we had to keep in mind that the backgrounds should be able to be drawn consistently between multiple artists over very short periods of time, should consist of components that can easily be modified and changed according to notes and needs, and should be able to integrate characters and props well with a very limited amount of compositing.

The line art was a big part of the challenge. I knew I wanted the characters to have black lines, and so it would greatly help their integration if there were some sort of lines in the background as well. We had the idea that we wanted constant line pressure in order to avoid too much differentiation between artists and tablets. But it can very easily kill the mood and colors, as you can see below:

These are some of Tanja Hass Nielsen's very first explorations of what the style could look like, trying to experiment with brushes and approaches, with the addition of a very early character test from myself. The trick was also to create a scope that all of the backgrounds would be able to work within.

If you look at the tree in the back, you can see that it changes quite a bit over time. We decided to take a detour to nail down some trees, since that seemed like a good place to start when picking the brushes.

What we realized through these explorations, was that we'd still be able to get a somewhat painterly look without traditionally painting the backgrounds, which I quite liked. On top of that we narrowed down vegitation and solid object brushes to just a few that would help us in creating a consistent style. We experimented with this approach on a few different key images before finally returning to this one:

This final version of the image was started by Tanja, and then finished by Adriana Bica. 

It was a really good learning experience, since defining the style wouldn't just be about what "looks good", but also what "looks good and can work consistently". There are many more considerations to layer on top of the usual when designing something for TV. It's usually a very tight budget (especially in Europe) made under a very tight time frame - and so, I think the shows that pull it off well are usually the ones who create some solid stylistic parameters to itself. So far, the style stood the test over the trailer production - but we'll of course have to put it to many more tests during proper full production!

OST COVERS:

The OST Spotify release is finally almost upon us! Matthew has been working hard to get it all ready, and we should be able to release it in the coming week-or-so. I will of course be sure to post about it when it's out.

On my end, I've had to come up with a little visual package. I went a bit back and forth with what I wanted the cover to look like. I had to scrap some ideas underway that didn't really work, and In the end, I decided on another cameo from Danfango. These illustrations were originally a building block for the TV-series pitch and development, and so I didn't share them publicly. But now that we've moved onto the next stage of the development, I can finally show them off - and in this case feature one for the sound track! 

OTHER FESTIVAL SCREENINGS:

Since last post, 'Tales of Zale - Flickering Lights' was selected for another festival - this time in Japan:

I've been holding off on submitting to any more festivals as of late unless I'm specifically asked to submit, or know of the festival already in some way. Because it's a really big ocean of never-ending festivals otherwise.

But the Fredrikstad Animation Festival is actually doing some of the work for me right now, by bringing the film around as their "best of FAF" program. It's been showing up at a couple of Norwegian venues, and most recently I've been notified that it'll be shown at Trollywood Animation Festival, Sweden, and Animest Bucharest International Animation Film Festival, Romania. I might aim to go to the latter, but it's still so far off, so we'll see!

EXHIBITION SEQUEL:

Another thing that's far off, but kinda official already is that the Tales of Zale exhibition will have a small sequel. I say "small", because I'm not sure of all the specifics yet. Either way, Farum Kulturhus in Denmark has booked me for an Artist Talk on September 7th for their local animation festival initiative. The program is currently being printed, so I'll share more details as the time nears.

ROUND-UP:

The nature of animation is really one of echoes and delays. I'm finally able to show a bit of representation of what I've been working on in the past year, while I'm currently unable to show any of what I'm working on in this moment. It's a bit of a dilemma I face on the social media as well, since so many people have only become aware of my work after I've finished it. Of course, it wouldn't be an issue if current projects weren't under NDA. Then I could at least show my progress as I went along. I think many rights-holders have become a lot better about letting artists share their work and process on social media - but only after the project's release. Whether unfortunately or fortunately, I don't think that is going to change any time soon. So for now, I hope you will bare with me during this slight "hibernation" period, where I'm mainly sharing older work. Nonetheless I hope there are interesting insights to be found!