Monthly Update: August 2021
Not much to report this month, it seems. Part V, for my part, has been in the can more or less since the last update. The composer is currently working on it, but as you can imagine it’s difficult to work on a project when you also have a full time job going on. But the good thing is that there’s also no real deadline for anything in this project, which affords up the luxury of taking our time to polish everything as best we can. Point is, I have no idea when Part V will drop as of this update. The music could be finished up in as soon as a few days, in which case I’ll probably aim to drop the episode on or around August 24th, but it may be later than that by a few weeks, no way to know for sure. But the good news is it’ll be out soon! I feel bad for taking so long for this current episode. It’s been well over 6 months since Part IV, which is a far cry from the 2-3 months between the last few episodes. It’s been a real hard episode, and I do hope you’ll enjoy it!
Speaking of full time jobs, I’m back working in an actual office again for my real job. It’s such an odd thing after over a year of working at home. I don’t know how it is for others, but or the first couple of days I could feel this gnawing unease in the back of my head, just due to being surrounded by other real life people. Thankfully that went away fairly quickly. I’m approaching 2 years of working on this movie (Black Adam), which is a record for me. I haven’t ever worked on a project for more than a year, so to double that number is pretty wild to me. Nothing compared to some people, I know. Regardless, it’s easily the best project I’ve ever been a part of. I do look forward to the day when I finally wrap, though, as I would like nothing more than to take a couple weeks to just focus on this project. With just two or three weeks I could accomplish so much, it would be nuts. But as for now my time spent on work is limited to 8-12 hours every weekend.
That being said, Part VI is progressing fairly quickly, especially compared to Part V. Looking back and looking forward, Part V is looking to possibly be the most technically demanding episode of the lot in terms of pure animation. Part VII is still slated to be extremely complicated, but animation wise it may still prove to be overall easier to animate than Part V. Compared to both those episodes, Part VI is a cake walk and then some. This current episode has less constant action, less simulation, and more medium/ close up shots, which cuts down on the amount of body animation I need to do. As of this update I’m over the 50% point for animation. I may even be closer to 66% done, as my animatics are usually timed a lot slower than the actual thing. By this time next month, I could be finished with animation! I doubt that, since I have family coming to visit in early Sepetember, and I’m sure there will be other factors, but it will be close. Next week I have a day scheduled out to film a lot of animation reference for the remaining complicated physical shots, and once those are done it’ll be a quick jog to the finish. So, expect Part VI to come out far closer to the release of Part V than V was to IV.
Other than animation, I’ve been doing a lot of writing. On the weekdays I’ve been going through my story bible and polishing a lot of details, making sure everything has a name and those names make sense in the lore, making sure all events make sense on the series timeline, etc etc. Most of what I’ve been doing is committing all the things I had in my head to paper, to have a record of it all. As of now I have a thick document detailing the world history, detailed backgrounds of all the main characters, world locations, religions, factions, countries, all the stuff you want. I’ve also prepared a detailed outline for a proper story, and not just a short film. Some day soon I’ll actually begin writing the script for that properly.
All in all it’s a been a pretty sleepy summer month. Work continues, and one day it will be finished! The final episode is in my sights, and when that is done I’ll finally get to sit back and look at this entire crazy thing all at once. But until then, there’s so much to be done. Until next month!
Alex
