Monthly Update: November 2021
Unlike the previous month, this month has been full of progress, thanks in no small part to, ya know, having actual time to work on the project again. The period of crunch I had for my normal job is done (for now), and without having to worry about that I am free to focus on wrapping up the remaining bits of Part VI, and getting a head start on Part VII, i.e. the finale.
Part VI is completely finished, at least in terms of my part. The animation is done, the edit is locked, it’s lit and rendered, and sound design is complete. Now it’s off to Toft for the score, and once he’s finished it’ll be out in the world. I’m hoping to get release it sometime before the end of the year, but it’s hard to say since there’s no set deadline or schedule when it comes to the music, so that’ll take as long as it needs to. If I can’t get the final mix done before the middle of December or so, I may sit on the episode until the new year. It might be a hassle trying to get it out there when in the thick of the holiday season, but then again I might be overthinking it. We’ll see when the time comes.
In terms of sound for Part VI, this was the first instance of having purchased sound effects outside of the original sound library I procured, which has proven to me more than enough to handle what I need thus far. But for Part VI, the sonic landscape changes somewhat due to the introduction of a new character, and I simply didn’t have enough sounds of wood or stone to adequately convey their presence. Over a year ago I went on a journey to collect a bunch of sticks for this very occasion with the intent of recording foley for what I needed, but the pack I found is easily a better solution. Besides, all those sticks have been sitting outside since then, and are probably full of spiders by this point. Either way, I’m very pleased with how the sound turned out for this upcoming episode, and I think it might be my favorite episode thus far, at least in terms of audio.
As for the future, Part VII is rolling along at a very satisfying pace, at least for now. As a result of the aforementioned crunch, the production saw fit to give my department the week off to recuperate. It was incredibly gracious of them to do so, and I took the week to dive into the finale with much gusto. In the last week, I make tweaks to the remaining sets to reflect the updated time of day, and other elements. The Grand Hall interior has gotten a minor face lift to bring out more detail in the structure, and I created a new lighting scheme, and the exterior city has gotten a complete overhaul. As the dawn approaches, it becomes obvious that a lot of the distant buildings aren’t nearly as gothic as they should be, but given how I’ve acquired more building to work with since I first started, I went back and did another pass. Unfortunately the fact that the architecture is different in these two environments does mean I’ll need to go back and rerender aspects of Part I and III for continuity purposes. I may be able to get away with not doing that, but we’ll see. I also need to rerender aspects of Part IV and V, because I made Asier’s sword less comically huge. All these changes don’t really matter, so I can let them slide, especially since the plan is to still rerender the whole thing anyway when it’s all complete. But I should probably make those changes just so all the individual episodes don’t have any glaring continuity issues. That’s the downside of releasing a short in parts like this, those things you discover along the way have to be applied retroactively.
Anyway, in terms of the actual content of Part VII, that’s coming along rather well. As I’ve said many times, Part VII is massive compared to all the other episodes. To illustrate, the most complex episode up to this point has been Part V, which was about 1:25 and around 35 shots, with a lot of animation and stuff going on. Part VII will be something like 2:15, and is 67 shots, with even more complex stuff going on in some places. Part V took me like four months to animate, so this next episode is aiming to be quite an undertaking. That being said, this week off has afforded me the ability to animate roughly ten shots, so rounding down I’m roughly 12% finished with the episode. Part VII is so large it’s split up into 3 individual scenes. The first scene I am about half way done with, and I’m very pleased with how it’s coming along. There was a moment in that scene that I was very worried about coming into it. I was having a lot of trouble imagining how this action would play out, and it took several hours of experimentation before I figured out the major poses to best convey what I needed to. Now it’s all said and done and I’m happy with how it turned out. And with that, I know exactly how I want everything to look from here on out, so it’s smooth sailing, in a sense.
I still hope to take some more time off to finish everything once my role on Black Adam has wrapped. I really hope I can get this whole project completed in the first half of next year, but it’s hard to say. But I’m quite confident that this first scene of Part VII will be done before the end of the year. As I said, things are coming along well, and I can’t believe that I’ve arrived at the last episode of this whole thing. I first put digital pen to digital paper October of 2018, and it’s been pretty much non stop work ever since. The finish line is in sight, and it’s only a matter of time and one final effort before I get there.
Until next month!
Alex
