It’s been a busy 2 weeks. I feel like my body is going to collapse and go in to a coma for no less than 7 days ;_;.
That said, I wrapped up the last bit of clean up animation for Episode 6: Broken Promises yesterday. It’s done, after about a year of production, it’s finally done. Well, sort of done. The animation part is done. So what does that mean? It means we move into audio production. I begin reviewing the episode with some close colleagues, friends that are voice actors/directors, animators, etc. The goal is to go over the voice over, see if there’s any way we can improve the performances, might add more inbetweens for certain sequences etc etc. Basically it moves into the “polishing phase”.
When I rebooted the series in 2013, once I was done with the animation, I just ran into throwing sfx down and putting out the episode. Usually it was around 2-3 days after I finished animation clean up that the episode was released. I stopped doing that with Episode 4 once I got a sound designer. And since it’s basically been a year since Episode 5 was released, a little more time couldn’t hurt.
Previous episodes took me somewhere between 3-4 months, so why did this one take so long?
I got burnt out is the easiest answer. The animatic for this episode was finished within 2 months of Episode 5’s release. Mid-August was when the episode had a full, flowing form. But towards the end of August a lot of things in my life happened and it effectively knocked me out of motivation and a few things until early December. So for 3 months, this episode was really in some sort of limbo of not being touched because of life.
But once things got back to normal, I was able to really jump back into production for it. So about 4 months of actual clean up was given to this episode. Still, it was at least twice as long as it would normally take. But considering this is the Act 1 finale, I wanted to push myself as much as possible.
Mech scenes are more polished than any of the previous episodes. Body language to match the emotions from the characters are more polished than the previous episodes. I spent about a month on one scene in particular, kept going back, adding things, fixing the pacing, etc, etc.
But it was worth it. Oh, and the episode is also a lot longer than any of the previous stand alone episodes, so that made the production go longer too!
So now I’m going to go rest as I’ve passed the episode off to friends. I’m going to go reboot my system, recharge my energy for the rest of this week before jumping back to this episode and implement any changes/improvements that may be suggested.
I would estimate a June release for the episode.