Status Updates 4 - Slowly

Intro

So I’ve been working on my first, long-ish storytime short. I began working on it last fall, and spent very little time each week progressing it. I left production on weekends for a few months and progress was snail speed.

Currently it’s running at a minute long, and has been a real pain in the butt to make. One of the reasons for the slow production is that this short is fully colored.

Adapt

This short is the start of my long form production, so there will be a lot of growing pains and adjustments as I figure out how to adapt to this new process. I will say, even though the short is starting to come together, I am very open to going back to the black and white look for storytime shorts (or perhaps another adaption of this design language).

When the project started, I had the intention of animating it in the app “Calipeg”. However after the production of my last short “Help Desk”, I was left unsatisfied with the programs features. I went back to “Toonsquid” for this short, and the timing couldn’t be better as the app released its second version with a bunch of new features. So the drawing process has been fairly chaotic as I work my way through re-learning the tools and also adapting to the new features. Toonsquid is really good though. It’s feature rich, and has a lot of potential in producing animation. I’m excited about developing more shorts in it.

Or Die

One of the frustrations of this project was that I haven’t used the comic effects for my shorts in a while, and the new After Effects updates have broken some of them. I spent some time last winter fixing up those templates and they couldn’t last one update with out breaking down. How frustrating! One of my goals was for these templates in particular to be smooth and easy to incorporate into shorts and they were, for a very brief time.

The last thing I’ll say is that I don’t have any expectations for this short. The story itself is low stakes, but I have a more experimental position with it. I’ve held back on the quality of my shorts for a while as I felt whenever I produced something I really liked, it bombed. That doesn’t mean I’m not putting any effort into it (on the contrary), but I am more conscious of the effort I put into the content so that it doesn’t drive me crazy. Since the format is still evolving, and I’m still adjusting to long form production, I think it’s more important to figure out my weaknesses, and growth potential for these changes. That way, when I do start making shorts I really, really want to make, they’ll be bangers

Outro

Here’s some screenshots of how the short is looking so far. I haven’t decided yet if I want the narrator to be in color or not (I haven’t even animated him yet, I just finished the voice over), so he’s there as just a placeholder. As always, thanks for reading.

-Until next time-