Death to the Daleks - WIP & Thoughts (Patreon)

Hello all!

As you can see from the screenshot of my Sony Vegas timeline above, the animation is about 55% done. Then it'll be SFX and music!

I've gotten a bunch more of it animated since my last post, and wanted to wrap up a big explosion that would make the scene pop. So I'll show you either that chunk or the Darkstalkers print image next post. For this week, here's a few screenshots and observations as an animator.

One thing that I've really noticed with this project is just how much longer animation takes the more characters you have moving on screen. Alien Monday took a long time, but was mostly just one character - sometimes two characters if you include the alien. With this one, there are always about four or five humans moving around in every scene and it's crazy how long each shot takes to finish! I think it really is as simple as just double the time estimate for every animated character on screen.

↑ Occasionally I can get away with just one character animating, and have some still people in the background. But even so, this shot is only two seconds long and the rocks took hours to paint...! Hahaha, the life of a suffering artist...

↑ And then there's crowd scenes. Absolutely nightmarish! Have you heard the story from the Ghibli film The Wind Rises? It took one guy fifteen whole months to animate a crowd scene in the film. I believe it was this one:

At least the Daleks are 3D and don't have a ton of limbs to move around...!

Now that I think of it, I don't think I've ever really had to animate a huge crowd. Here's Yasuomi Umetsu, best known for his perverted works like KITE and Mezzo Forte, animating a crowd in Ellcia (1992)

Speaking of which, TV anime these days tends to just use 3D assets for crowd scenes to avoid the Studio Ghibli timesink:

For a distant shot like above it kind of works, but if you look closely the characters are very obviously 3D people all using the same walk cycle (this is from the anime Call of the Night).

Anyway, I've been having fun reimagining the Dalek POV shots as well.

They looked like this in the original story:

Also, in the original story, the primitive alien savages just run at the Dalek and hit him with sticks until he explodes. Daleks are supposed to be almost impenetrable tank-like machines so I always thought that was way too underpowered and made the Daleks look weak. You'll have to wait until next week to see how I've updated our heroic soldier's sad demise!

But then, I suppose they've been defeated kind of easily before...

He didn't even kill anyone on his way down the ramp. I'd have been petty like that.

ANYWAY! Enough of my musings. Back to work...!

-Paul