TH17.5 short progress #10 (Patreon)

We're at the final stages of finally getting the animated short out. It's been a long time coming and now I'm at the home stretch. But there's still a lot of work to do, and even after it's finished, this is merely the beginning of my animation journey. I just wanted to let you guys in on what is happening at this end stage and when you can expect the animated short to make its debut.

The biggest news is that coloring is practically finish and I'm now in the compositing stage where the real fun begins. But I didn't actually tested out compositing for this short so I'm taking some time to experiment with that. You already saw some test concepts on the last update and this time it's more of the same, only now I'm aiming for the actual thing. So I'll just show you some more of the test that I have performed to find the right look.

First, I did an animation test with some compositing on a particular cut.

What I did here was applied the gradients on the character rather than the gradient coming from the video editor itself. However, I don't like it. I would rather have the video editor add the atmospheric effects, and that's what I started experimenting with.

This time, the gradients are coming from the video editor itself. The shadows and highlights are still manually added, but the subtle red glow as well as the light source from the background is from the video editor. I really like it. It adds a really foreboding atmosphere. Like flan is really deep underground.

I did a bit more experimenting and came up with this one, which I actually like moreso. While the previous one had a more warmer tone to it, this one adds a cooler tone on top while keeping the warmer tone on the bottom in a subtle way. This one also adds more darkness all around by a little bit. I feel It increases the creepy atmosphere even more so.

But as much as I like this, I fear that it may be too dark. That maybe the viewers won't be able to see much of the character.  You can barely see her Flandre's wings in both shots. I'm going to try to experiment with the intensity and see if I can get a good balance but I'm really interested in keeping this atmosphere, at least for the beginning when the area is dark. As you may know, the blood pools actually has two backgrounds with the second one being more bright and red. I'll be experimenting with that background next but before that, I'll be doing some test with Yuuma to see how she gets affected with this dark atmosphere.

I'll be posting Yuuma and the second background experimentation soon so let me know what you guys think about this dark atmosphere.