Episode 9 Progress - 3/15/19 (Patreon)

Hello friends.  I have had a tremendous week.  About a week ago, I drove into the desert and isolate myself in a hotel room so I could work on the episode with absolutely no distractions.  The goals was to finish 21,725 FRAMES of animation.

Here is the whiteboard from my resulting week:

As you can see, I've only managed to finish around 5,000 frames.  Even on days where I got out of bed, went straight to the laptop and worked all day until I was exhausted with a headache and went straight back to bed, I could finish just over 1,000 frames at most.  This is a far cry from the 2,000+ frames a day I'd been planning.  Needless to say, I bit off more than I could chew.

However, I am actually very pleased with my progress.  In those 5,000 frames I jumped over incredible hurdles that I didn't know how I was going to approach, including a scene with a tricky rigid body/fluid simulation.  I've developed a workflow.  I'm now way, way more comfortable with the Blender animation process.  And now, aside from lighting, the first four minutes of the episode are pretty much completely finished and very watchable.  I am making far more progress here than I was at home.  So I have decided, for the time being, to stay in the desert and continue to marathon this workload.  I am going to stay here for at least another week and continue on this wave of genuine progress.  Ideally, I would like to stay here until I finish all 21,725 frames.  However, I can feel my sanity diminishing by staying this socially isolated, so I'm not sure if it's healthy for me to continue living like this for more than one more week.  In the very least, I'd like to make enough progress to get the finish line in sight by the time I return home.

I also have one additional animator working on his own separate batch of frames.  And his progress, similarly, is much slower than expected. His batch was supposed to be completed by now, but it is still very much in progress.  I attribute this completely to the complexity of the work itself.  This production, in several ways, is way more complicated than it seemed. As usual, I got very ambitious with it.

Because we getting so close to the episode's completion, updates will now be weekly.  Also, I've decided to make all new Patreon posts public, in an effort to keep anyone curious about the episode progress updated.  Older posts will be Patron-exclusive.

To those of you who have continually told me to "take my time" on the episode and "not rush" because you are patient:  Thank you.  Thank you so much.  I really appreciate you.  Your comments are a really really nice change of pace from the constant impatient, angry comments I get notifications for every day on YouTube.  However, at this point, finishing the episode sooner than later is more for me than for anyone else.  I've had this hanging on me for over a year now and it's time to take that final push to get it out.

Bless you all and thank you.

-Shipp