Episode 9 Progress - 4/7/19 (Patreon)

Hello friends.  I've had quite a week.  Here's how it's going for April so far:

My progress and general productivity has lifted considerably since flying in to Colorado on Monday.  Populating and tweaking the hive has been an absolute chore due to the number of characters.  I've spent so much time on it, and yet it still doesn't feel quite done.  The scene at 12620 is the second most complicated in the whole episode.  I probably would have spent the rest of the week on just that, had I not remember the Big Picture > Little Picture adage.  I'm okay with it for the time being, but I'll probably go back and continue to tweak a few things later.  For now, I need to keep pushing forward and not sweat the small stuff.  I'm very satisfied with how 13450-14484 turned out, as it looks almost exactly as it did in my head.

On another note, the animator working on the SMASH sequence has finished about half of the fixes, and reports needing another week to finish the rest.  I'm actually kind of relieved that I'm not the only one to underestimate their workload.  And I am extremely glad to have this animator in particular on the project, as they've done done tremendous work, and I believe that taking the extra time to get it right has shown a significant effect on the quality of their sequences.  Hopefully the same can be said about the episode as a whole once it's done.

I'm now facing down 14484 -15729.  It's the climax of the episode, by far the most complicated sequence, and the one area that I've been dreading most from the start.  I've spent a lot of time yesterday and today prepping the scene build and the character rigs.  As soon as this hurdle is cleared, it's mostly downhill in terms of work.  But it feels like a very big hurdle.   Next week I hope to be making a very relieved post about how I cleared it.

Thank you all.

-Shipp