Episode 9 Progress - 4/15/19 (Patreon)

Hello all and merry tax day.   Here's my progress for the week:

Based on frame count alone, it may not seem like a lot of progress for the week, but believe me, it was a lot.  14887-15130 was, as expected, the most difficult sequence in the entire episode.  I thought it would take me a few days, but it literally took all week to get it right.  Because this sequence was so important, I actually paid someone else to animate it at first, but I was unhappy with the results and ended up doing the whole thing over myself.  In a way, it's the perfect example of why production of this series takes so long - I really want the animation to look a certain way and I refuse to make compromises.  Whether or not this is a good thing is up for debate, but in the end, I'm pretty happy with the result, as it looks relatively close to how it looked in my head. Eventually, when you watch the part of the episode where Charmander fights a crowd of Caterpies, you can have the knowledge that this ten seconds of animation took a week to create.

 In other news, the SMASH sequence has finally been turned in to me, completed.  There are still a lot of tweaks I want to make to it, and I'll be doing so after I reach 21725 and go over tweaking everything, but overall, it looks very solid and does justice to the vision of the scene.  I really hope to be able to employ the animator behind it for all future episodes 

I'm very excited to return to animating scenes with a normal amount of characters in the coming week.  The last big hurdle to clear is 15271-15326.  After that, my frames/day ratio should return to normal if not get faster.   But I'm also returning home at the beginning of this week, so hopefully I won't be hitting another wall in terms of productivity.  Nonetheless I will continue to keep pushing.

Thank you all,

Shipp