Episode 10 Update -5/24/20 (Patreon)

Hey everyone - This week was very productive, and I'm finally starting to see the episode come together.

All of the new voice roles have now been cast.  I have reached out to all the new voice actors and scheduled sessions.  One of them has already done a session with me.  I have three more sessions scheduled for the rest of this week, and by the end of the week, I should have just about every character, and enough to dive into blocking out the animation.  I gotta tell you, some of the voice actors really nailed it this time around.  There are some real dramatic moments in this that would fall flat without the performances we've gotten.  I'm fortunate to have such talented people working on this project.

I now have more than half of all required voices collected, and have been timing out the dialogue.  The dialogue for the entire mid-section of the episode is now put together.  I'm a little worried, because the section I put together is eight minutes long, and is eight pages of the script.  Since the script is 27 pages, we may be dealing with a 27 minute episode, which might be a little much for me... I was hoping to be dealing with a 22-24 minute episode, but I'll get a better idea of the actual runtime once all the voices are collected.

I've been corresponding at great lengths with my one of my animators who has also been working on the rigs.  He has so far taken a big workload off of me, and I can tell that, moving forward, a big chunk of the budget is going to go to paying him to do a lot of the episode's animation.  This guy did a large chunk of "Rock Smasher", so I'm confident he'll do well on this.

I've also started corresponding with my composer, who is doing the music for the episode.  Although we won't be getting to the meat of the music work until much later in the process, he's been itching to get a head start on doing the score for the episodes.

I've also started putting out my feelers for acquiring more 3D artists this week, and have gotten a good deal of qualified applicants.  However, once I've paid off the voice actors, my animator, and other services used this month for the episode, I'll have pretty much tapped the Patreon budget for May, so I'm going to have to wait until June to hire one.

So far so good.  Unlike for the last episode, my process has become streamlined.  I know what needs to go where and I can use Blender comfortably.  I believe that even if the episode is 27 minutes, we can finish before the year's end, I just have to be smart about utilizing the resources I have.

Thank you all very much.  I appreciate your continued patronage.