Wrapping Up the First Half (Story #9 May 2025 Update)

Hi Patrons,

Here is an update on my going's on's! We're tackling a whole lot of animation, cleanup and even the pre-production of a new mini-episode.

Story #9 Animation Progress

The progress for "The Stellapent & the Eraser" is now at ~35% done overall. We've basically finished all the animation + ink/cleanup for the first chapter, and the second chapter is not far behind. I've been busily animating roughs for Lilian, who is in a couple dozen scenes in the chapter.

I find that for the animation pipeline, it is more efficient to focus on drawing a singular character (in this case, Lilian) across multiple scenes, rather than working linearly, which would involve switching between the cast of characters. This mirrors the way that Disney and other studios usually assign 1-2 characters to a single animation team to major in, rather than the entire crew having to be familiar with every character. This likely stems from live-action film methodologies, where actors are forced to portray 1 character.

In our production, I've assigned "Violet" scenes to Rebekah, since it's her character. No need to force her to animate Gildedguy, Lilian, Lilian's parents & Poppy, as that would require unnecessary study of their model sheets.

1 animator + 1 character = best practice.

However, we do not have the liberty of a big crew, so we often pull double/triple/quadruple duty on characters. But to best simulate the focus of a singular actor's performance, the aforementioned "batching by character" helps a lot!

To ramp up our speed, we've recruited an additional animator/cleanup artist, Rainby. He worked on previous projects with us and hope to give him some scenes to tackle. He also just graduated art school! Congrats to him 🎉!

Musical scoring work has also begun, thanks to the talents of Rush again.

There are only a handful of cuts left to animate in Chapter 2 (Castle Day). Which means we will shortly be transitioning into Chapter 3 (Castle Night). This would put us roughly at the half way mark. Still, there's plenty of wrap up on the first half before we can declare ourselves "over the hump".

New Mini-Episode (Plush Feature)

Similar to the previous 2 plush feature skits (the ones involving Lilian), we'll be doing a quickly produced skit for the upcoming YouTooz Plush!

Can you guess who it is? (Who am I kidding, you know who it is...)

This skit will be featuring two, unlikely yet interesting characters: Dummy & Arzon!

It'll involve a chance encounter with wind powers and carnival fun. We'll be going for a humorous & cartoony tone for this one. The storyboard is already done, and I'll be doing layouts soon.

That's all I have to report for now! See you in the livestreams and on the Discord. Thanks!