First 25% Animated! (Story #9 April 2025 Update)

Hi Patrons,
It's been a couple weeks since the official project announcement, and I've received a lot of positive feedback. With that bit of promotion done, I've taken the opportunity to put my head down and focus on the animation itself. We are now in the meat of the project, which is the rough animation & cleanup:

Since the previous update, out of 191 total scenes, we've animated 48 and cleaned/inked 27 of them. Mathematically, that puts us at ~25% done overall!
To help, I recruited one additional cleanup & inker, Voroxzii (the creator of Dummy). This puts our team size at a lean 4. I'm keeping the team small because we need to be economic with our efforts in these early chapters. I intend to save budget for more spectacular scenes later on.

Endurance

Recently, I ran a 5k for the first time (~3 miles). It was drizzling the morning of the race, which kept things cool but also slightly humid. At the sound of the buzzer, 300 runners left the starting line, and I started to jog as fast as I could.
At first, the terrain was pretty flat, but it soon turned into multiple hilly climbs throughout the neighborhood. I was able to keep a jogging pace for the first mile or so, but I eventually got winded and had to walk multiple times. Each time I gassed out felt like a miniature defeat. And once I caught my breath, I had to muster up extra energy to jog again. It was especially tough doing this at the foot of hilly climbs.

Throughout this, I noticed many runners who were decades older (and younger) than me. They kept a slow jogging pace while passing by me and other walkers. And they just kept on going! It was like they had Extreme Battery Saver mode enabled.

I believe if I had stuck to a slower initial pace, my 5k would've been faster (and more enjoyable).

As an artist, I can often get distracted by the indie content that is released by others. There's been an explosion of animated projects as of late, and it seems to come out faster than ever. It kinda feels like the aforementioned walking and getting passed by.

Something I try to keep in mind is that we're all going for our PB (personal best), and that making consistent progress is better than burning out completely.

This is true for the marathon medium of animation, and especially true as we grow older.

So we're just chugging along like a steady little steam train.

Walking

I'm currently working on 2nd chapter (of 4): Daytime at Castle Gilded. This lines up with the pleasant Spring weather we're having here in North America.
This portion of the animation features a lot of "walk cycles", and with a fair number of characters on screen too. These types of the scenes can be deceptively expensive, because characters are making precise, slow contact with the environment. Since the scenes aren't action packed, the camera has fewer opportunities to hide & imply character movement. This all increases the work load.

Time-consuming scenes like this must be treated like long uphill climbs - you must set small, achievable goalposts. "Just got to make it to the stop sign" turns into "just need to finish 1 scene today".

I've set up spreadsheets to track progress, and it feels good to see green!
Walking scenes are a good opportunity to practice draftsmanship as well. You're usually working with small, subtle spacing between drawings, so a steady pen stroke is required. It's also a great way to become familiar with the character models since their spatial volume doesn't change much.

Lastly, the way characters walk can be fun to experiment with. Lilian tends to waddle around, off balance, which poofs his cape up. Violet is more graceful, and is serenely aware of her environment.
And I tend to animate Gildedguy's walking similar to myself: Blankly staring and in my head.

Housekeeping

I'll be away from home for the next couple weeks visiting friends & family. Hopefully I'll be able to get some work done with a mobile art set-up. But it definitely means no livestreams for a bit. I will try to keep ya'll updated in the Discord server.

Thanks for checking in and for your support!