October Update: Short Film Development & More Tales of Zale Concept Art!

Dear Patrons,

Happy October to you all! This month's update is going to be on the shorter side, since it hasn't been all that long since last month's delayed post. I'm still recouping a bit from the whole festival month, on top of having had to travel back and forth from Copenhagen for a variety of reasons these past couple of weeks. But anyhow, progress has been made and there is still news to be shared - so let's jump right into it!

TALES OF ZALE TV SERIES:

It's been a lot of animation for the past couple of posts, but this month, I'm sharing another piece of Tales of Zale concept art, this one also made by Nicole Di Fresco. It actually started from a color thumbnail we'd made during a previous development round:

This was towards the end of our concept art development period where we were seeing if we could fit in just a few extra pieces. So apart from some in-person feedback, Nicole just went right at it:

I gave a bit of draw-over on Zale to get him more consistently on-model, and then we tweaked some of the trees furthest back. I think we could have used a bit more time color tweaking and figuring out the details of the water, but it's still quite a sweet little scene!

RE:FLECTION:

Speaking of concept art - when we last left off we had just gotten news of the support from Open Workshop for concept art on the RE:FLECTION short film. Shortly after that, we got to work. On this project I'm working together with local concept artist, Maria Kruse. We're still in the midst of work, but since there's no NDA on this project, I want to share some of the progress with you all.

The goal is to have 3-6 concept pieces + location reference done for making the bathroom in 3D. The pieces are taken from different beats in the story. Above, you'll see some brain storming for the last beat. Here, we'll be seeing the full bathroom, so it was a good springboard to do the location exploration from.

One of the sketches already felt pretty good to me, so I suggested to use it as a base with some tweaks. I kind of wanted to have a bathtub in there because it's a nice element to play with in storyboarding, but at the same time we didn't want the bathroom to feel very luxurious at all. So we landed on a solution of making the side wall slanted. So we get a bathtub, but it's super uncomfortable - you'll never be able to take a standing shower in that!

With those tweaks, this is how the sketch ended up:

Now it was time to get some rough colors down. It's the end of the film, so I wanted things to be quite vibrant. In general, I tend to prefer a saturated look.

Maria did a new color thumbnail with this in mind. It's better to push it a little too much than too little! I also added a few extra notes to get a bit more shape variation into the bathroom.

First take:

Second take, toning the blue down a bit and letting more light pour in. We also decided to have tiles on the whole bathroom, because it makes some of the other compositions look a bit more interesting.

I drew in the rough character, but still need to clean her up and composite her into the scene. That comes next! But first, we want to go through a couple of the other concept pieces and just be sure everything works well together overall before making last tweaks.

We've got more motifs in the works, but they are still a little bit further back in the process, so I'd like to share them in the next update instead when I can take you through each step like this.

Meanwhile, I've also been script writing and thumbnailing. Thumbnailing is a really great way to lay down a foundation and look for the visual ideas in each scene before comitting too much time to it. First, I start out just looking for the overall key images:

And then I may take some of those key images and flesh out the sequence more:

I know there are still going to be plenty of tweaks from there, but that's why it's great not to have spent longer on each panel. In this case, I will probably want to put these into a rough edit and experiment a bit with sound and pacing before I commit to a final board. That is, once I'm done with thumbnailing the whole film - which is still and ongoing process as of writing. In an ideal world, we get the DVF fund before then so that we can also work out the 3D model of the bathroom and use that directly for layouting in the storyboard. But as I wrote about in the last update, I don't have hopes too high for that, so I may have to work on it without.

MUSICAL PIPERS:

Rambu's project is coming together really nicely! I finally finished my last shot. I decided to take on one more shot after that, but it's a lot more simple so it shouldn't be taking me as long :)

ZALE TROT CHALLENGE:

The Zale trot challenge continues until October 31st! A lot of really nice takes have already come in, especially on the Discord server. So feel free to join in if you haven't already. Can't wait to get started on the compilation edit!

NEW SETUP:

This year I've been taking steps to make my work setup more sustainable in the long run. At the beginning of the year I took a bit of a chance on getting a running pad, and it's been a really good way to get the pulse up daily apart from the weekly swimming. It suits me great because I find that I really need to create a positive association in order to work something into a long-term habit. In this case, I can run and catch up on cartoons at the same time. And I feel like running, because I want to catch up on more cartoons.

Anyhow, this month I finally got a raising desk, which is another big thing to cross off the list. I'm really happy with the new setup, so I wanted to share. Before, my home desk was slightly too low and after a couple of weeks of working from home I could really feel it. So it was a long overdue upgrade - level-up achieved!

ROUND-UP:

Alrighty, so I think that's it for the October update! November should be really interesting, since we should be hearing back from the broadcaster hopefully - although I don't know exactly when. I don't want to think too much about it at this point - anything can happen for any reason whatsoever, so it's best to take things as they come. But it is a month that I at least look forward to for the sake of gaining more clarity.

And then I'm heading to Madrid to be part of the anniversary panel at Cartoon Springboard here at the end of the month! That's also something I look forward to, I think it will be very cozy.

In this month's bird news, I finally got these two to the proper bird specialist vet that I'd been hoping to get them to. We both agree that they don't seem 100% healthy - we'll have to try a few different treatments over time, since you can't really do blood work on such a small bird. But! At least Chia the flightless canary is not so flightless anymore. She's actually able to follow the other birds around the whole apartment now. Although she still has to think a lot about it before she sets off, and prefers climbing the ladder back up to her cage once she's done with her daily expeditions. Still, I've been really impressed with her progress. She's very motivated to be part of the flock, and she's definitely been building up her flight muscles. She even hits her head on the cieling sometimes 'cause she hasn't quite learned how to control her newfound strength yet. So that's a bit of happy news to end this month's update on :)

All the best till next time!

-Sif