Well into 2018 - Discord, Livestreams, Tales of Zale and more...

Dear Patreons,

We have arrived well into 2018. I hope that you’ve all had a great January and are making your way nicely through the winter months. It might have just been for a brief moment, but the other day the sun was shining and it felt like spring was approaching. That should be a good sign of things to come.

With a month having passed since last writing I’d like to go over a few points in this Patreon update. I’ll start with some news and then further elaborate on what I’ve been up to.

DISCORD:

Matthew (the composer of Tales of Zale) and I recently started up a Tales of Zale Discord channel. I’m not overly familiar with Discord as of yet, but I’ve had a lot of fun interacting with the people who have joined thus far, and find it a nice way to share announcements with those most interested without drowning out in too many news feeds. I’d love to have you join if you’re interested: https://discord.gg/kuKWTed 

I’d also like to make a special chat for Patreons only. I think it could be a nice way to share some more material with you all on a more casual basis, and it’d make for a nice way to interact. So if you do join, please let me know that you’re a Patreon and I’ll set things up accordingly.

LIVESTREAMS:

With productions taking longer and longer I’ve kind of fallen off YouTube these days. In terms of social medias I’ve mostly been active on Twitter and Instagram, but I somewhat miss the days of talking to an audience in a more direct manner. So after a lot of back and forth I decided to finally make a Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/sifstreams 

It’s a different platform and I’m curious to test it out. Right now I’m keeping the streams very casual on my end to encourage myself to stream more often, but it may very well grow from there. Feel free to drop by!

THE DANISH FILM SCHOOL:

Now we get to some of the more general updates of what I’ve been up to. I’ve spent the past two months in Copenhagen; first to visit the family for the holidays but secondly to work at the Danish Film School as an animator for the Animation Directors’ graduation projects (as part of our standard curriculum). It was an interesting experience; very different environment. I’ve got to say though- back when I applied for the Animation Workshop I had also considered applying for the Film School. This experience however made me very happy to have chosen the way I did, even if it’s not quite as direct of a path towards my dream of becoming a professional animation director. The whole course did serve as a nice warm-up for our own bachelor productions though. I’ve attached a bit of the animation that I did for the film school project in case you’re interested. Unlike former years these projects should be made available for viewings on the Internet within the next year.

TALES OF ZALE:

Though my workflow was slightly disrupted during my time in Copenhagen, I do feel like I’ve made a lot of headway with Tales of Zale already during this year. It’s a project I can keep expanding upon as I learn, and that’s part of what makes it so fun to work with. The past couple of months have made way for a lot improvement in the editing for example.

While I was receiving advice and thinking a about music some thoughts occurred to me about editing the animatic according to the rhythm of different metronomes. I’m pretty sure this trick must be common practice in the industry, because it was rather effective – but to me it was something entirely new to figure out. 

As you can gather from that we’ve started to work on music for Episode 3. It’s been a long time coming, but for the better, because I’ve really needed to up my game on this part. Music has been too big of a blind spot in my directing for too long. As such a lot of the beginning of the year went with research into different genres, instruments, implementations in media etc. I had to invent a bit of communication means myself, like the attached “music graph”, because I’m still missing a lot of vocabulary in this regard. But I’m happy to have the help and advice from both music-minded people at The Animation Workshop as well as my composer grandfather. It may take some time and some stumbles, but at least I’m on my way.

I’ve also finally gotten around to making a color script for episode 3, which has already been put to great use. Up until now I’ve mainly been using base colors and then filters to distinguish between light and moods – but I think this will add a lot more personality to the final product. I’ve also attached a bit of this color script below.

Of course animation has also been high on the agenda, as you’ll be able to see from both my twitter feed and streams. I got a couple of clean up assistants in around Christmas, who are starting to get a hold of the style and produce really nice results. 

Moreover once I returned from Copenhagen I started animation and vertical slicing on one of the episode 3 scenes that I’ve been most looking forward to animating. Already it’s given me a great inspiration boost.

There are still a couple of spots in the animatic that I’d like to polish up further, but while I’m reflecting on that I’m very happy to be producing some of the scenes that I’m most certain of!

PLANS FOR THE YEAR:

One last point on the topic of Tales of Zale ties very well into the plans that I have for the rest of the year. It’s not going to be a quiet year by no means. It’s my last full year at The Animation Workshop and with that comes the prospect of pursuing an internship or two somewhere out in the world. It’s still not completely clear where I’ll be ending up on that front, but I do have a couple of other travel plans in mind on top of that. Right now I’ve got my mind set on entering the La Poudrière European Program to learn more about pitching for TV-series an alike within the European animation industry. That there is a 3 months’ trip to France. After that I’m also rather set on trying to enter The Animation Sans Frontières, which is a great program for anyone who wants to direct or produce. For this program you’ve got to bring your own project, and this is where things should start to come together. Can you guess which project I want to bring? Yup, that’d be Tales of Zale.

I’ve already been out with some preparation work, but I know it’s a long road. Nonetheless I’m happy to be able to talk a bit about my future plans for the project, which hopefully explains a little of why I’ve been taking my time with episode 3. Episode 3 will be produced independently as usual, but I’d like it to serve as a demonstration of the kind of episodes that I’d like to further produce. I’m not about to throw the projects’ heart and soul out the window, but I know very well that I’d just be hurting myself if I were to keep solo-multitasking animation projects in the way that I’ve been doing thus far forever and ever. So I’d like to take the steps to pursue doing what I love full time rather than on the side. 

These are only the preliminary steps. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m going to approach it full force and with an optimistic attitude-- Wish me luck!

That’s about it for this time. I hope to see you on Discord if you’re on the service. Until next time, have an awesome day!

- Sif