Although I took a holiday of about two weeks, I didn’t get remotely as much done as I hoped. However, I have to say as much as I loathe creating background art (because I often get the angle/viewer’s height of the perspective not quite right and have to redo the whole thing in the end), I think I got a little better at it. There’s been less reworking of artwork and it wasn’t such a drag to create and visualize all the rooms I needed for this episode (they’re still not great looking, they’re barely usable).

New Characters

The new character to appear in episode 2 took a very long time to finalize.

First he was conceptualized as a catfish-like creature that for some odd reason was wearing steampunk attire with a nod towards the German Empire (1871–1918) all with “Pickelhaube” and such.

When the story changed and turned him from antagonist into a protagonist, I had to make him more friendly, and emphasized his being an engineer with the leather apron. I also made the Pickelhaube yellow as a kind of steampunk hard hat. Eventually I rewrote the story one final time and the character changed from catfish-like, to merely fish-like, also I dropped the Empire paraphernalia and just made him an engineer wearing a hard hat and wearing overalls.

Even after that I tweaked him a few more times with different hand, leg and foot shapes, and finally it took me forever to find the right voice for him. Not being a professional voice actor, I feel I’m running out of “serious” voices for the series. I can do a lot of over-the-top cartoon voices, but when it comes to main characters you don’t want them to sound too goofy, and ideally I wanted the new character to sound big as he is with a sonorous voice. Which I don’t have. So, I had to make compromises and eventually settled on a sumo-wrestler like pressed moaning voice.

The last two rig tests are still using an imaginary accent with the overly throaty “r”. I’ve dropped that in the final version of the narration.

Animatic

So now that I’ve got all the backgrounds and narration complete I’m creating a very rudimentary animatic, just to get the overall timing tweaked and start looking for some music, foley and such. Once that is done I’ll start animating and the whole episode should be done in about a month.

Episode 3 & 4

The good thing is that I also had plenty of time to think about episode three and start writing the script. Currently I have a detailed outline for episode 3, and the script is also about 40% complete. Episode 4 will be a direct continuation of episode 3 and there’ll be a direct story arc over these two episodes, and possibly two more episodes later in the season will build out the arc into a larger tale about Phungus, his aspirations and how they turn out. I’m really looking forward to build out this more complex story into something hopefully exciting to watch.

Software Woes – Gone

Anyone who has read a few of these updates might remember my gripes and worries I had with the main software I use to create the animation: Moho. Well, the original creator of the software Mike Clifton, and Oscar nominate studio Cartoon Saloon (Wolfwalkers, the Breadwinner, Song of the Sea) have teamed up and bought back the software – and finally released a new version 13.5. This was expected as a maintenance release to fix some of the worst bugs in the previous version, but somehow they’ve even managed to add some interesting new features, and overall Moho is off to a great start with a new website, and a new support platform. They’ve been very communicative over Twitter as well as their own forum, and support requests are met with friendly and quick responses, so I’m rather ecstatic knowing my favourite animation software is alive and kicking, and again going places!