It took a whole year this time around, but Phungus & Mold’s third installment is finally completed and published. If you want to watch it you can do so immediately either via Vimeo On Demand (worldwide), or purchase downloadable mp4 files with embedded subtitles for English, German and Japanese from the Pixelblast site, or if you prefer on Gumroad. Availability on Amazon depends on region, so you might have to check back in a few days to watch it there (it will be available in the US, UK, Germany and Japan). And now you can also watch it on Trickfilm.com and Pzaz TV

Whether or not you can watch the episode for free with your Amazon Prime Subscription is at the sole discretion of the regional Amazon sites and might differ by region. As of this writing it’s included with Prime for US, UK, Japan and Germany.

Here’s Trailer “Wild West” of Episode 3 (this one is serious)

Here’s Trailer “Mowld is Backer” of Episode 3 (this one’s more fun)

What I’ve Learned This Time Around

Animation: I’ve learned that sometimes less is more, and doing quicker less exaggerated squash and stretch for all pose changes actually feels more natural.

Narration: I think I’ve finally got a good grip on the main characters and slip in and out of character within minutes now. Also I feel somehow my voice got a little deeper (?), or maybe it’s just my age and voice bands deteriorating.

Backgrounds: Still hate doing them, but I did the backgrounds for Zanders bar directly in Procreate, which was much painless than having to “construct” them in a vector app. I could do that, because I was pretty clear about what I needed for the scene thanks to my storyboard, so planning out animation scenes and shots actually is very beneficial (duh).

Film Festivals

I was kinda done with film festivals, but this time around I might send off episode 3 to a few ones anyway. It’s completed, why not put it to good use?

And also I’m doing this because there might be a longer pause in the series, since I really want to make a full feature length (i.e. 45 minutes or more) of Shadywoods and doing that will probably take almost two years. If I do it alone, but maybe…

New Allies

I’ve been recently contacted by a very nice CEO from an animation production company, and we’re kind of starting to exchange ideas and stuff (and before that we exchanged NDAs). They seem to be willing to help pitch my stuff, so if I get lucky with Shadywoods, I might actually get a budget and get it done in a shorter time frame with a proper distribution deal. That would be splendid, but nothing at all is decided yet.