Finally the end is nigh. But in a good sense. I’m getting closer and closer to the completion of the pilot. I thought I’d never complete it. I’ve started putting all the pieces together in Final Cut Pro X, and watching all the animations I’ve created I have definitely improved at making animations over the course of these 18-ish months.

The problem I’m facing now is that the first part of the episode stands out in a negative way. Animations feel stiffer, more mechanical than at the end. While I am happy that I learned a lot just producing this first episode, I also almost want to rework most of the scenes at the beginning of the episode – after all the first impression will decide whether people will watch it to the end, so this could be crucial.

Rewrites & Positive Effects

I had to replace the female alien Teega Banthu in episode two with Otto von Katz (I can’t do female voice overs unless they’re very comical or grotesk) a very different character – and when I started to tweak the plot to accommodate for the different background and motives, I ended up rewriting most of it.

Now I’m wondering whether I should end episode 1 with a bit of a cliffhanger, well knowing I don’t have a final script for episode 2 and I might shoot myself in the foot by doing so. Episode 2 won’t be available for quite a while, so it’s better to have an additional hook to lure the audience back, but I also don’t want that to turn out to be a bit of a lacklustre. My current drafted rewritten version of episode 2 isn’t good, I might have to rework the whole thing once again, before I can even start creating storyboards and animatics. Maybe I’ll end the pilot just safe with a conclusion that doesn’t connect to the next episode, then I’ll have freedom and peace of mind that I can write episode 2 in any way I like.

Backgrounds, backgrounds…

What I’m also likely to do is revisit every scene in the pilot and add more detail to the background illustrations. I’ve created them rather bare bones (I loathe making them, I just really suck at it), but even to me they feel a bit stale. Technically it’s an easy task, since these are all externally referenced images and after some brush up work, a reload and re-render will fix it, but it’s still extra work.

15 Minutes of Fame

So just for shits and grins I registered Phungus & Mowld with the IMDb, and lo and behold, they accepted my submission. On that site the current status of the series is “pre-production” – which isn’t really true, but I wanted to get a longer grace period, before I would probably have to prove that Phungus & Mowld isn’t just vapourware and that it’s actually been aired anywhere else but vimeo and YouTube (I’ve got to enter the pilot into several film festivals to be taken “serious”, I guess).

I’m also preparing the data for vimeo On Demand, Amazon media on demand as well as Filmhub. Let’s see if anyone is going to grab that thing off the shelves and buy it, or maybe even distribute or broadcast it.

More Software Woes…

Just in perfect timing I’m reading rumours that SmithMicro might have abandoned Moho (the software I use to create my animations). And as a little check whether there could be any truth in that rumour, I reinstalled the latest version 13 (which I’m not using, I’m producing everything with v12.5), and lo and behold I, too, couldn’t connect to the update server and got an error. So I’m seriously worried. Despite all its shortcomings Moho is an awesome piece of animation software (up until version 12.5, that is), and I love it to bits. I’ve been looking into alternatives, but it’s looking dim.

Here are the alternatives I tested:

• Blender Grease Pencil right now has the problem when using rigs (indispensable for animation) the viewport goes down to 5 fps or so on macOS. So basically unusable. You never know how quickly they might fix this, but from what I heard only 14% of Blender users are on a Mac, so priority will be low. Very low.
• Cartoon Animator 4 can only use bitmaps for custom made characters, which is kind of prohibitive if you want to do anything but explainer videos. In any other animated production you want close-up shots of your characters, but if you use the same bitmaps as for the full body shots, your line width will grow proportionally to the increasing size of your character – not desirable. And I really don’t want to make two rigs one for full-body, one for close-up of every character.
• ToonBoom Harmony is the industry standard, but it’s rental software. Which means you don’t really own whatever you create with it, because as soon as you stop renting it, you lose access to everything you’ve ever created with it. I really don’t want to go there, but it seems to be the only productive option after all (and no, Adobe Animate doesn’t come close to Harmony and costs the same as Harmony Essentials)
• What else is there? The only other 2D animation software I know that makes use of bones is Synfig but Jeez that is some buggy piece of work, and the usability is somewhere in the non existent range.

Newsflash: just before posting this update it looks like Moho just got its own domain: https://mohoanimation.com this of course gives me hope that this software still has a few more years of life in it. I don’t think you’d move your website to a separate domain, just to ditch it. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Even newsier flash: I’ve temporarily switched to a 1080p monitor while my 4k LG display is in repair, and wow, now Moho is zippy as hell. The timeline preview does everything in near realtime not dropping a frame. So I guess the high resolution was a bit too much for the app to deal with when doing real time previews of animations (Motion can handle it, so I hope the devs soon optimise the app for Metal 2 on macOS). Almost makes me want to stick with the 1080p monitor, although it’s really, really narrow and awkward to work with. Also the blurry/jaggy text sticks out after being used to high DPI monitors.