First things first: Attached below is a video file that Patreon won't let me embed for some reason. It's the first fifty-ish seconds of animation, with music. It's nothin' huge to look at, with several still or panning shots, but I promised you WIPs!!
So... here's where things are at right now!!! I'm about a third of the way done the pure animation part of the process. It's taken me several weeks to get here, but most of that time has been spent practicing and learning the workflow I'm using now. The actual bits of animation in the full-length preview took me about five days' work, and the rest should go at a similar pace now that I'm fully revved up.
Bootstrapping myself on animation has been a wild ride. Part of the learning process mentioned above involved rewriting a substantial amount of the script for this video to be more visually-oriented rather than relying on text for narration. This seems extremely obvious in hindsight, but it turns out that the thing that works best in video is... video!!
I thought that my experience with comics would translate neatly over into animation, and I think much of it does, but one thing that doesn't transfer over is pacing. In comics, you have very little control over the reader's pace. The only way you can artificially shorten or lengthen the amount of time a reader spends on any given panel is by employing Dirty Tricks. Chief among those tricks is to modulate the amount of text and the spacing between speech bubbles.
So the original script for METEMPSYCHOSIS had a lot of text, because text is how I enforce pacing. Almost immediately upon loading up the storyboard I had drawn back in January into Clip Studio Paint's animation tool, I realized that none of it worked. In video, the pacing is just the pacing. The dimension of time is fully under my control!! In this realm, my dirty tricks are just bad editing.
This discovery necessitated a lot of reshuffling of my priorities and rewriting of the video, but it's all for the better. I'm really excited about what I have so far, and now that my wheels are on the ground I'm well on the way to getting the pencils all finished this coming month.
In the mean time, I think I'll update the site with some cute little bits of art here and there!
I've also been doing some deep thinking about the future of Goodbye to Halos once this video (and remaining handful of pages that will close out the chapter) are done. My ideas aren't quite done stewing yet, but I want to say that I think Goodbye to Halos will be undergoing a metempsychosis of its own. I'll let you in on that development process as things cohere.
Thanks for checking in!! There's more to come soon!!!!