Hey everyone,
I'm really excited for the day you all finally get to see Episode 2. This animation is making progress much faster than I anticipated, which is a very good thing. Before I get into it, a quick heads up: I'll be posting to Patreon a little less than usual over the next month so I can pour as much time as possible into this. You'll still be getting exclusive content, just a little less often for right now.
Changing my workflow
For the first time ever, I'm blocking out the entire animation before recording final voices. It feels kind of stupid saying this because most professional animators and artists work like this, but you have to keep in mind that making animations with voice actors is still something new to me. Most of the animations I made for that past 10 years were music videos, which don't really require blocking since the music itself determines the pacing.
With Episode 1, my process was: write the script, hire voice actors, then animate to their recordings. This time, I wrote the script, then voice acted every single character myself to use as a reference for pacing. Right now I'm blocking out the full animation using those temp voices. Once the blocking is finished, I'll send the whole thing (the blocked animation with my placeholder voice acting) to the actual voice actors.
This fixes the biggest problem I ran into on Episode 1. When voice actors only have a script to work from, they're basically guessing at the timing, and I ended up with a ton of pacing issues that were really time consuming to work around. With this new approach, they get a full visual and audio reference for not just the pacing, but the emotion of every scene and the environment their character is in. It makes their job easier, it lets me actually show them my vision instead of just describing it, and it should make every animation after this one faster to produce.
After I finish blocking, and once I get all the voice lines from all the voice actors, things will move very fast. Every camera angle, shot, scene-build, and character pose will already be laid out for me, all I will have to do is animate on top of it.
What to expect from Episode 2
A lot more world-building than the pilot. You're going to learn significantly more about Flower's character, and her (and his) motives. And if it wasn't obvious already — this one leans a lot harder into horror. Some of you may have noticed the horror elements sprinkled into the first episode. This episode explores a lot more to that side of Flower. But there will be some cute and silly aspects to this episode, especially with Kefania's parts.
How long will it be?
Now that the temp voices are recorded, I can safely say this episode will be AT LEAST 11 minutes, and probably longer, since I might adjust the pacing in certain scenes while blocking. It could even end up longer than Episode 1.
I know that contradicts what I said before about making episodes shorter to speed up production. But I won't lie to you guys — the script I wrote for this episode is way too good to chop up into multiple parts. It needs to be one whole episode, and when you see it, I think you'll understand. That said, it won't take super long to make, and the new workflow is a big part of why.
I'll be providing more updates along the way.
Thank you all for the support. More soon.