Finishing Up – 2-17-23

I’ve got 2 scenes left to animate and have 25 minutes fully animated. The process continues to move along faster each day. I have created my final character for the episode, Nurse Becky, which took the bulk of my week. I have to say that created a new character is by far the most time consuming part of the process.

I have some ideas for how I’m going to promote the episode prior to its release. I believe animating a short 1 minute clip for each main character and releasing them as daily youtube shorts will do much to get the ball rolling. I’m going to limit myself to 1 character and one background angle per short.

My final 2 speakers should be arriving in the next two days. This will enable me to begin editing in surround sound. I believe the sound effects and foley design may move very fast. I will be using sound effects from “splice” in order to avoid spending time recording and editing sounds. The fun part is choosing the reverb, delay, speaker placement, and panning for the sounds. These tasks are simple and quick but allow me to be more creative than simply dragging and dropping the sounds into place.

The final part of the project will be adding music. I imagine at most using 1-3 songs for the entire episode. The more important “music” will be sounds that assist emotional transition. If you watch Southpark, there are several musical cues that indicate a scene transition or emotional moment. I hope to design high quality sounds that I can reuse for each episode.

I am very excited about what is to come and even more excited about watching my hypothesis of repeatability play out. When I begin work on the next episode, I will already have 12 main characters fully drawn and programmed. I will have 3 primary locations with a wide variety of camera angles.

I have chosen to make this comedy about private paramedic workers because the setting is relatively simple – each episode will feature the same 3 principle locations and 12 main characters for 90% of it. That means I may only have to create 1 new background and 1 new character each time I set out to create a new show.

Looking forward to the future and I hope you’re doing the same.

Quick Update – 2/5/23

I only have a few minutes to write this so I’ll keep it brief. I have 3 remaining scenes to animate and then it is on to audio. I did wind up deciding to purchase 3 additional speakers, I will have the option to mix the episode in surround sound. I intend to use splice for sound effects as they’re sounds do not inhibit monetization or commercial use for a reasonable price.

I greatly miss creating music and working with anything other than animation. The good news is I have been able to turn out a scene in a day or two lately – meaning recording the dialogue, animating the characters, and mixing them in with a background. The countless assets I created are working great, especially the vehicles and background characters. I am very excited to be done with this project soon.

I am still determined to put out short scenes but have not yet begun recording them. Once I am done animating the episode and take up work on the audio I will routinely create short 1 minute clips in the hopes of promoting the launch of episode 1. I hope all is well and you have a great day.