A Little Stress And Slow Progress

Welcome to the second edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! For this edition, please confirm that there is an option to unsubscribe at the top of this newsletter or in the preview in your email browser. For some reason, this option did not appear in the previous edition. If it does not appear again, please contact me at my main email address so I can find a solution.

The start of classes

This week, classes started, which means I have a lot less time to work on my projects. Most of the work from this point forward will likely be completed on the weekends as weekdays are reserved for actual class, homework, and resting after long school days.

I am still trying to gauge the amount of time I will have on weekdays to animate. This past week was the very first week of school and therefore likely not a very good indicator of what the rest of the year will look like. That being said, I think I have an hour or two to work in the mornings and evenings after classes if the workload I get from school stays manageable.

It may also be important to note that the time I have to work should be separated from my actual ability to work, which is influenced by many other things. I have been consistently getting home exhausted because of long periods of waiting in the triple digit weather for the buses to arrive (among many other factors), which means I usually can't produce my usual quality of work even if I have the time. Going forward, I will do my best to continue producing the highest quality of animation I can for the project while not sacrificing my own health or performance in school.

3D backgrounds

This week, I started modeling the backgrounds for my upcoming short film. Having 3D backgrounds eliminates the need to draw interior rooms and buildings at multiple different angles and allows me to reuse assets, making the whole process of adding backgrounds a lot easier and more efficient.

Much of the short film takes place in one room. So far, I have tried using the Blender Home Builder add-on for interior design. It is a very efficient and useful add-on, especially for its free price, but it is also still very limited. So far, I have found it very useful for creating the basic shape of the room as well as adding cutouts for things like doors and windows. I will probably use a mix of free to use assets and very rudimentary modeling to create the rest of the room.

My hope is to spend no more than a week creating all of the backgrounds, keeping in mind most of them (except for the main room) are only on screen for a few seconds.

Voice acting

I have finally gotten the voice acting for this project to a point where I am happy with it! I kept the same technique explained in the previous newsletter edition, but this time I changed my own voice a bit more and preserved all of the original formants. This made the final voice clips a lot less robotic. Having the completed voice acting now allows me to work on all of the clips with lip sync, which I am very happy about! This also gives me a good estimate of the length of the final film, which is looking to be a little less than six minutes in total.

Very slow 2D animation

2D animation is simultaneously the most tedious and largest part of this project. I think I had a good instinct to do most of the hardest parts of the animation before classes started, which means I can create the rest of the animation while expending a bit less energy. It still does take a lot of time though...

That is it for this edition of the newsletter! I once again forgot to advertise it on social media, but I will do that as soon as I remember to at a reasonable time.