2D Animation Takes A Long Time

This is the third edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter and the third time in a row I have forgotten to advertise it on social media, but I will right before this edition goes live (I promise). This week, I focused on project organization and 2D animation.

Organization

My work tends to be pretty disorganized, but due to the scale of this project, I had to come up with a system to keep all my files in the right place and have an efficient workflow that doesn't compromise the rate at which I can get this project done. I decided to number off all of the shots in this film and name the .blend files and scenes within those files accordingly. This makes it so that I can sort all the files alphabetically and find the shot I need to work on much quicker. In addition, I have my audio, images, and project files separated into different folders to keep things from getting messy. I would highly recommend anyone starting their own project to come up with a similar system for their own file organization.

File organization makes the next step of having an efficient workflow much easier. This next step is file linking, which is a very convenient tool in Blender which allows you to reference data from other .blend files and keep all included data up to date. With this tool in mind, I created a new project file for the full sequence of clips and linked each of the scenes from those clips in the video editor. This allows me to sync up the shots with the finalized audio I recorded last week and see how the project is looking as a whole. The nice thing about file linking is that all linked data automatically updates whenever the source file is updated, which means I can see the project taking shape in this master file as I work on each individual shot. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that file linking breaks whenever the source files are renamed or moved, which is why it was important to organize everything early on.

Using this system also forces me to create files for each of the shots, which I have been procrastinating on doing for a while. The bad thing is that this made me realize just how much 2D animation I still have to do, but the good thing is that this allows me to alter the lengths of some shots before I have actually done the work to animate them. The final audio I recorded different significantly in timing and length from the demo audio, so many of the shots have to be shortened or lengthened to compensate. I really don't want to waste the work that I have done by cutting short some of the already completed 2D animation, so I think it is a good thing that I still have some unfinished shots I can change.

2D animation and lip sync

This week, I started some of the lip sync shots for this short film. Lip sync is tedious, but not difficult in the same way that some of the other more complicated shots are. These shots are the longest by far and constitute about half of the film's runtime, but luckily they involve only one character, subtle movement, and zero camera action.

One challenge I expect to run into is audio synchronization with the master file. I decided to be a bad voice actor and not separate my audio into voice lines, which means it will be difficult to sync the audio of the individual shots (as I animate them) to the master file. I have a plan in place to mitigate this, but I still don't know how effective it will be.

Apart from lip sync, at this point I have at least a rough starting frame for almost all of the 2D animated shots so far, and I have made significant progress on many of the simpler shots. According to my document, 5 out of 23 total 2D animated shots have been completed (all still uncolored), 9 shots are being worked on, and 9 shots have not been started yet. It may be important to keep in mind that some work-in-progress shots are drastically farther in the completion process than others, and all shots vary in both complexity and length. While animating, I changed some shots to be less complicated so as not to compromise animation quality or my own health. I think I have been overworking myself a little bit.

My hope was to complete all rough 2D animation by September 13, but looking at the work I still have to do, I am unsure if this is achievable. If not, I will probably move it back by a few weeks to ease the workload on myself. This will likely result in a publication date in late November or December as opposed to early November as I was hoping. I do still have to color and (very minimally) shade all 2D animated shots, as well as work on compositing and sound design after all animation is completed. I think that trying to force myself to complete all of this within a few months was a very bad idea, but I will try my best to do it anyway.

Conclusion and side note

That wraps up this edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! As a side note, I think I have figured out why the unsubscribe button is not appearing at the top of the newsletter emails. I believe this is due to email sending reputation, which is very silly in my opinion. The good news about this is that as I send out more emails from this address to more people, the issue should resolve itself over time. I will now go advertise this newsletter on social media like I said I would.