I Do Not Know What I Was Thinking When I Started This

As the title of this email may suggest, I am currently going through a slightly rougher period in the short film's production. I will explain in more detail in the rest of this edition. This edition will also contain more animation previews than previous editions because more animation has been completed and I think that previews are long overdue.

Aside from that, can you believe that it's already been three weeks since the first edition of the newsletter was released? I suppose time flies when you are really busy, or something like that.

Pushing back deadlines

I didn't want to have to push back the original release date for this project, but I am pretty sure completing everything by the deadlines I had set for myself at the beginning of the project would be physically impossible. Previously, I planned on completing all rough animation (I am considering this to be all parts of animation except for coloring and minimal shading) by September 13th, but I do not think this is possible without sacrificing my own well-being, which I think I have done enough of already. I have decided to push back this deadline by three weeks, meaning the new deadline for completing all rough animation will be October 4th.

Similarly, the deadline for coloring and shading will be pushed back. I originally planned on completing this by October 31st, which would have given me about 7 weeks to complete all coloring and shading, but I think I will also extend the amount of time I have for this task. At the moment, I am not sure how long coloring and shading will take, but judging by how severely I underestimated the amount of time rough animation would require, I think it is reasonable to assume I underestimated finishing the animation as well. Thus, the new deadline for finishing animation will be pushed back five weeks to December 5th. Altogether, this places the new release date for the film in mid-December.

Making these decisions made me really sad, especially considering how far the new release date is from the original planned one, but I really think that it is for the best. I also tried to give myself a lot of breathing room in between deadlines. If things get less busy over the next few weeks, which I am hoping they will, I might be able to complete some tasks a bit earlier.

Lip sync

I have just completed lip sync for one of the shorter shots in the film, the first shot for which I have done so, and to my pleasant surprise, it actually did not take that much time. I was able to add lip sync to the entire thing in a little over an hour! Granted, the other lip sync shots will be much longer, and animating the underlying movement of the head and body took a few days by themselves. Regardless, I would consider this something worth celebrating.

Can you guess what he is saying?

Miscellaneous work in progress shots

As stated previously, this edition of the newsletter contains more animation previews. This is partly because I have not done that much new stuff since the last edition of the newsletter and I don't want this edition to be 95% bad news and 5% filler. Here are a few previews of animation that I hope you will enjoy. (Only a few because the rest are surprises!)

Conclusion

That wraps up the fourth edition of the gaierhei Weekly Newsletter! Apologies for the lack of updates in this edition. Hopefully by next week there will be more to report.