So, I finally uploaded my first video. It took a long time to get here. A long, loooong time. I wanted to talk about some extra things about the video and the process to getting here.

Workflow

Firstly, I do want to make more videos, but I have to find a better workflow. Most of this entire video was made with Blender, Blender is great, and it’s 2D animation is surprisingly good! However, it lacks some polish, and I need to be able to do things faster. For example, Blender doens’t seem to have an easy way to tween shapes, or to make some kind of puppeting for 2D animation. It might be there, but I wasn’t able to figure it out despite how much time I took on this. On top of all of that, while compositing in Blender is very poweful, it is also fairly slow, as in, it is slow to set up, and animating within Blender itself makes it a lot harder to cheat perspective when I need to, I ran into that specific issue several times actually.

Currently, I’m considering using a render of my scenes as a normal map to use in After Effects (Example below), and while I did manage to get the lighting working on the image as a whole, I haven’t yet figured out how to get it working such that the light is calculated per pixel, or even per object / image. I might make another post about that at some point, maybe even a tutorial video if I find something interesting.

Any recommendations for a 2D animation app that isn’t Adobe animate would be much appreciated!

Sunk Cost

As for why it took OVER A YEAR for the production of a 1:14 video? Well, this video actually used to be a lot bigger! I posted a few in progress images on my community tab on YouTube:

This Blender scene is for the video I had intended to make, if you notice, the scope is much larger, this video would have been around 5 minutes or so, and I still want ot make it, but I had to reduce the scope, it became clear to me after working on this one scene for 6+ months that I needed to make something and get it out there. And I just couldn’t get myself to keep working on this project, it became too big, and would have taken me weeks to finish the animation on it, even with my animatic style that I’ve adopted for now to speed up production and so I can learn faster.

I’ll be splitting the episodes up for now, this frirst video was titled “Log 3” as a stylistic choice, I might fill in the other log numbers, I might not! I think leaving holes in the chronology of the series actually makes sense for the series anyways.

Doing Better

There are lots of things I want to improve on, but the two major ones are better animation, and audio mixing. Animation / Anatomy will come with time, and better audio mixing will probably take some deliberate practice and soliciting help from others. I’m glad this project is finally done so I can move on and continue to learn!

Thanks!

Thanks for watching the video and reading this post! Have a good day!