Still in it for the long haul?
To catch you all up on how thing's are progressing; the animation has been very very roughly blocked out, and stands at approx. 38,000 frames.
Not a typo. At 60 frames per second, I'll leave you to do the math.
Suffice to say, it's a long one. I'll very likely be trimming down large swaths that either I don't quite like or that aren't working in regard to overall cohesion or flow. Right now, what I have is closer to a storyboard, with very rough camera placement/movement, and keyposes with approximate lighting arrangements as and per each composition necessitates. The next step, now underway, is to go through pose to pose, filling in the spaces between keyposes, and fleshing out the existing work. Nothing that'll look too pretty, nor anything jiggling for quite a while I'm afraid.
A lot of this work will involve making things make sense, before I'm able to make them look as visually pleasing as can be.
With that being said, the project is a behemoth and, understandably, not something many will be keen on waiting a millennia or two for. With the way things have been allocated, it would be fairly simple to divide the animation into parts, and release smaller segments individually.
Please note that if opting for this route, the parts likely wont seamlessly link together due to being worked on many months apart and appearing both visually distinct, as well as likely having elements of animation change that would affect how the start/end interpolate. This would differ from the process of working on the sum totality stage by stage; wherein cleanup/secondary animation/sculpting/simulations/lighting/compositing/post production are done across the board one by one, rather than going through all stages on a single part of the animation, rendering out a final version, then moving to the next.
I'm open to suggestions, so do feel free to comment any thoughts and feelings you may have.
One final note; I spent a considerable amount of time since the last update attempting to recreate the physical interactions that are created by anamorphic lenses in real life. I've found something I'm fairly pleased with for the cameras being used throughout the project - there will still be a blend between anamorphic and spherical lenses, with the former hopefully lending a more cinematic look to the piece as a whole. I aim for this project to be the most striking and visually distinct of my works from composition alone.
I look forward to giving some proper insights into the changes with some stills at a later date.
And as always, I release most of this shit on twitter, so feel no need to stick around if you're solely here for content. Thank you regardless for your continual financially dubious decisions that allow me to crawl deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole.