January Snapshot #2 + Reflections

Greetings and welcome back to my second January snapshot postings!

Since December I've been prototyping several changes to refine my workflow. I wanted to identify the challenges I face when producing animations and what ideas I can use to combat this - its been a pretty successful workflow model that I've used over 4-6 month periods in my studies. 

The main problem statement I'm tackling right now is that animations take a fair bit of time, if you're familiar with the project management triangle featuring 'Time, Cost and Quality' as the factors by which only two can be used to benefit your workflow. In the past time has been the cost and quality, so in an effort to address the pace at which I can go and to open up more opportunities I'm shifting my benefits to the Time & Quality sphere. This basically means the cost of projects will go up, but it also means that I have a model which would encourage a more consistent turn around and allow me to hire additional artists to help with various aspects like painting in cels, animating inbetweens or helping me clean up the lines to look far more appealing. Aspects like this is what I want to improve upon this year's line up of projects. 

Since time is the factor I am cutting out, I have reorganized my project formats with a different configuration. I've added in 5 & 30 second submissions as well as removed the 40 second offering - this doesn't mean that I won't do projects longer than 30 seconds, but I suspect as a single animator I will need to enlist the help of a few artists to collaborate in the effort of producing longer projects and would therefore warrant its own special format of parameters for negotiations.

As a side note for the smaller details I've reformatted all the postings involving behind the scenes content with the 'Development' tag for easier identification and single word description. The Euro is my standard currency since I'm now paying taxes over this (inserts celebratory felicitations) which means that I can still accept foreign currencies like the US dollar however it will be invoiced at the adjusted rate with the exchange - this is something I've also linked in the information for those curious. 

With a higher rate I do intend on improving upon the quality of the work in my aim to producing animations running on 1's or 24 pictures a second in running time. Additionally I'd like to get into more scene painting and framing as well, something to give the set a a bit of dressing in the presentation. My work in Blender has offered some interesting insights in how I can dynamically animate in a 3D space.

As mentioned before the price sheets previously posted are still saved and those who approached me at a particular period will be offered those prices contrary to the changes I am currently making. No need for alarm in that regard.

As a final note to my progression to development, I've decided to feature 'Dailies' which is essentially a term for a review session animators collectively partake in, by watching each others work from the previous week. Even though I post bi-weekly, a dailies posting might prove interesting in observing the progression of the work as I complete various segments. These will normally only feature the segments that I work on for that week and not the complete animation - other snippets, resources and topics will still be covered but I plan to make this the main course of development postings especially in periods of focused work.

I think that about wraps up everything I wanted to cover. I'm very excited about some of the upcoming projects and soon to be releases of said projects. 

Again, thank you all for your interest in supporting my work, its been very motivating to see that you all wanted to chip in on what I do and I hope to continue to provide excellence in the content I have to post moving forward!

~WK