Scene Progress! Fund Application and Directing Jobs~

Dear Patrons,

I hope you're all doing well! This is just my monthly check-in to let you know how things are progressing on Tales of Zale :)

VIDEO TESTIMONIALS:

First of all, thanks to you guys and a bunch of other kind people we managed to get 33 awesome video testimonials for the fund application. Picking out shots has been real difficult for the editor! Thank you so much to all who participated!!

FUND APPLICATION:

In terms of the application, there's just a bit more writing work to be done on my part, and then afterward I'm going to have to go through all the interns' character drawings and do draw-overs to make the new character sheets we've been working on more consistent. So we're still in for a bit of a busy month.

DIRECTING JOB:

There's another reason that these next weeks are gonna be a bit unusual. This one I really wanted to let you know of sooner, but it took so long to get a contract in order and make things official. Basically I've been hired on as a Director for a project at a French studio. Over the past year-or-so I've said no to so many jobs in order to focus on Tales of Zale, but this one was just too beneficial to turn down. For one thing, it's incredibly flexible. We start out with a 6 week "residency" (although I'll be doing it from home due to Covid-19), and then take it from there. Nothing extremely binding, and development is still on a flexible schedule. For another, I get to work with writers and artists which will surely make me much better equipped for handling Tales of Zale's direction. For another another thing, having a directing credit increases the chances of the current fund application going through. And for another another another thing, this little escapade will be able to pay for much needed new equipment and/or the trip to the Annecy festival with Tales of Zale next year. It'd be a different thing if it pulled me completely away from work Tales of Zale, but as it stands it will mainly benefit the project and I should be able to juggle working on both at the same time. Although, the Tales of Zale work is mainly focused on finishing the application right now, then I'll be right back at it with episode 3 afterwards!

EPISODE 3:

As for episode 3, over the past month we've had a whole bunch more finished clean-up animation done! I'll probably show a little overview in a later video, but thanks to interns and volunteer contributions we've progressed much faster than I would have been able to do on my own! There's some scenes that I'm really eager to do the last couple of shots for and start doing background work on. The compositing artist and I have also been hard at work on the scene that I've showed you progress on over the last couple of updates. There are still a few things I want to go back and make edits on, in particular the last shot and adding more mud to Zale in some shots - but for the time being I'm going to take a step back and freshen my eyes. I hope you enjoy how it's coming along so far though!

INTERNSHIP OVER:

Over the past 3 months I've had 4 remote interns on for visual development for Tales of Zale and one in-studio intern on for 1,5 months to help on clean-up for episode 3. This week those internships came to an end. It's been pretty amazing to have the project moving and breathing outside of what I did with my own two hands. To think that just a year ago I'd only worked on episode 3 all by myself, while this year I've both had an animator on, a compositing artist, interns and multiple clean-up volunteers. It's been a pretty cool learning experience, and I'm so so grateful to everybody who have contributed. It's gonna feel a bit quiet now! But that's alright too for a little while.

PATREON ART BOOKS HAVE BEEN SENT OUT:

There are a few new cool $10 Patrons this month, so I just wanted to let you all know that I've sent the Patreon Art Zine off today and it should arrive within the week hopefully! Normally I try to send them off as soon as the pledge comes through, but my schedule has been a bit out of wack these past weeks. Still, better late than never, and do let me know if you don't receive something or if anything is off!

That's all I can recall to update you on for now! I've been a bit spotty on the Discord and in terms of streaming as of late, and it's probably gonna keep on being like that for a little bit while I juggle different aspects of the projects and alternate work stations. But I'm gonna try my very best and I can't wait to show you more as everything progresses! In the meanwhile, I wish you all the best!!

- Sif