February Preview

Dear Patrons,

First month of the year cleared! It's both been a quick and slow one in different aspects. Let's get into it!

APPLICATION MANIA:

Hey, so remember how I wrote about putting together an application for a work grant last month? I was staying well ahead of schedule on that one, but it sure did end up swallowing a chunk of weekend time towards the end. Then we had our producer strategy meeting and figured that we should make an application for the MIFA pitches in Annecy, which had its deadline here at the beginning of February. A lil' bit hectic, but still manageable, since we already had a lot of material to work from. THEN, last-minute we found another development fund to apply for, which had its deadline on almost the same date. And that was on top of me having to prep a pitch for a potential distributor and having a deadly ill canary which I had to run to the other town with because there aren't many bird vets in the area. And of course, on top of doing the new full time job. That's all to say, it's been a hectic first month of the year, and boy am I looking forward to have a proper full weekend now. But we put together some neat applications and I've got my fingers crossed!

Unfortunately, I can't put the applications on the internet at this point - but I can show you a few more or less blurry screen shots from them to give you an idea of what I've been working on:

THIS MONTH'S PREVIEW:

I was convinced that I'd already shown you the compositing work on this scene. But I suppose it was only a couple of screen shots. There are still a few shots that I've left up in the air, and I'm planning to spiff up the title sequence more - but hopefully you can see how far it's come since the last time I previewed this scene. 

EPISODE 3:

This month has seen both a lot of progress on the episode, and very little. On one hand, I got crazy busy with those applications and the 9-17 job, so it's been hard to make any further headway on the compositing. On the other hand, I've been working on getting the sound team together, and I'm happy to say that it is now fully assembled: sound designer, sound mixer, composer and singer! Yup - we're working on having an original song written and performed towards the end of the episode!! We're dealing with some incredibly talented and nice people, and I can't wait to see what they produce -- although scheduling means that some of them will first truly be getting started next month-or-so. At the time of writing, I just finished a 3-hour meeting with the sound designer, going through everything. After working on the visuals for so long, being able to talk about my intentions like this and add those extra layers in the story through sound and music is really truly exciting. It's probably going to be a while before I can preview any of that, but I'm really looking forward to it!

ROUND-UP:

I think I'm going to allow this month's update to be one of the shorter one. Some exciting things have been set into motions, but there are parts of it that I think are too early to talk about in specifics - for now. We've got some real interesting ideas for how to approach the TV-series, and if any of the applications come to fruition that will become relevant to talk about sooner rather than later. I've also kind of settled on a release date for the episode, and am playing around with some cool ideas for the release. But you know how I sometimes get ahead of myself with the ideas here and then become too busy and get away from executing them? Yeah, don't want to do that this time around, so I'll wait a bit with enlightening you all till I've got the plans locked and loaded :)

In loving memory of Tot, the flightless canary:

Tot came to me a little over two years ago, having spent the first year of her life in a small transport cage together with way too many other birds. For such a little bird, she's been a big inspiration, because even though she could never keep up with the other birds and barely fly, she lived that bird-life of hers to it's fullest nonetheless - always finding new creative ways to get around. She had health issues from day one, and in the end it caught up with her. One Friday amidst this turmoil of a month it became evident that she was losing a lot of her strength. The vet spent a week trying to treat her, and she surprised us every morning by still being alive. Unfortunately there's very little one can do in order to diagnose such a little, weakened creature, blood work and X-rays both being too disruptive. She did not suffer, but grew increasingly tired, finally passing away in her sleep in her food bowl last Saturday. 

She was a cool bird. And one of her chicks still lives with me, having become an incredibly sweet and hand-tame for a canary. I'll definitely miss her!