The production of my animated short film “Sleeping Dragon” has been on hold for quite some time. I always liked the story too much to truly abandon the project, but I also lacked the time and dedication to work on another large effort like this in my spare time.
Nonetheless, I’m happy to announce that Sleeping Dragon is back in production and is progressing nicely. The story has had a minor overhaul with some new elements added and others removed, and the look has been much refined: For this I must thank both Corel and Apple, simply because Corel’s software Painter is absolutely unusable on my Mac and Apple for making it necessary to run Windows in Boot Camp in the first place. Without these inconveniences, I would never have tried to achieve the look I am aiming in good ol’ Photoshop, only to find that it does a much better job anyway.
So now that I’ve finally settled on a look and style, I’ll continue working on the painting, animation and compositing.
I’ve decided to do as little as possible in 3D. One reason is that I’m quite frankly sick of waiting for renders to trickle in (I do that at work all day) and I’d rather work in a more productive and interactive 2D environment.
The other reason is that the style would be much harder to achieve in 3D, with practically no advantages to speak of. I’ll just fake the depth in comp.
The characters however will remain true 3D models, but I’ll be using my Normality plugins to shade and light them rather than doing it in 3D.
I’ll be updating the journal with my progress on the film every now and then. Over the past two years I’ve done a lot of research and development with this project in mind, so you can expect to see a tutorial or technique to pop to up here occasionally, as well.
