Finito!

Well, that's phase one completed. I actually finished and sent off the last episode just over twelve hours ago but I needed to catch up on sleep before I could be bothered signing onto Blogspot.

This thing has been hell to animate on top of the pressure of a 50-credit-point semester at university. I'm still wondering how I managed that. I am one man and so far I have animated TWENTY MINUTES AND FORTY SIX SECONDS of Okki the Octopus.

If no one gives me an award for this I am going to invent one and give it to myself.

The client didn't like the look of Coach Eel so I gave him a facelift. I'm glad they pulled me up on it as the new Coach Eel not only looks better but is also much more expressive and smoothly animated.



In other news, I am finally onto the last of eight episodes of Okki the Octopus which should hopefully be finished in a few hours. It is by far the longest episode, but thankfully it is not that complicated compared to an episode like Okki's Game where there is a lot of action and everyone is wearing a soccer uniform. Tiny little technical perks like that can ramp production time for a two and a half minute animation (about the length of Okki's Game) to the same amount of production time as a longer but simpler episode such as the final episode, Okki the Team Player. It utilises many pre-established backgrounds and characters from previous episodes, though the episode itself goes for three minutes and twenty seconds.

Upon completion of this final episode, phase one of the project - which will constitute my WIL Project for university - will be totally complete. From there I will be moving into the 'feedback' stage where rather than producing entirely new material, I will be refining and making changes to episodes as per the client's request.




The last two episodes have both called for small-role characters who nonetheless appear a few times during the animation. Every time I must make a new set of parts it adds hours to production time, but the end result is usually quite satisfying.