As evidenced by the 30+ Million views we’ve had so far on youtube, the past 9 months have been a crazy, wild ride.
Before Nathan Riddle (producer) and I came on in August, the small talented team Shonduras and Jordan Nguyen assembled to animat the 1st episode of A for Adley had been churning for over 8 months. We helped them finish in about a month.
Episode 02 took 3 months to animate, but we also re-designed and re-built the character and main environment, shifted to Unreal, and did our first NFT drop with Quarter Machine.
We hired more people and refined our processes to get Episode 03 done in a month and a half, Episode 04 done in a month, and Episode 05 in a month as well.
Of course, each of these has a month for storyboarding/concepts and a month of modeling that happens 2 months previous to production, for a total of 3 months for the overall process, but we’ve gotten better at overlapping the processes for monthly releases.
Full Momentum
Episode 05 felt like a sweet spot for many of us. While working on episode 03, we decided that it was time to start developing the new series so we can someday release one of each every month. To do this, I began to hand off directing responsibilities to other team members while I took time to storyboard episode 05 to give that production one last push. The goal was to layer in more poses to speed up the animators, to get more production design done along with the boards, and push the clarity of storytelling.
One lesson learned when it came to productions is that I should have done the first pass on the concepts. My lack of communication there caused a lot of rippling complications. But we have such a great team that we ironed the problems out and delivered a great episode:
[Edit: Animation industry colleagues have reached out to me asking why the quality of lighting/animation/texturing/rendering went down so far from episode 04. These kinds of conversations are important to a director because they inspire improvement. When the storyboards were presented to the team, there was such an excitement about the quality of the boards that we began saying, “this episode is going to be fast and easy.” On episode 04, the plan was to hand off responsibilities and become a co-director. On episode 05, the plan was to hand off the co-directing role because the new series required so much attention. The further episode 05’s production went along, the more I jumped in to fix many things, worried we might have a quality issue on our hands. It was important to keep team morality high, as we had another episode and an NFT project starting immediately after the 3 weeks of animation finished. I was concerned about quality, but everyone around me was talking about how great it was. In retrospect, I should have done at least rough concepts along with my boards and communicated more at the beginning of the episode production. There are many other small things we could have done better. I’m grateful for these lessons because they’ll make me a better director in the future. That said, this is still projected to be our most successful yet in terms of views.]
Of course, in showing that video out of order, I’m denying you the privilege of watching how our team pushed quality steadily higher with each and every episode. Here’s 1-4:
The Next Chapter:
As some of you know, a potential partner and I almost funded “The Unsingable Song” feature film back in August, but it’s actually good that hasn’t happened yet. Spacestation Animation has been an amazing place to learn and grow. I’m constantly saying, “Glad I learned that lesson before directing a feature film.” It becomes more true each passing month, especially now that I’m developing this new series.
And that next series is shaping into something fun and special, with fantastic collaborative voice artists(tba), story artist Brant Moon, and character designer Shawn Boyles! More on that exciting development coming soon … once it’s ready to share!
Thanks for all of your support these many years and I hope we have even more inspiring content coming for you soon.
~Scott