Story #8 is Out! Post-premiere Update & Followup Post

Hi Patrons!

About a week ago we premiered Gildedguy & the Dragon of Mar Story #8 to a Twitch audience of >1000 people, and nearly 9000 people on YouTube! It was a event full of generosity, headbangs, and much excitement for the animation.

It was wonderful to screen a full half hour animation to everyone, something that I missed since FM3K's premiere. While the animation was playing, I was listening in on a Hyun's Dojo Voice call next to the Mrs, (Rebekah).

Although most of you were watching the stream, I had my eyes glued on the chat, and I was very happy to see everyone react to all the story moments and characters that the team and I put so much work into.

For those that attended the premiere, thank you so much for joining the party!

The Week Leading Up to the Premiere

I WILL say that the week(s) leading up to the premiere were full of hype, but also anxiety, for the reality of thousands of unrendered, unccomposited, unpolished frames was staring the production team and I straight in the eyes. I greatly underestimated the amount of work needed to get the animation to a satisfactory state, and Rebekah and I underwent many long days (10+ hours) of pure compositing work to get the animation done in time.

Red Bulls were purchased, consumed, and restocked throughout this period.

Crunch is not new to me, but one of this length (over 4 months) and intensity took quite a toll on us. To absolutely frank, the phrase "I just want this to be OVER!!" was uttered a handful of times. I now understand the justification of animated pilots using crews of several dozen artists.

Cleanup work was plenty needed for this one! Check out Voroxzii's highlight reel on their contributions across departments.

But since necessity is the mother of invention, fortunately I learned a few new techniques to speed up the compositing step of future productions. It's a technique specific to Adobe Animate, and it involves throwing all of your Symbols into one .FLA, and doing Document-wide Find and Replacements to perform color corrections and isolations. I estimate a week of pointless menial work was avoided thanks to this. I also delegated a large portion of Compositing responsibilities to Rebekah (who did Chapters 1,2,3,& 5) and to UnderMineBlox's 3D scenes during Chapter 6.

You can read up more on UnderMineBlox's 3D contributions in his Twitter/X thread here!

All of these factors combined with back-to-back weeks of overtime work allowed us to reach the premiere day with all the assets we needed for final cutting.

One (too many) Small (Big) Issues...

Although we had all the polished assets in place, the final cut was still needed, and I had about a day put it all together. This comes at a risk because this process is dependent on the editor's ability to detect split-second errors through careful reviews of the current "cut" (preview). As the clock ticked down to the final few hours, we started to run out of time to review previews, since the episode was so long. Thankfully the whole team came to rescue and offered their eyeballs to scan the final cuts for blemishes and errors.

The initial "bug" list that we had compiled amounted to over 200 errors that Rebekah and I hacked away at over the course of the final 12 hours (no sleep the previous night)!

So many bugs....so little time..

Even with all the visible bugs squashed, I know that a few escaped our grasp. I am wholly satisfied with the job we did given our time constraints. I was literally rendering video up to the hour the premiere stream went live!

I aim to post even more behind the scenes of the project next month, but in the meantime enjoy what our production team members have been sharing so far online:

Rainby's Demo Reel

Mate's Reel

Reception

Although I do my best to make my animations accessible to anyone (as in, they don't have to see the whole series to enjoy an episode), I am blessed that I have many supporters who are willing to buy into the story, and believe in the characters. This was a long video, a format which doesn't always hold people's attentions in our modern online world of TikTok & Shorts.

I am grateful for people's commitment to sit and view Story 8 through to the end! We already have over 650,000 views in under a week, and several reactions posted online!

 Watching reactions is my guilty pleasure, I can do it for hours.

I'm also noticing a fair bit of discussion on the darker themes and backstory of the animation, which I hope hasn't negatively impacted the enjoyment of the episode. For now, I won't be posting any of my personal thoughts on the meaning of the story, since I want to let the animation speak for itself. I will say that a bunch of peeps have already grasped and zeroed in on what I had learned and wanted to express. So kudos to them for "getting it".

NOTE: Lots of great discussions in the Discord Server, and we have a ton of new members!

HEY! We also got some accolades over on Newgrounds! Daily Pick & a Front Page feature.

 It is wonderful to be recognized for a project we put our all into, and a great deal of credit goes to our art team and you all, the Patrons!

Thank You!

This animation has been on and off my mind since 2017, and the dream of having my character fight a monstrous dragon probably spans back to childhood.

I am grateful that you guys pitched in money every month to support the production of my retelling of this classic myth. I can finally stop wondering what it would be like to artistically "take on a dragon". Although it was brutal and my hardest challenge yet, I have you to thank (in the first place) for the opportunity to jump into the dragon's maw.

I survived!

And we got a whole lot of golden art as a result!

Thank you!