Production
Production remains step-wise pretty much the same as before, but with some subtle changes. For starters, I chose a new voice for Felini. She was carrying a drama, and needed to be more expressive. So I switched to a new voice from a premium, pay-for top-tier collection that offers dozens of controls to stylize the voice to suit situations. For example I could make her whisper, shout or giggle, and sound happy, sad, annoyed, sarcastic — the list goes on. This offers me the ability to create a finely-tuned, nuanced performance that breathes a great deal of life into the character — complete with breaths, sighs, and so on.
As one might imagine, art production is now much more involved. The new style takes more than twice as much time to generate, so episodes will be slower in coming — not that I'm on some kind of schedule. At the end of the day, it's more satisfying. It isn't, and could never be, "Pixar-quality," but it's as good as I can possibly make it. Incidentally, I use CorelDraw (Version X8, which is really old) for all of the artwork, with an occasional assist from Corel PhotoPaint.
One fairly big stylistic change I've made is using more music. A lot more. I feel it helps add some dramatic "weight." The music is a mix of material I create myself, using Sony ACID Music Studio 8.0, plus some freebie online stuff.
As before, I bring the soundtrack to near-completion before moving on. It's pretty much how the entire animation industry operates. As it is, I'm really big on sound design, for which I use Audacity, which is surprisingly powerful freeware, plus Sound Forge Audio Studio Version 10. I do the final mix in Sony Movie Studio Platinum.
For Felini, one can expect a lot less on-screen dialog. Lip syncing is by far the most labor-intensive process, so I am taking advantage of the more cerebral nature of the show. Much of the dialog is thought-based; and, there are more and longer lingering shots to give us time to think — and give me a break.
Some of the visual effects are courtesy of an ancient piece of software I'd forgotten I had: Winamp (Version 5.8, released 2018), a music player with a built-in "visualizer" that generates colorful drug-trippy eye candy. It's responsible for the wormhole/flypaper effects, as well as Boo's fancy speech visuals.
Finally, I put it all together with Sony Movie Studio Platinum. Sony has since sold all of its software to Magix, but the interface for the newer version is simply awful, so I stuck with Version 12. The software is buggy as all hell (I can reliably crash it with just two clicks), but you kind of get used to the bugs after a while. Yes, I could do a ton of awesome stuff with, say, Adobe's suite (AfterEffects is something of an industry standard), but I don't have a thousand bucks just sitting around.
Incidentally, I started the miniseries at the beginning of September, and estimate that I've invested roughly 1,800 hours of work in it. I've got absolutely nothing else I need or want to do, so I can obsess as I like. The single most labor intensive scene in the whole series was Felini's escape from the drowning shuttle; I spent nearly a week fine-tuning that one scene.