After about a thousand hours of production and one and a half months of running late, Valentine's Day 2012 is finally ready for viewing purposes. As I discussed in previous posts, this will be the final annual installment of the Valentine's Day series for the following reasons:
• Danielle and I have agreed that these are taking way too much time to produce, and we'd rather spend time together instead of me spending five months on 50 hour production weeks.• This is the first year this started to feel like an obligatory chore rather than a fun opportunity to make something neat.
• I feel these animations are starting to get a little repetitive.
This is the only one of my series that will have an unexpected, 'cancelation' style ending. I've had the plans written out on how to end the other series (SuperVillain, SpermRider, and Sock) for three to four years now.
However, in a few years, I'd like to come back to the series and make a climatic, send-off episode, but for now we've agreed that it's best to end the series here.
Considering how every episode seems to involve some kind of car/vehicle thing, Danielle and I also think that the series would make for an awesome racing game sometime in the distant future.
This animation marks the official debut of the new 'digital composition' post-production technique I'm using to save time. 2007's "VoyageWaffle," 2010's "The Faster the Treadmill," and the upcoming "Empire of Sock" technically all did this previously to some extent, but "Valentine's Day 2012" is the first to extensively use it. Due to rushing and a gross overestimation of how much I could achieve with it, I composed some of the shots poorly and had to over-rely on digital blurring and other effects to make the shots look nice when compiled. I like how the final product looks, but I'm going to avoid making the same mistakes in future because I hate losing details.
Since the new method requires me to painstakingly scan every frame one at a time, and my scanner is going senile, I had to make this paper frame thing to preserve the light levels. Unfortunately excessive exposure to the scanner's crazy x-ray light thing caused some adverse side effects. Sorry Scanny Buddy, your eyesight died for a good cause.
Anyway, with Valentine's Day out of the way, the Empire of Sock can finally birth. The entire piece is penciled and inked, and the first two minutes have been fully completed (as previously previewed). All that remains is going back and redoing a couple of shots I don't like anymore, coloring the last 75% of the film, and postproduction.
This means I'll be seeing you all at some point in the next decade.
