Weirdos: Homeworld--KyrocT

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This is the second “prequel” short to the in-development WEIRDOS series. (Wow, I actually went through with doing more of them!) It introduces Kyroc, another one of the four main characters. He is of the species where everyone is made of rock-like material and has round projectiles for hands.
There are two more shorts in the pipeline (episodes -2 and –1) leading up to episode 0, the full-length premiere. Depending on how things go and how much experience I feel I gain, I may skip one or both of the next shorts. I’m thinking I probably will do the third one, but I might skip the fourth one, because it would be the most difficult one to animate. That character has eight limbs, a tail, and antennae. Enough said.

As with episode –4, this short is not integral to the main series at all, and very well may destroy later continuity. It’s more of a test, to get myself familiar with how to animate this character and to figure out what kind of shots I can do. But I put lots of effort into it, and once again I’m publishing it for critique, so I can figure out what I’m doing wrong and right before I make something that I REALLY want to get right. I did my best on this short, but it’s inherently unimportant in the grand scheme of things, so I can afford to make mistakes on it. It’s a learning experience.

Fortunately, this was not 5 months of off-and-on effort, like the first one. I started working on this one immediately after I published the first one, at the beginning of the month, and about a month later, here it is. And despite taking less time to make, it’s unquestionably better. It looks a lot better and there’s a lot more action. It’s not just a bunch of shots with transitions between them, like the last one was.
The only thing I’m not too proud of is the voice work. Fortunately, there are only 4 lines of dialogue. I’ll have to work on developing a voice that sounds good when digitally deepened. But that secondary character is someone I’ll never need to voice again, so that’s good. I won’t have to try to do TWO distinctive digitally deepened voices anymore.
There’s also some running animation that could probably be better… Since I kinda finished the scenes that the running animations were used for and they’re the most complex scenes in the episode (especially the one with shadows), it would’ve been a lot of trouble to make them better… and I don’t think it would’ve been worth it, because they’re pretty good as they are.

This short is even shorter than the last one, and once again I didn’t do any real scripting or storyboarding. Once again there’s not much of a story. But I feel more confident about it than I did about the last one. It’s still not the greatest thing ever, but I think it stands on its own a bit better. It could conceivably get good scores. But still, there’s not much humor to speak of, whereas if I ever do the REAL series it’ll have plenty of humor. The humor will come from the interactions among the 4 characters after they’ve left their homeworld, so there’s none of that here.

If you want to read a whole bunch of other long-winded stuff check out the first short (“Weirdos: Homeworld – Uzo”). Have fun! Hopefully the next short will also take within a month to make.

(P.S. -- I'm out of town for 5 days or so, so don't expect any replies to your reviews until then.)