CLIP: The First little finished bit of animation colored and everything heck yes what the heck YESSSS

Look at this! LOOK! It's a few seconds of finished animation on the next Mashed video I'm working on!

Right now it's been animation city go go go draw draw draw! I'm hoping to get ~4 minutes of it done in the next month. Root for me! We got the same BG artist from Sonic Babies back on this too. They're so good, really looking forward to how all that turns out.

You know, looking at this, I think my favorite bit of animation here is the little bird. It's a really simple animation, there were like two assets that were actually drawn for it in total, but I really wanted to make the animation look authentic. You've seen how those little birds hop around.

Lipsync is here too. Honestly looks pretty smooth. If you've never heard me talk about how I tend to handle lip syncing, I usually go a pretty minimalist route. I don't like making a ton of different unique mouth shapes for every consonant since usually just a couple different lip flaps will do the job.

I've been trying to up my game with it, though. You might notice the mouth movements here look a bit more fluid than normal? Maybe? In Clone Chaos it looked REALLY simple, like I think there were often only three (mouth open, mouth with teeth, mouth closed). I always felt in that video it was really obvious when Dranzer (the other animator) took over since his mouth movements are pretty much frame-by-frame unique, so I've been trying to make mine a bit more fluid just to blend in a bit more. And I do think it looks better.

That's all I've got for now! Expect some more in-progress animation from here on out. Fingers crossed that things start rolling smoothly and the first part comes out at the end of the month, and the second part a couple weeks after that. The whole thing is like... nearly eight minutes! I think splitting it into two parts made me feel like I could pace it out a bit longer, like there's a few moments that I was able to let linger without it going on too long. In hindsight this was kind of a lot of story to cram into one video, it's definitely on the Clone Chaos end of having an entire plot that takes turns and stuff.

Keep looking forward to it!