I want to thank all my loyal Animan friends and followers for their interest in the next Animan movie, DD5. So let me show you some artwork I have done so far, for DD5.
These are the first characters who appear in the movie.
In the foreground, we can see a towel and some men's swim trunks. Hmmmm!
The main 4 characters are shown in the top picture, but altogether, I think there will be at least 26 different personalities in this video. One of my first Animan videos which I made back in 2012, was "Coach Ben's Big Beach Adventure". I originally made that one for an adult video contest, and so it was limited to a running time of 5 minutes. After the contest, I added some more animation to make it longer. But when I watch that video now, I see places where I could have done more things and made it more interesting.
So, this video DD5 will have lots of improvements and be about 13 minutes long. Most Animan videos have about 100 different scenes. DD5 will have 105. Each scene has to be imagined, drawn and animated separately. So you can see that it's a gigantic amount of work, requiring that I sit at my drawing desk for hundreds of hours. It also takes time to record the voices and sound effects, and those have to be included in the soundtrack. Something that takes a very long time is synchronizing the characters' mouths with the dialogue. Characters feel more real, when their lips match the conversation.
I have to make sure that the characters and their clothes (when they're wearing them!) are the correct colors. And a lot of the beach towels in this video are decorated differently, and I have to make sure those are correct, too. These little details seem unimportant, but they can often make the video more interesting to watch, and just make it more fun.
DD5 began with a slow start (all the Animan movies are that way). During this last Christmas and New Year's, I took a trip to the US for 12 days. It was wonderful to spend the holidays relaxing with my friends. When I came home again, DD5 was waiting for me, and I've been doing my best to pick up the pace. Unfortunately, for the past two weeks now, I had a terrible case of influenza, and was sick in bed for a lot of the time, and I had my outside work to do. It's not possible to sit for hours at my computer when I feel that sick! My Animan followers are very understanding and patient about that, so I was able to recuperate smoothly.
So, when will DD5 be finished? I cannot say exactly, but I have already finished about 1/4. During the next few weeks, my outside work will be at a minimum, so I will probably be able to finish the video by the end of March. I will put ALL announcements about the video's release here before then, so please be sure to check back to this blog!
