Dear Friends,
I am still working like crazy on DD5 but I am far from finished. I haven't even had time to create a trailer. So, why is it taking so long? Well, I think I can give a few reasons.
1) In my videos "Filipino Professor" and "Uncle John", I used a technique called "cut-out puppet". The characters are made of different body parts which are all moved independently by the computer. It is rather complicated, but I like the smooth movement it provides.
One fan of Animan said that it lacked the artistry of drawing all the pictures by hand, rather than manipulating a puppet. So, I have tried to do things the old fashioned way, to give the video a higher artistic quality. Hand-drawn animation is very tedious and super time-consuming. This has resulted in a longer, much longer period of making this movie.
2) There are a lot of characters in this video. There are also lots of voyeurs, who only blink and don't move--but even THEY require a lot of drawing time.
3) Some fans have expressed a desire for more dialogue, so I have put a lot into this movie. If you've ever watched an Animan cartoon, hopefully you will have noticed that the mouths are synched to the speech with perfection. I do not use the auto-synch feature of my software, because it doesn't always do a good job. So I do it myself, and it is very time-consuming.
4) I had asked several people to help provide the voices in this video, but that didn't work out. Two people who had offered before, suddenly changed their mind. Another two people had done voices for me before, but after I sent them the script, I never heard back from them. And so, I had to do all the voices myself, at least as well as I could. I did that before in the "Camp" video. I'm hoping that fans will not be too disappointed.
Other things require time--this video takes place at the beach, so whenever possible, I have even tried to draw grains of sand, to make the movie better! Also, every character has a different style of body hair, and a few times I had to go back and correct mistakes. I get very tired--not so much from the drawing, but rather from the long hours of concentration!
I promise to do my best to finish this video on time. Thank you for your patience and kindness.
Animan
