Finally episode 2 of Phungus & Mowld is completed and I'd like to share two trailers with you folks. I've done the whole episode again as a one-man operation: all designs, animation, narration, script writing, editing, post-pro is done by me. All of it in my spare time between job and family. And as fate would have it shortly before completion the whole family got COVID-19 and I was hospitalized and that alone delayed everything by more than one month (it's OK we're all fine, no big deal).
All animation was done using Moho 13.5 on a MacBook Pro 16" with an eGPU. The latest version of Moho is quite stable – I reported a bunch of weird bugs to Moho support, who were super responsive and helpful (great job guys!).
Unfortunately for long scenes (1500 frames+) Moho can get quite unstable and sluggish (there's a horrible bug that can crash Moho randomly when you perform an undo ). Rendering speed is better with this version, since I can use all 8/16 cores, but compared to Apple Motion rendering performance is still a joke. This time I didn't bother doing most of the compositing in Motion, though, because I wanted more camera angle switches and for that I'd have to render out the characters in 4k and that ain't gonna happen with Moho's sluggish rendering performance, so I had to do almost all rendering and compositing in Moho directly. That was painfully slow. I won't do that again.
Another reason why I prefer compositing in Apple Motion is that I suck at coloring background artwork with moody light/colors, so I just cheat by drawing backgrounds in "normal" light and add ambient moody lighting in Motion, which tends to make the scene look better. I regret not having done that for this episode, because as a result all scenes look too well lit and kinda flat.
Episode is out now, but Amazon did some screw up and my show is now registered twice, once with only one episode and once with two (duhhhh).
Had to fix it myself on the backend, but Amazon's digital machinery is slow, so it'll take several days until it's updated on their frontend…
Yeah the credits, since I did basically everything, I thought it would be a bit much to put my name there yet again at the end.
But in episode 2, my name's in there. I also learned there's a proper way and order of people to do credits.
Thanks for noticing (people DO read credits after all then… ).