Back from Ireland - Looking forward to 2019!

Dear Patreons,

As usual, I hope you are all doing well and enjoying yourselves in these warm holiday times. 

As the year comes to an end I want to make one last update to round off 2018. I was aiming to make a video just like last year, but with a cold keeping down my voice and lots of stuff to take care of before returning to Viborg that one is going to be slightly delayed. For now, we’ll get by with text!

It’s been a year full of adventures, and I feel like I’ve gotten to grow a lot in many different aspects - which is always a great feeling to have as New Year approaches.

For the past 3 months, I’ve been in Ireland interning at Cartoon Saloon, as I briefly mentioned in my previous update. The internship went way beyond my expectations. I was lucky: lucky to get the internship in the first place; lucky that they were just in the start of the production where it was easy to communicate with the production team; lucky that I was the first intern to arrive, being able to gobble up a lot of the fun tasks; and super lucky that one of the main characters was a bird and that I could use a lot of my experience from Tales of Zale and observations from my two canary birds to develop an animation style for (that the directors were very happy with).

I had been so afraid that I would end up doing cleanup for my entire time at this big studio, but on the contrary, it felt like they came to rely on me plenty. I even got to re-design a few aspects of this character and do some much-needed posing exploration, which on the other hand taught me a lot more about character design that I think I can take with me into Tales of Zale. On that note, I also got to show off the newest version of the animatic to a lot of people and get a lot of feedback, both on episode 3 and how to pitch the series in the future.

When I was offered a job at the end of the period the answer was clear to me. I had greatly enjoyed the experience, but I was even more-so eager to put all the things I’ve learned into this project of mine. During the internship, I had been trying to work on ToZ at the same time, but this pushed my wrists too hard and got too close for comfort to a permanent injury. If the amount of time I can spend in front of a computer is the slightest bit limited it makes all the more sense that I spend that time doing what I truly enjoy.

Luckily (again) the winds are blowing in my favor, as my application for the Open Workshop next year was accepted. I have attached my application for this program, as that should make my intentions rather clear.

The Open Workshop in Viborg provides free residency and equipment while artists work on developing their projects. I have applied for this in order to work on producing episode 3 and developing the series pitch and bible.

I am beyond excited to finally be able to put my full energy into Tales of Zale and see what that can lead to! 

Looking to next year I will first be going back to The Animation Workshop to finish off my studies and graduate in January. Following this, I will be going home to Copenhagen for 2 months to prepare ToZ before starting at the Open Workshop in April. The OW lasts 6 months to start off with, with the possibility of extension; so we will see how things go from there.

I have a few hopes while I’m on this track. I hope to get better at using the social media more consistently to share my work, and I hope to do more live streams to share the progress of producing an episode and trying to get a series off the ground. 

But especially I hope to re-brand this Patreon and to be more consistent on updates. With the entry to Open Workshop, an ideal scenario would be that I could push this platform to fully support my only remaining expense (eating and staying alive) so I can focus wholeheartedly on the series. But if I can’t keep updates consistent now that I have no school studies to distract me I don’t think I should have a Patreon at all.

I also think it would be fun to do a bi-monthly art raffle just to add a little more to the rewards than blogs, but that’s just an idea in my mind right now. If you have any ideas for things you’d like to see I would love to hear them – this all goes towards the list of New Year’s resolutions!

For now, I will leave you to it, drink some tea to get my voice back and enjoy some holidays where I can draw freely once again.

Thank you so much for all of your support!! Here’s to a happy 2019!

- Sif