Bora Bora Honeymoon is now live on Youtube!

After a nearly 4 year production, Bora Bora Honeymoon is finally ready for its You tube debut! I want to thank Lija Mandic for his outstanding work on the backgrounds, Fox Amoore for his fabulous soundtrack, monsterchow for his amazing sound mix and Ifus Moraine for her coloring of the end title art! Thanks go out as well to all the voice artists who contributed and made this animation what it is today! I’ll be posting this blurb on both Fur Affinity and Bluesky. If you get a chance please consider watching it on you biggest monitor as it really deserves as large a canvas as possible. I uploaded a 4K version and as of yet it still has 20 minutes to go before it’s live on Youtube. Lots of fun detail to see on a big monitor, lots of fun cartoony vore as well as a little tender moment snuck in there.

And thanks for everyone on FA for all the encouragement and well wishes over the past 3 years. You guys and gals are the main audience so I hope you like the film as much fun as I had making it!

https://youtu.be/ncf2FXJH1ZE?si=IN9ejyzcCyv40n6W

I created the Youtube channel for Bora Bora Honeymoon on Sunday. I'm awaiting one small tweak to the audio and once that's done I'm posting no later than Friday of this week. The sooner I get the audio file the sooner I'll post....but I don't want to delay the release of the film any longer than Friday! I've already begun my second film project and will be posting the FA page as well as a link to the Patreon for the project. I'll give you all a heads up as I go live with both items!

Hello all! I've kept it quiet for a few weeks now but I'm posting now on Bluesky! It's more of the same post you see here but I wanted to get the word out about the upcoming release of Bora Bora Honeymoon on Youtube this week. Here's my Bluesky name: dashwana.bsky.social

I have received the final music mix from Fox Amoore and have edited the film together in a pretty close to finished form. The sound FX and music are balanced and it's sounding awesome. There are just 2 tiny tweaks to the soundtrack and if those happen, the film will be pretty much ready for publication. We're going to have a wrap party here first for the local furs and then a short time later it'd be uploaded to Youtube and everyone will get a link.

Fox and I are attending AC this year and I've put in for a panel about starting your own animated film project. I'll be cohosting with Fox and it would cover animation as well as the musical journey bringing the film to Youtube. This is all very much dependent on if our panel gets selected or not, so stay tuned.

Bora Bora Honeymoon is in the final stages of post processing! I have a full WIP score on hand and Fox is fleshing out the orchestral sections. The music is sounding fuller by the day and there's a part at the end that just gives me chills, as I'm a sucker for choir in a soundtrack. Once the score is finished there's a final mix to be done, then, publishing! Just a little longer...and it'll be done. I'll be announcing my next film project shortly with it's own FA page, so stay tuned!

Just finished the largest scene in the picture...900 frames with 2 characters talking in bed. All together that's like 60 seconds with both characters combined. Animation through coloring took 11 days, which is pretty fast considering.

What's left? 2 walk cycles of Howard and Kayla and 3 otter scenes, and that's it. The ending has been animated for quite a while, so it's just a few hookup scenes left.

I have one outstanding commission due for the end titles....still waiting on the coloring for that.

Then it's final edit and prep for sound effects and contact my music composer for the film score.

I missed the three year anniversary by 10 days, but it's close enough to call this the start of year 3. A lot has been done these past two years, 69 scenes in color, edited with sound! Five scenes are left to finish the project. I'm working on the largest scene of the picture by far, nearly 900 frames, with both Howard and Kayla talking.

What's left? The big scene, then a few scenes with the otters talking and two short Kayla/Howard scenes. After that it's time to lay in the final sound effects, and after that, original music score. There's still one piece of Background art yet to be rendered but it doesn't affect my animation. My goal, obviously, is to finish up this summer or fall. Since taking retirement I've been able to work far more productively on the film and have completed a number of difficult shots. Now it just a steady push push push to get it done.

This has been a huge learning project: Learning more about animation, about software and the limitations of it. Motion capture, which helped in a number of scenes, didn't always work for the angles I designed them. In particular, angles of someone leaning back in a chair at a 70 degree angle was too much for the software....the mocap translated into weird movements that required time consuming hand animation. The result came out nice, but at a cost of more than a weeks' work. This isn't a complaint, just a recognition that if I use mocap in the future I'll have to carefully design the film and shots to utilize it more effectively.

Well, time to get drawing. I'm pacing myself and trying to get quality scenes out as I can. Every scene presents its own problems and solutions, each one a learning event. It's been a great ride, and I'm looking forward to the next project. I have a new voice talent to whom I've spoken with and two tentative ideas. I may go with a simpler art style next time, but that is for another post!

Whew, so it's been a long while since I've updated, so let me fill you all in on what's happening. First off, the project has been steaming along this whole time, with some minor breaks to work on some side projects. We are currently sitting at 94% completion at this time! There are some 12 scenes to finish the piece out of some 74 or so.

I hit a big slowdown in December trying to add some fully animated scenes to the piece. These take an inordinately long time to do since I'm still at work most of the day and animate before work in the morning and sometimes late into the night. I've been trying to limit the animation to a Warner bros type of movement and fight doing full blown animation, but I let a few of those scenes creep in. Those took over a month to do, instead of a few days or weeks. But now I'm back to doing quicker scenes again, hopefully for the rest of the project.

Good news on the very near horizon! I'm going to retiring, FINALLY, from my current job April 1st! Now I'll be able to devote my full measure to the project at that time. Balancing work and animation over the last two years, plus the ongoing efforts of having a house have made doing this project slightly challenging, but still doable. Currently I have over 5 minutes of the piece in full color with a rough cut of the sound.

I mid may we start the 3rd year of the project. Ugh. I want to finish this as expeditiously as possible. Not having to work and 'waste' 8-9 hrs of my day not doing animation will help there.

Thanks for sticking with me. I know a few folks have wondered what's going on and have reached out to me. It's not for lack of progress, quite the opposite. I'm working 16hrs a day, just not good at updating FA! So that's the update, hopefully more to come soon!

Bora Bora Honeymoon Synopsis
a day ago
Bora Bora Honeymoon Synopsis

On a beautiful honeymoon resort in Bora Bora, an inexperienced otter receptionist is taken aback to see a shark couple checking in ahead of the other guests. After checking them in, the shark couple head out into the resort, confused at first at seeing so many otters in what was supposed to be a shark honeymoon package. Confusion soon reigns in the resort call center as call after call comes in to the reception desk that guests are mysteriously disappearing in droves! This couldn’t have anything to do with our mysterious shark honeymoon couple, could it?

I get this from time to time. Right now production stands at animation, 90%. I have 4mins 37 seconds of finished color animation cut together in Adobe Premiere with sound. With each finished dialogue interstitial I can cut together another 30 seconds or so of finished action scenes. I estimate there are about a dozen dialogue scenes left to animate. This will probably take me through the fall of this year. My biggest slowdown occurs because for me this is still a hobby...an important one but sadly not my full-time job anymore. Until I retire next year I'll lose 9-10 hours of production work every day to my current day job. But I still have weekends and I can get a solid 20+ hours each weekend to get further down the line.

So what's next after animation? After animation comes sound design and music score. I've hired a background artist, might as well get an original score by a reputable composer and sound FX by someone with a sound studio added as well. I have no idea how long 7 minutes of scored music takes to write but I'll be finding out. Ever since I was a little kid I've always wanted to animate my own film....and with each passing month I get closer to my goal.

How will it be released? Most likely Youtube although I've not ruled out a dedicated website to showcase the project.

Well, here we are! Almost two years ago I started on this my very first personal animation project. It's been a labor of love and an almost all consuming one at that. The story idea came to me in a dream one morning...that what would happen if a couple of sharks on honeymoon visited by accident a resort that catered to otters? When I woke up that morning I quickly jotted down the entire idea in 30 minutes on note cards and before I knew it I had the whole thing storyboarded. That kicked off a whirlwind of updating my studio for animation production. I had many thousands of sheets of animation paper, my pencil test machine Io bought in the 1990's as well as my animation desk.

Virtually all my weekends since then has been spent animating. I'm a traditional 2D animation artist, working at an animation desk with pencil and paper. However I did invest in a Rokoko motion capture shoot to help with the animation. Certain scenes like the hula dancers were done with the Rokoko suit and Cartoon Animator 5 as performance capture. Others were hybrid scenes, with certain actions mocapped but with hand drawn elements. The many action scenes were all painstakingly hand drawn. This has slowed production on the many dialogue scenes as I can't motion capture certain aspects. I can't have a character turn around, for instance...I have to hand animate that action.