I am now leaning towards using Blender to build content for Boneeaters. Blender’s 3d format can certainly build comic panels, which is my normal method for projects like this, but it can also be used for fully animated films.
It is extremely tempting to want to do animation, as that format is the best final format possible. I went back and played a bit more of Mass Effect and yeah, that animation with lip syncing is very strong.
But it introduces some really time-expensive loops to every second of the content itself. If I’m making 24 hours of content, that would be 24 hours of animation. That’s a very tall order for a one-man shop – even getting some help, it would take roughly a full day to create 3 to 5 seconds… so 20+ years? And that’s like full time level too… yowza.
I also have zero confidence AI can get this done for me, the lack of consistency I found caused me to abandon AI as even helpful at all for now.
So that pushes me back into my format of choice, and adds yet-another big reason my format works so well. By making comic panels and then doing voice and music on top, the effort is cut back to something more reasonable.
I can square it with another mental pull back – my goal is to get the story out there, not just work on partial animation for my foreseeable future. So, if I consider the entire project as basically a full storyboard with voice and music, that feels like a complete project. I can also build out the entire story and add voice and music at the end… I can live with that road map.
Although I could possibly do the intro video as a full animation, that would feel like a bait & switch. It’s best if I stick to the same format for everything in the project.