I'm happy to finally be able to announce what is ROOT project. This summer I will present a panel called Animation is Magic! at BronyCon 2013. This project is a big challenge for me, bigger than any project I have ever done before, but I like challenges. Why making a panel about MLP? Well, that's a long story but in short Thierry37 told me to watch the show, I did, and liked the animation so when I saw all the fan animations I told myself "Hey, I could do that!". As Yoki is a Flash puppet, I already knew a lot about the style.

Here's a short trailer for Project Thundercloud, a fan film about Derpy Hooves I'm making for the panel. Right now I'm still searching for a voice actress for Derpy, as the one who was supposed to work with me is busy with another project.

I made a short movie for the panel showing the steps to make Flash animation that will be the first part of Project Thundercloud, but as I'm using 7 seconds of animation from the show to make an example, I will probably have to cut some content out of it if I want to post it here. I contacted Tom about it but I didn't receive any answer, I can't blame him, he's doing a big job making sure the site is fully operational.

As I said in my earlier posts, the film is still inspired by the visual style of Yoki's Story. Like every episode of Yoki's Story did before, I use exaggerated angles for the characters, so the characters will be seen in 3Q more often than in profile. Instead of circles under the characters I will use more realistic shadows having the shape of the characters like Yoki's Story VI did. Technically, they are not rendered the same way so there are no static shadows anymore and it's the same for reflections and refractions. Of course, this wouldn't be my project if there wasn't any 3D animation, but this isn't the biggest part of the film. The only thing that won't return from Yoki's Story is from the soundtrack as I won't use anything from Final Fantasy in this.

For Yoki's Story fans, two weeks ago I said I would write a little something about it. Well, I did eleven pages just for episode VI : part II. Here's the link. It's in PDF, so you will probably have to download it, I'm sorry about that.

Also, I finally decided to join Twitter. I don't know why I didn't do this before, but I'm going to use it now.