I will host two panels at Nadeshicon, a japanese culture festival happening at the Université Laval, April 4th to 6th 2014.

- Fan animation with Playerdotexe, Saturday at 3 to 4 PM. (It’s not exclusively about MLP fan animation, but the ways to create a fan animation and the challenges around it.)

- My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, with Sharpe, Juju and Playerdotexe, Sunday 4 to 5 PM.

That’s the reason why I announced that the trailer for Project Thundercloud II would be released that weekend, as it will be first shown at the fan animation panel.

The two panels are in french, but I will gladly accept any question in english as well.

The project is going well, and as I got this as a request from a few fans, I decided to work on a scene of the film blending 2D and 3D in a live recording.

There's around 12 minutes of footage rendered right now, but I will have to render again two scenes to fix a mistake I did with magic effects.

The production of the project is going well, everything is on schedule and the quality of the animation is improving greatly.

The name of the project changed to Project Thundercloud II: Shadowbox, but the Newgrounds release will have to be called Project Thundercloud II because I'm limited to 25 characters for the title. I'm also going to be credited as Playerdotexe rather than Player.exe as most people are now referring me as the former.

So far there is 9:18 of rendered footage, and I expect the final project to be around 16 to 17 minutes long.

I'm also working on some good 3D/2D blend animation for the project. Some will be in Open GL and some will be raytraced.

And yes, Project Thundercloud III is in writing right now.

I also got some extra time to experiment with digital drawing with Photoshop, and I finally got to use my old Bamboo tablet for something else than Reswob's handwriting.

As I said earlier, I have a few important announcements regarding the second part of my animated trilogy based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic called Project Shadowbox to give you for Christmas Eve.

First of all, I have to start with the most important of all. I am very proud to announce you that BaldDumboRat (The voice of Derpy Hooves) returns for this sequel.

On the topic of voice actors, GloryOfTheRainWings and Cougar MacDowall are also joining us for the project.

The audio itself is getting a lot of improvement, most notably with the balance. I got a lot of complains about how the BGM was just too loud and the music choice wasn’t the best. There won’t be a single theme from a video game in this. The audio synchronization is also done differently, there won’t be anymore the lip-sync problem from Thundercloud.

The improvement is not only with the audio, the animation itself is also improving and I’m very excited to announce you that Project Shadowbox will become the first MLP fan film released in 4K, it’s four times the pixels of the TV show, being in 1080p. This will however stay in 1080p on Newgrounds. The scenes are also saved in two pass 100Mbit/s H.264 video rather than single pass 80, so it should look a bit better.

I also made the switch to Adobe CC, but you shouldn’t see a big difference. It’s just that it got better performance and it’s finally in 64bit.

There is a lot of hand drawn content in this project, many backgrounds are completely original. I didn’t want to stay with only what the show did and I wanted to make something by myself.

The animation is also getting something that the show doesn’t even have, in Project Thundercloud I made sure not to mirror manes to avoid the problem of the Ambidextrous Sprite (This is becoming a technical problem for me with Vinyl Scratch), but now I’m doing the same for horns.

The film should be released this summer, and it should be around 17 minutes long. This will also be my last project to be released on Newgrounds, as I want to focus more on Youtube releases.

So this is all, I wish you all happy Holidays and a very Minty Christmas.

(I said it was going to be huge, but I didn’t expect it to be that much)

Hey guys, it's your former sprite animator with a huge annoucement!

On November 16 at 12:00, I will be hosting a fan animation panel along with TehJadeh at the CANterlot Convention in Toronto. If you go to the convention, make sure not to miss our panel, we will have exclusive content to show you.

I must say that Project Thundercloud completely changed my life, it not only changed the way I animate, but also gave a reason to animate. It gave me something that I never had in all these years of sprite animation. It was only a small tech demo I wanted to make for my panel, but it became much bigger. It's now the first part of a trilogy, and I am working on the second part called Project Shadowbox.

I could talk about my experience at BronyCon 2013 as a panelist for hours, but the most amazing moment have been when I found out that bronies from Quebec were there. They told me about their group, we became great friends and met again at two brony meetups.

Yes, that's right. A new version of Project Thundercloud fixing a few problems that have been pointed out will be released as the introduction of Project Shadowbox.
- The scene with Cheerilee will be reedited for accuracy.
- The scene with Dinky will also be reedited for accuracy.
- The audio will be fixed so that the dialogues won't be drowned by the background music.
- Some background music will be changed.
- The film will be faster paced by shortening the transitions.

A few changes to the animation will also happen, but only to match the animation of Project Shadowbox.
- As the aspect ratio changed from 16:9 to 2:1, most scenes will simply be reframed using a pan and scan technique.
- The night sky will be slightly different.
- The 3D scenes will feature Z-depth blur.
- The distance blurs will be hexagonal rather than Gaussian.
- The lens flares will also be different.

As for Project Shadowbox itself, the fan film will only be released in a single official version rather than the four I made for Project Thundercloud. The opening logos will also be slightly shorter.

Project Shadowbox, the sequel to Project Thundercloud, a fan film about the story of Derpy Hooves is in work right now. This is a huge project that will take a year of work to be done. Right now I don't have anything animated to show you, but I can tell you this, the quality of the animation will improve.

Meanwhile, you can ask me things related to Project Shadowbox (As long as it's not related to the story), Project Thundercloud, Yoki's Story (My previous project) or anything else.

Unfortunately, because of many problems with Flash and the way movieclip effects are rendered I won't be able to make Project Shadowbox with the paper style I wanted to have at first. I decided to go back with a more show-accurate style instead.

The puppet rigs for all the characters of the project are now done. For some I tweaked the colours of the original puppets but for others I simply remade them completely, as the Double Rainboom puppets while very high quality, are not accurate enough for me.

Visually it should look like Project Thundercloud, but more detailed and featuring particle simulation. The 3D animation should blend better with the 2D animation too, but it will continue to be photorealistic. Technically it will take a lot more resources to render it, but as Intel is introducing the new Haswell microarchitecture, I will invest on a more powerful computer at its launch for rendering it. I had to make a lot of cuts to the 3D animation to reduce rendering times in my previous projects but now I should finally be able to have the resources for that.

The project itself is even more complex for me than before as I am doing the job of an entire animation team all by myself but it shouldn't stop me from making something amazing. Project Thundercloud was a challenge for me, as it was not only my first My Little Pony fan film, but I had to make this one of the best of its category. This time I want a new challenge, and I want to make something even better.

I can't tell a lot about the story yet, but it will tell the same message as Project Thundercloud.

Project Thundercloud got a sequel in work, yay! Called Project Shadowbox. I might need musicians for this, as I would like to make the music fit right with the animation. With the success that the last project got, I can officially say that I will stay a brony animator and leave the sprite animation.

First, with the technical details :
- Like the teaser at the end of Project Thundercloud, it's going to be in 21:9. (Edit: changed to a 2:1 ratio)
- The style is different, but I think you should like it. It's inspired by the creations of The Paper Pony.
- This will rely more on After Effect compositing.
- Will probably premiere at BronyCon 2014.
- Project Thundercloud has been done in six months, like Yoki's Story VI : part I and Yoki's Story V, but Project Shadowbox will take a year to do. Making it a much bigger project in term of complexity and length.
- 3D animation will return, but it's done slightly differently.
- I will probably have to find a rendering farm for the 3D scenes.
- Only two different version this time, the Youtube / BronyCon 2014 version and the Newgrounds version.
- The full source won't be published this time, but I am not saying no to giving you the sources to some scenes.

The story details :
- Derpy won't be the only talking character this time, and the narrative structure won't be the same.
- The Background Mane 6 will be there.

The film has been finalized and I can now tell you the release dates of the different versions of the project.

For those who don't know, Project Thundercloud is a My Little Pony fan film about the story of Derpy Hooves in the style of Yoki's Story I am working on since January. Contrary to Yoki's Story VI : part 1, all the versions are in 1080p. I am not sure on the kind of projector I will get at BronyCon so this version will probably be shown at a lower resolution. I am really excited to show you this project, this is my first time working with vectorial artworks and this is so awesome I don't think I will ever work with sprites again.

All the times are in UTC-5:00.

- BronyCon 2013 version, presented at Animation is Magic!, on August 2nd at approx. 10:20 PM. (7m 58s long)
- Youtube version, same as the BronyCon 2013 version, on August 2nd at 11:00 PM
- Newgrounds version, slightly altered version with a scene removed for copyright reasons, featuring beta content instead (8m 30s long), on August 2nd at 11:00 PM.
- Colorless version, same as the BronyCon 2013 version but without any post-productions effect. (7m 58s long), on August 3rd at 11:00 PM.
- Source version, every files used in the project in a .zip archive. (355MB), on August 4th at 11:00 PM.

Here's a few trailers I made for the project :