Hey, it’s been a while since the last production report. Lot of things happened! Let’s summarize the last three months.

As it was announced earlier, we have made an agreement with recording studio of Reanimedia Ltd. to produce Russian voicing for upcoming episode. In the middle of December I had flight to Voronezh (the city where Reanimedia headquarters located) with a purpose to meet Alexander Filchenko – the head of recording studio and voicing director.

On the way to Voronezh I’ve had a 8-hours long stop in Moscow, so I took this chance to have a quick meeting with Dmitry Kazakov (lead developer of Krita), Alexandre Prokoudine (the head of Libre Graphics World and Gimp contributor) and Ksenia Kuzyaeva (the regular sponsor of Morevna Project and Synfig). Also, there was a quick interview about Morevna Project for the guys from “The Red Color Group” and we have watched the current production snapshot of the upcoming Morevna episode. A lot of fun!

After that I had 3 days in Voronezh, discussing details of the voicing with Alexander Filchenko. Alexander shown me his studio, which is organized right at his private house. This was the place where all dubbing works happen. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to make any photos.

Alexander is a very charismatic person. Besides of being the ADR director, he is also acts as voicing artist for many anime titles dubbed by his studio. Below you can see a fan-recorded video of Alexander performing some catchphrases for Kamina character of Gurren Lagann anime series (whom he also voiced), filmed at anime convention in Voronezh, Russia, on May 2nd, 2009.

IMPORTANT: The video and photos above are not a subject of any flavor of Creative Commons license.

Alexander wanted to know every detail about Morevna series. We have spend a lot of time discussing its concept, story and characters. During those days we also watched a lot of works dubbed by his studio and picked a few candidates for voicing our main characters.

During one of the meetings Alexander suggested one idea for the key scene of the episode – the revival of main villain, Koschei The Deathless. Actually, this scene is very important for the whole series. With this idea the character motivation gets much more improved and well-developed, so I couldn’t resist. After getting back from the trip I have discussed the changes with Nikolai Mamashev and Denis Kholodilin (who have joined our project as animator in this month). We have polished details and made changes to the screenplay.

The changes are quite significant – some shots should be re-drawn completely, some dropped and many new added. More work for Anastasia! By this moment I almost finished making all required changes to animatic. The whole duration of the episode grown from 13 to 16 minutes. Is this good or bad – you decide. From my side I promise that this is going to be the last significant change to the new episode.

Well, what else did I missed? Too much written already, so I’ll try to be short:

Our lead artist Anastasia Majzhegisheva is still working hard on doing shading. You can see some results of her work scattered around through this post. 90% of already drawn keyframes are shaded by now. After that she is going to take on new shots, which I have added to animatic.

Ivan Mahonin added a new lipsync features to Synfig. Now it can read Papagayo files and sync your animation with them. Expect this feature to land into Synfig builds soon.

We have good progress on RenderChan development – I was writing about it here.

Our crowdfunding campaign for Russian voicing is close to its end. We almost reached the goal and that’s awesome! Managing crowdfunding campaign took a lot of my time last months, but I am happy to see that (besides of the funding) our project is gaining attention from the Russian community. And yes, for the past two months we’ve got more fanart than for the whole time since it beginning.

The total support received by our project through Patreon page almost reached the amount of $100. That might not seem as a big amount, but for us this is absolutely exciting to see that there are people, who value our work that much! We are happy to see how your support makes the project grow. Our possibilities increasing and we are eager to move faster and bring you more. Much-much thanks to all our Patrons!