✨ Happy Star Wars Day Week everyone! (a bit late to posting this here 😅) ✨
Time to finally give you some updates on the Tukk Tales project and introduce one of its new characters:
Commander Faust of the Coruscant Guard.
More on him soon, but for now I'll let this animation speak for itself. 🫡👀
But why new characters? And where's the short film??
First of all I'm sorry I haven't been great with keeping you all updated in the past! Juggling the project with my freelance work and private life hasn't been easy and I wanted to wait until things have developed further until I make any new announcements, but here's basically what happened:
After the announcement teaser trailer in 2023 completely blew up and I got to see how much love and support there already is for Tukk, his company and the project, I got motivated to push both my storytelling skills and the film itself a lot further, going back and rewriting the whole thing to let us spend more time with these characters and tell a more impactful and memorable story.
Instead of a little one-off 6 minute short (which at the time was still mostly in rough previz stage), it evolved into something closer to a full Clone Wars episode, which I've eventually decided to separate into three mini-episodes, inspired by the beautiful "Tales of" shows from Lucasfilm.
With that expansion also came the need for a lot more characters, designs and assets. And since I'm making all of those from scratch, with hand-painted textures, animator-friendly rigs and screen-accurate details that have to hold up in all kinds of close-ups, I've spent a LOT of time on that part of the process while simultaneously setting up some of the previz animations for the new story.
But an end of that step is in sight and once it is complete, updates will become way more frequent as I'm much faster when it comes to bringing shots from previz to a final stage.
I still can't give a release date yet as it's a no-budget personal project that is happening between client jobs, but it's still going full steam ahead and I'm extremely excited about the new direction it has taken on a while ago.
I'll also be looking for other character animators to bring onto the project later on and help out with some shots, so if you're interested in volunteering, feel free to send me your reel (mail address in my linktree)!
That's it for now, more character reveals soon (and no, they won't all be clones 🗡️🥸)!
I'm not the best customizer, I'm not the best photographer, and I'm basically not the best. But I really like the animatics of High Ground Animations aka Jan.
I'm really looking forward to the episode! And since Jan recently published a new character, I made him and added him to my group of custom characters that I want to share with the world!
Now I have the whole gang. Stretcher, Moss, Roy, Tukk, Crash, and an ordinary fighter. I wonder if there will be more characters... I also took the liberty to make two types of heavy fighters (I hope Jan won't be offended...).
