The 2nd anniversary: thank you and good bye!

The Not Safe! Series had its second anniversary yesterday! Wow, two years of Not Safe! Series... I really was persistent...

This post is meant to just put an end on the series. The Not Safe! Series is over.


I really was on the mood to continue the series on the past months, even with the low number of views. The fun of making videos kept me on it. But, that's just not enough.

The number of views on my videos is hilariously low and I don't see any point in continuing the series like this.

Besides the fiasco this series is, another reason for me to abandon it is that I plan to start a new one. But a really good one. This new series, however, will take months to get done, so you will only see it probably after august of this year.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who watched any video of the Not Safe! Series and a special thanks to those who subscribe to its Youtube channel.

I know they are good when I want to watch them over and over again

Making good animations is a difficult work. Not only because of the technical and "physical" work required (make the backgrounds on Gimp, animating the characters on Synfig, adding sounds with Kdenlive, etc), but also because the pressure to "tell a good joke".

Primarily, the Not Safe! Series is a humorous series. Obviously, this means its content is meant to be funny, and making something funny is hard, especially because I don't want to "tell the same jokes" that many other series do.

A "meter" that I use to know when my animation is good is how many times I like to watch it again.

I am going to be honest: not all content I made and released achieved a high value on my meter. In other words, there is some videos that I myself don't like that much, or that I know I could have done better.

But there is content I made that, even I knowing it has flaws, I really like and actually like to watch many times. The 2012 Christmas themed single "If Gifts Could Talk", for example, is an animation that I often watch. "Mixer Man Trainee" and the Episode 4 are other of my own videos that I enjoy.

Actually, I think this is my best animation of 2012.

I am generally confident on showing off these videos to other people because I like them and I know they are good.

But, no matter what is the final quality of my productions, I like to think all animations I make are an "experimentation". As some sort of indie productor, there is no content standards to follow, and I am always trying to find what kind of humor I am good with. And even if I did find someday, I will still do experimentations.

Watch "Episode 6 Preview: 'Stuck on my Head'"

As promised, a new video after two weeks:




About the Episode 6 itself, well, it is going to take more weeks to get done. The next video is probably going to be a single, unrelated to the Episode.

Daily Report: Kdenlive render problems

The Episode 6 Preview: "Stuck on My Head" is done and ready to go!

Today I did all the final editing and added the sound effects. As stated on the previous post, the lack of voice acting represents a challenge on the audio part; but after all the work I am happy with the sound effects applied.

Unlike the single "If Gifts Could Talk", I took more care with the sounds. I edited some sounds on Audacity to fit them better on the context of the animation, and the result is pretty good. Unfortunately, you will still feel the "lack of something", due to the non spoken dialogue.

Adding sound effects with Kdenlive.

After beating the sound challenge, I found out I would have to face another trouble: Kdenlive refusing to render the animation.

The rendering process was taking less than 1 seconds and it was generating empty files.

After some time trying to fix it, I tried to run Kdenlive as root and strangely everything worked fine. Searching on the internet, I found other people having problems with Kdenlive on the Ubuntu 12.10. It must be something with this version of Ubuntu.

Anyway, I finally could render the video. But it wasn't perfect at all: Kdenlive was desynchronizing the clips. Fortunately, it was creating a difference of only a few frames. However, it is something that shouldn't happen. I tried to compensate by throwing all the sound clips a few frames ahead, but had no success.

As this problem wasn't an "animation killing" problem, I decided to go with it. In other words, I am sorry but the animation will be released with this "defect". I will do some searches on the Internet to find a solution so this incovenience do not happen on future animations.

Anyway, the new video will be uploaded tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Daily Report: Two scenes in one day

Today was another day of hard work. Despite being tired because of it, the results are good: the two scenes of the animation are done!

Tomorrow, I will make the final editing and add the sound effects.

Just like "If Gifts Could Talk", this animation is centered on a dialogue and thus I will face the same challenge again: the audio part.

Since the dialogue is text on screen, there isn't many sound effects to put, and that results in some "strange" moments, where you feel the lack of a intense atmosphere, which would be created by voice acting (which I don't have for the moment).

Anyway, time to let the computer render all the two the scenes!

The rendering will take some time...