Hey there, Newgrounds!
My team and I are working on a pretty beefy OVA within our Legacy comic universe as a one-off 'Christmas special' (I'm using the term Christmas lightly as the context within the animation is different than the real-world counterpart), and we were hoping to recruit a few more animators to the team in order to meet deadline goals.
A synopsis of the OVA is that Sonic and a few friends and relatives decide to spend the holidays back at his home on Christmas Island, while other parties at play are vying for their own aspirations.
The tone of the animation is more lighthearted compared to the comics themselves, although there will still be conflict within the story. The animation has a more minimalistic approach to character design and shading to ease workload of animators, with only foregrounds rendered with the same quality as characters, while backgrounds are static pieces with a more painted feel to help the characters pop. The animation is roughly slated for 15-25 minutes in length, with a total of 18 scenes, two of which are action scenes, one is more 'static' and storyboarded similar to a scene you'd see in 'Sonic and the Black Knight'. Everything else is more basic animation such as walking and talking, with emphasis on the latter.
One of the higher-action scenes is already claimed, but we have one left available, while most of the other scenes are available to claim. The OVA is fully voiced and ready to go, and all scenes are storyboarded and waiting to be animated. Musicians are on standby to write out a fully originated score to go along with the timing of the animation (we try to avoid using any existing material in all of our comic dubs or creations). The goal is to have the OVA completed and ready to release for Christmas of 2022 (originally it was 2021 but due to pandemic and shift of focus, not a lot of progress was made on the project).
Some examples of existing storyboards and animation progress are linked below:
Animation samples so far:
An example of the art style that the characters will be drawn in:
Another reason that I am trying to meet the goal is that our Eggman voice-actor for all of Legacy's currently released and planned material, Mushrunner, recently lost his life. This was the biggest project that we had that he was able to be a part of, and I want to ensure that we can release it on our planned goal, and have it be the best it can be, in order to give him a proper send-off from our team.
On the technical side of things, the animation is set at 24fps, with most scenes being animated on 2s, with the exception of some events in the action scenes where 1s translate better. For character dialog, we're just going to stick with the traditional "anime" lip flaps of closed/semi-open/open for easier style-syncing between artists. The project resolution will be 1920x1080 for the final video cut.
If you're interested in being a part of this animation project, we have our Discord server where all project communication and organization takes place. All you need to do is join the server and submit any previous animation work that you've worked on so that we can have a peek at your animation style and experience (preferably would also submit any sort of Sonic works, so we can see how you handle the style of characters. Bonus points if you whip up something mimicking the art style we're aiming for!). You'd submit your audition in the #animation-auditions channel within the server, where I and other editors can review and reach out! If accepted, we'll get you synced with our Google Drive where the script and all storyboards and assets exist!
The final project will be hosted on both Newgrounds and YouTube, the former for networking out with more content creators, and the latter for sheer reach (it will be uploaded on the Sonic Paradox channel, where we currently have about 686k subscribers). This is a voluntary project, we do not have the type of funds or backing to really be able to pay anyone for participating on this project, so I wanted to set that expectation early on. Everything we do on Legacy is born out of passion for the series, and nobody expects financial compensation for their contributions (although I would love for us to get that sort of backing).
Now that I've rambled and probably didn't keep a good order of paragraph topic cohesion, just wanted to thank anybody for taking the time to review the post, and I hope we can see some of you join the project and make this video a reality!