As I’ve had more time to work on my own projects lately then I was hoping for, here’s something I managed to finish these days, another narrative sequence of shots featuring more acting, more characters, and - first time, despite all my ranting, I feel like a filthy hypocrite - AI-based voice overs. It’s all @JDaniel’s fault, his recent work has encouraged me to give it a try, finally - no point to refuse new options like this while watching my own little island melt away passively … 
This one has actually been fun, because overall it was - and still is - an ongoing attempt to trick something remotely resembling voice acting out of an AI that has been trained for narrative content, however definitely not for showing too much of emotional variety, and even less for talking the Anukhai native language Anughu.
Again, this served as a test & playground for many different things - beyond the obvious: doing more narrative, character-driven stuff while slowly approaching the kind of content production I’ve always had in mind, it was an exercise in pragmatism too because many of the character assets I used here were a bit older and, regarding their technical aspects, not up to scratch. They’re fairly low poly, and part of the challenge was to find out whether it would be possible to get a sufficient range of expressiveness out of their low poly facial meshes.
Most of all, all these attempts I did lately, were and are attempts to circle back to being a narrator, and get some of the things going again I’m carrying in my head for so long a time. I hope - and right now it feels like it, actually - that this clip brought me a bit closer towards that goal. It feels like I could take it from there and just carry on with the story … if only I had the budget to spend the time … 
Old warrior decorating shields:
“Hey coward”
This little short also features my first ever attempts at animating kids. Orignally planned as a mere background animation, I fell in love with those two repelling a horrid attack, so they got their own little scene:
Nokha’s Love:
Wide shot: Mali and Morm on their way back to the village
The narrator’s perspective:
The short isn’t yet uploaded to YT (it takes me some hesitation to overcome each time, I’m still not super-fond of using YT), so I can’t embed right now.
You can however watch (and even download) it here: http://telayaunddiomancomic.de/ulog-ov.mp4
I’d really be interested in your opinion. Despite its compromises, does the style work? Does the narrative work? The animation, the emotional side?
As improvised and preliminary as the AI voiceovers may be (I’d rather work with human voice actors, but plainly can’t afford that right now), does the native Anukhai voiceover attempt contribute to mood & narrative, or is it more of a distraction/disturbance?
Also, particularly during its first chapters, the story arc features a relative high amount of (part) nudity, because it’s main protagonists are, on the one hand, a small group of teenage/adolescent Anukhai, a (fictional) stone-age-level tribe, and a female Salharin who found herself in the mid of a world unknown to her, without memory, cloth, or anything else. I’m trying to depict the nudity in unobtrusive ways, but for now I’ve tagged the thread “NSFW”. @mods, please let me know if I can skip that.
Need to look into that later.