Phungus & Mowld Episode 2… took me long enough
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2021 12:30 pm
Finally episode 2 of Phungus & Mowld is completed and I'd like to share two trailers with you folks. I've done the whole episode again as a one-man operation: all designs, animation, narration, script writing, editing, post-pro is done by me. All of it in my spare time between job and family. And as fate would have it shortly before completion the whole family got COVID-19 and I was hospitalized and that alone delayed everything by more than one month (it's OK we're all fine, no big deal).
All animation was done using Moho 13.5 on a MacBook Pro 16" with an eGPU. The latest version of Moho is quite stable – I reported a bunch of weird bugs to Moho support, who were super responsive and helpful (great job guys!).
Unfortunately for long scenes (1500 frames+) Moho can get quite unstable and sluggish (there's a horrible bug that can crash Moho randomly when you perform an undo
). Rendering speed is better with this version, since I can use all 8/16 cores, but compared to Apple Motion rendering performance is still a joke. This time I didn't bother doing most of the compositing in Motion, though, because I wanted more camera angle switches and for that I'd have to render out the characters in 4k and that ain't gonna happen with Moho's sluggish rendering performance, so I had to do almost all rendering and compositing in Moho directly. That was painfully slow. I won't do that again.
Another reason why I prefer compositing in Apple Motion is that I suck at coloring background artwork with moody light/colors, so I just cheat by drawing backgrounds in "normal" light and add ambient moody lighting in Motion, which tends to make the scene look better. I regret not having done that for this episode, because as a result all scenes look too well lit and kinda flat.
Episode Trailer 1 “Dramatic/Sad”
Episode Trailer 2 “Groovy”
All animation was done using Moho 13.5 on a MacBook Pro 16" with an eGPU. The latest version of Moho is quite stable – I reported a bunch of weird bugs to Moho support, who were super responsive and helpful (great job guys!).
Unfortunately for long scenes (1500 frames+) Moho can get quite unstable and sluggish (there's a horrible bug that can crash Moho randomly when you perform an undo

Another reason why I prefer compositing in Apple Motion is that I suck at coloring background artwork with moody light/colors, so I just cheat by drawing backgrounds in "normal" light and add ambient moody lighting in Motion, which tends to make the scene look better. I regret not having done that for this episode, because as a result all scenes look too well lit and kinda flat.
Episode Trailer 1 “Dramatic/Sad”
Episode Trailer 2 “Groovy”