You know, I think the worst part of doing an animation, especially in sprites, is the constant need to watch the scenes over and over and over and over and over just to make sure it's right. I don't mind the sprite hunting, sprite editing, nor the audio editing so much as I get sick and tired of watching the same section of animation constantly. The one thing to keep yourself a bit sane doing it all is to have good background music playing while you're working in the time line and not viewing things.

While sprites can be a faster way to make an animation, you still have to know what you're doing in order to produce the desired feel and/or look. Also, you have to find the right place to "anchor" the sprites or they look bouncy or strange when you animate them...this is a HUGE problem in a lot of sprite animations, including Phoenix Wrong tributes.

As much as I'm suffering through this animation, the Game Ranger 3 is coming along wonderfully. With the scene selection, the first scene, the second scene (action), the full credits, and the bonus scene done the file size is only 2.79MB.

Some might say that file size is a bit large...well, it's not. Reason being is because it's at 32kb/s for the audio and 25 frames per second. Also, the action scene alone is over a minute long. Remember, this is a fully voice acted series with text boxes to assist you understanding what is being said.

Aside from the file size, editing and manipulating sprites isn't as easy as you'd think initially. Most of the time you're limited in what you can do based on the sheets available, but if you have the right programs and patience, you can do extra things...all of which takes time. Looking for sprites is time consuming enough as it is!

Oh, and what happens when you want to use something other than sprites in a sprite movie? Yeah, you either have to make it or find it, then edit it in multiple copies in order to get what you are going for...especially if you can't find what you need on the web.

Then there's the audio...even though I have the recordings from the voice actors and the music...it still has to be edited to sound better and/or fit correctly. This takes up quite a bit of time, too, especially when you have to redo voice files or find the right sound effects. You'd think that fucking Dragonball Z would have tons of sites with the sounds, but no...

Oh, did I forget to mention how long lip-syncing takes?

Then, of course, there's always those times where you surprise even yourself. It's always a great feeling to animate something and then watch it, only to find it better than you hoped for originally.

As far as the GR3 is going, as I said, it's a small file size for what's 100% completed and it's going to be a lot longer than the previous episodes.