TLDR Thank you for your interest in our works!❤ We know it's a long wait but we're working hard every day to share it with you as soon as we can! Everything after Fischl will be shorter (。> ‿ ◕。)
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Hello! I don't know if any of you will recognize me but I'm Vici's animation partner Kitsune (@ KitsuneEcchi). First just want to give another thanks to those of you that supported us. It means a lot to us (˵^ ◡ ^˵)❤ And even those who haven't and just like watching we're happy to see you enjoy them too!
I don't intend to change any minds, and for the few that are upset we completely understand. Some of your concerns are perfectly valid and reasonable. I would like to clarify some things however given the rampant speculation and misinformation I've seen on repeat here and on Twitter.
Up first of course is how long Fischl has taken. Or more accurately Fischl + Succubus Hu Tao + Ganyu x Keqing + some wallpapers we've dipped our toes into over the last year or so.
Fischl wasn't originally planned as a 20+ minute animation that would take a year, but no surprises there. Our work is very open and malleable, often influenced by not just our own ideas but the many ideas our fans request through Patreon and in our near daily discord live streams of our progress. We don't truly know how our works will look in the end until we reach the end and just enjoy seeing it take shape as we add as many fun ideas as we can. Perhaps a few too many at times, which we more fully understand now.
On top of this we're always wanting to improve our skills and advance our craft. This means pushing ourselves with more complex animation and more interesting ideas we weren't capable of before. As a result Fischl has far more dynamic animation than every animation we made before it combined. To be fair we took a bigger bite than we expected with this one, and we've never had to polish anything close to this before. All of our estimates were out the window since this is new territory for us too. And not just the size, more complex animation, and other new techniques. I'm even working with proper voice actors now for our animations, their schedules, and plenty of editing for each and every WIP. Before we just had to set lights, render, color grading, and release the WIP.
It may be a surprise that we're still kind of new to some of this. We've only been at this for a couple years and a huge chunk of that taken up by this one project. We've learned many lessons with this one since it started, and with Succubus Hu Tao it really showed. We have a better measure of where to split projects into smaller stories now. But that lesson was a little too late with Fischl, and rather than drop it or cut it off early and releasing something half-baked and unsatisfying we chose to commit and see it through to the end.
To set some expectations our pace has always been ~1.5-2 mins of finished animation per month, and that hasn't changed in spite of the higher complexity. With that in mind, for as long as Fischl has taken overall we've still been working faster than it may seem. As mentioned Mona x Slime was 9 minutes but took us over 4 months. And with more basic animation that we could re-use better across many scenes. Fischl is around 2.5 times longer with far more complexity and still keeping similar pace. We also spent about 1.5 months on Succubus Hu Tao in the middle of Fischl, another 2.5 mins of finished animation.
All of this to say it should be plainly clear that there is no "milking", "stalling", or any other choice of words to insinuate it's just an easy ride for us. We even paused memberships a handful of times in the last year and half. Fischl is just a huge animation compared to our past works and we simply aren't fast enough to make something like this in just a few months. We work 7 days a week on this outside of sickness a couple times a year or short breaks to spend time with family. Many of our patrons have watched first hand day after day how we work in our discord and know exactly why this kind of work takes so long. Surely some of it our own inexperience admittedly, but not for a lack of effort.
But again we understand the frustrations and have given plenty of thought about how to tackle the many ideas we have for the future. We do apologize for the wait, but when making something equivalent to ~6 of our normal animations we can only get through it so quickly even working each and every day. We only want to give you the best we're capable of, just a bit sooner next time (。> ‿ ◕。)
Rest assured we don't plan to tackle something this huge again with just two of us. We intend to stick to 3-5 min pieces like before. But we also hope it's clear that our passion isn't just churning out porn for the sake of porn like a factory. We love to tell stories, make expressive characters and explore emotions, and push our skills further and further. We could cut to the chase and make loop after loop, scene after scene, of just the raw porn with no bells and whistles. It would be fast, easy and many would be happy with just that. But as fun as the explicit sexual parts are it often rings hollow for us when we can't tell stories and explore emotions and character dynamics right along with it.
Our passion is more than just the porn and we don't want to give anything less than our best to each of these stories. We know that doesn't give the best value to those only interested in the porn for gratification but that's also part of why our patreon is optional and we release free versions of our full animations for everyone to enjoy in their own ways.
Thanks again to the many of you enjoying our works, and we hope you'll enjoy many more of the things we have planned soon once we finally finish Fischl! (っ^ ◡ ^c)❤