So, a little on what's going on: my friend, who's doing one of the voices (Cyril), had lost his pet tortoise very unnexpectedly the weekend before last that he had for 20 years, then this last weekend, I lost my cat that I've had for 17 years. All that with other life stuff kinda...yeah.
Then, what now? I'm going to get back to work today. I'll work on getting a rig onto the Male Shepard model. He's already got all his shape keys done (though the phoneme mouth shapes could use some refinement). Then we'll be able to get the first animation done (it's just one shot). After rigging, I'll finish up the shape keys for Kaiden's model then rig him while waiting for Mordin to get done. Then we'll go over the mouth shapes one last time and we'll be ready to animate the bulk of this thing!
So, no deadline, right now. I will just make a post when the rigging is done.

Sound good?

Well, it's not too surprising, but the deadline has been pushed back to the weekend after this upcoming one. Now it's around Sep. 10/11.
I got in touch with Velikhi Maikeru, who's doing the shape keys for the Mordin Solis model, and he informed me that he wouldn't be able to make the original deadline. Which is very understandable, since he's been working on several other projects and was generous enough to actually help out with the more tedious aspects of getting this project done (i.e. troubleshooting, rigging, shape keys, etc.). This is also good for one of our voice actors, since we still need to get some of his lines done for the beginning of this short.
Anyways, thanks for hanging in there. We're almost ready to make this happen!

I've been making significant progress on setting up shape keys for the MaleShepard model. And I'm super proud of myself, since this is my first time doing it! Actually, almost everything I've done, so far, has been a first.
So, I'll update the Tumblr blog with a short .gif, video, or series of screenshots showing the progress here soon. :)

I made this a comment, but I realized it'd probably be better to posted as an announcement:
So, I'm setting a deadline for being animation-ready.
I plan to have the basic models set up with basic rigs and (hopefully) all the necessary shape keys for facial animation ready by the weekend after next (Sep. 3/4).
Just a heads up for everyone in the group and a motivator for me.

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Basically, this means that we'll have all the assets and voice files needed to start animation for the main scenes. This doesn't mean we'll have every asset completely read, but the ones needed for the main (long) scenes. Then the secondary scenes, like the flashbacks and the very end, will be tackled later.

Looking forward to getting this thing made!