Please let us know your more constructive or positive thoughts on the animation update. This can include:
My advice for the next update would be to leave the lips as they are. Maybe their pace can move more smoothly and efficiently, but we don’t want what we had again. Like the lip shapes for example. They got severely affected from the update. My character has Medium Straight Natural lips. When the updated happened, his lips moved like a hybrid between medium natural and medium heart. It was very cringy to see.
As you know, many of us envision our characters a certain way and we really feel connected with them. I felt very connected with my character because I designed him based on a crush that I had once met. So when they got changed, it really broke my heart and others’ heart as well.
As many other said on here, please have the team give us some options, or let us have a say in the future updates. I understand that y’all need to update to give us new animations, and I get that. Limelight has updated in the past before. Just look at what LimeLight looked like in 2017-2018. However even though it got updated, the only difference was the character movements and arm movements for the most part. The faces were still pretty much the same, except that additional detail was added. So please let’s leave the faces alone, or at least give make the new animations function like the original and let us choose between them.
Also as the amazing @TalGordin said, please test these new concepts first. Show us before you finalize. So that we can actually be excited for what’s coming or tell you to change somethings. We all want to genuinely be excited for times like these.
So just to briefly takeaway from this: Please update without changing the way our characters’ mouths move. Please run new concepts by us so that we can state any necessary changes or approvals, and also please allow us to have a say in any new ideas or updates y’all might have. We all make up a big chunk of Episode so we feel like we should be able to decide.
Thank you so much once again for listening to us in terms of removing the update and we hope we can safely and happily move forward from this and also hope the next update will go well in our favor 
A suggestion @Tory :
When you do a tech update, can you and the team not update the lip movements to move very different from how they initially did?
I’m sure limelight has to update but when it does, can it not look drastically different from the original, such as weird lip movements?
Thank you so much again and I wanted to share this so that a tech update can occur without upsetting the community.
Feedback;
@Tory (so for all the tags) , everyone on this feed has made it clear that the animations we’ve already used in all of our stories should remain as how we already see them. I am sure we would all appreciate using new emotions & animations with a new animation code. But overriding the ones we already use isn’t the answer.
I prefer the older talking feature where just their lips move & who knows maybe others do too!
But, if the team insists upon keeping the new talking animations going forward they need to regulate the jaw movement. Right now it’s very exaggerated. The jaw drops far down & opens so unnaturally. I don’t know how it looks to have the jaw move slightly on our avatars (as it does in real life on real humans). I think as a community we would really enjoy beta testing the realistic talking feature when you guys are trying out. & please don’t scare us without another surprise release. We would all prefer beta testing & helping the animators improve before a final release.
Also I did like the creases and squinting from the new animations. But can they be separate animations? We don’t want them to replace the already existing ones.
The lips and the way they moved were awful. I’m being totally honest when I’m saying this. They moved very slow and they gave a more “chewing motion” as opposed to a talking motion.
In the future, can we please just keep the characters as they are for the most part. I understand Limelight has to update. I’ve seen it since 2017-2018. But please don’t change any noticeable features that us authors rely on such as the lips. Especially the way they move. A lot of us are very connected to our characters and when y’all modify the lip shapes and the way they move, it’s really saddening and gives a very distorted look.
I am going to include two images below just to do a comparison.
This is my character who has Medium Straight Natural lips. He is in the following animations: idle_happy_pose and leanon_happy_loop. This was him before the update:
And this is him with the exact same animations after the update:
Do you see the big difference? It isn’t very genuine. I know some people who have the same lip shape as he does and their mouths move more similar to the older animations. They don’t move like the newer ones unless they got punched in the mouth or they are chewing bubblegum.
Please in the future, show us the update y’all have in mind so that the community can vote whether y’all should finalize it or not. Please take this advice.
Thank you so much for everything @Tory
I hope this feedback gets passed to the team.
I’ve already made a similar post here too. I just wanted to add more details.
I like the idea of richer emotion of the new animations, but it was executed poorly.
Episode’s art style resemble animated GIF’s with moving 2D parts, making facial distortion look very inconsistent. If Episode wants to mimic 3D perspective, it’s advisable that they revamp the entire catalogue, changing how the character’s limbs behave, the angle the characters are facing (or the option to alter), how clothes follow their body, etc.
Just changing the face isn’t gonna help. In fact, I would rather a revamp on limb interaction more than facial interaction 
Some actions make LL characters look like their ankles are hung on a piece of string 
Also, I think that solving layering issues with the outfits will benefit the community more. To list out a few shortcomings I as an author had to face:
Hijabs/headscarfs/balaclavas/hats: I had to create an entirely new character just to make them bald in order for these assets to work. For hats specifically (cowboy hats), hair strands from certain hairstyles go outside of the brim, making it look like some weird horsetail attachment 
socks/stockings and shoes: these never layer well. Heck, it has been bothering a lot of creators on the platform for as long as I can remember
Jackets/blazers/coats with shirts/tank tops: A lot of blazers are really skintight, and it’s hard to pair a collared shirt underneath without it bleeding outside of the blazer. (specifically for generic female. The amount of times I have to resort into a skimpy dress and a crop top jacket to make it look semi-formal… 
)
masks: They’re nice, but if a character has hair over their ears then it’s gonna look like a floating piece of fabric Also, I think it should be layered underneath glasses. No one wears them over glasses irl.
Thank you Tory, I hope you don’t feel too stressed about all this.
I feel as if some of the features in this update shouldn’t be completely removed. They could be a choice whether people wanna use these animations, or a whole other animation for some. As already said by another writer (I couldn’t find them) You could name and make the new angry animations as another animation and write something similar to “eat_food_hand_angry” and change it to “eat_food_hand_furious”.
In my personal opinion, I’d much rather the old animations have no changes at all. Though, this is my opinion.
If you (and/or the team) do decide to change the animations, I feel as if the lips should have little or no change at all considering that most of the backlash were about the jaw and mouth.
(Constructive criticism.)
Yes, the first thing I have to say is going to be about the lips.
For the girls, it looks like every animation represents a mean, typical, cliche highschool girl. They pout, and transform into a weird shape, where the top lip folds a little on the side of the mouth making it look extremely unnatural. I admit that I tried to replicate the lips in the way that it was shown in the animations. I looked extremely stupid with duck lips and an expression that was not even close. It proves further that it’s just not natural to have your lips curve like what is shown.
I also have noticed in the animations that laugh the lips don’t show enough emotion. it just kind of opens and the bottom lip bounces a bit. It doesn’t look like a laugh at all, and I think it’s because of the lips.
For the Men, the lips either curve down or curve to high, it just looks ugly. it doesn’t show really any emotion other then a kind of mix of neutral and sad (and what reminds me of a :3 face) . It looks extremely silly, and really unpleasing. I’ve also noticed that they don’t really ever close. It honestly might just be me and I have really bad sight, but I feel like in every animation you can see a slight gap.
The second thing I have a problem with is the wrinkles.
The only thing really I have to say is, don’t age my character 30 years older then she/he is supposed to be!! 
It’s horrendous to look at, and it’s too dark.
I’ll also use this to mention the eyebrows, which I feel like hasn’t been talked about enough.
On a lot of the angry animations, the eyebrows curve down SO much, it makes the character look like their ready to plan somebody’s assasination. The wrinkles enhance the evilness and just makes me think, welp my character is about to be mentioned in a documentary…
I would also appreciate if the furrowed eyebrows weren’t on basically every sad, mad, or tired/worried animation.
I feel as if most animation looks super off, but the ones that I had an extreme hatred against as soon as I saw it were:
eat_food_hand_angry (It looks too angry, and evil. Instead of being mad it just feels like she’s the villainess.)
draw_gun_angry (I actually don’t have to much of a problem with this one. It doesn’t quite look mad at all, more like neutral. I’m actually not sure what the old one looked like but I think I would like this for a "draw_gun_neutral)
bow_happy (Female, The smile is to wide, and I’m just not very fond of this. It looks extremely unnatural, and it’s a bit creepy)
dance_shake_happy_loop (Female, The smile is not showing that she’s happy, it looks like the character is completely out of this world)
talk_shrug_concerned (Male, The lips!! It is so ugly!! for the female version I don’t mind it cause there wasn’t much of a change, but on the male it looks more like a cat frowning…)
eyeroll_subtle (It just looks like they are snarling, and it’s more of a “eyeroll_angry” more than it being subtle. I miss the old eyeroll!)
I feel like that’s all, and if I have more to say it most likely will be repeated in the document.
I’m sorry Tory! Let’s hope all this stress will end soon…
I’d be fine with new animations, but leave the eyebrows n lips alone 
For example the animation from INK where they’d collapse into their knees, I’d love one for Limelight too. Along with an animation where the person is dying or is about to faint and another where someone is holding them, an animation where people could carry others, and stuff like that. Would be amazing to have that, it’d include so much more scenes without extra overlays or editing, etc. Plus I’d love more backgrounds, overlays and outfits- like astronaut uniforms, alien outfits or even characters, spaceships, backgrounds on alien planets, spaceships, zombie apocalypse, etc. It’d be great to have more Sci-FI, horror and fantasy stuff. Since we don’t usually see stories like that and I’d think it’s cause of the lack of resources for those? I love those types of stories and I’d love to be able to write one easily.
@Tory I can’t wait for the new update! It gives a lot of possibilities to extend our directing with new animations and I’m happy you think about it.
If I may suggest something, if you ever fix the current animations to look more like the previous ones, please also keep the new projects the team already made and just rename them into the new animations to give us during the animations update. Some of them were very cool and could really help us - like talk_deny_happy, talk_explain_happy, talk_armscrossed_furious etc. Many of them! They were different but still cool to use! Just not in the previous context.
Some people for example liked the lip bite in the angry animation, some didn’t. I personally like them visually, but they change the current scenes and narrations. However if they were new animations, they’d do great for people like criminals, villains etc.
Old animations also have A LOT of cringy or exagarrated animations on the portal and I love to use them, just in the comedy scenes or for the characters that could really use them.
So please consider giving us those (slightly fixed according to the feedback) but with maybe new labels! We’d be very excited!
In the future I don’t want the lips to move weirdly again. Please let the lips remain as before. Most of the community prefers that too. Maybe make the creases less apparent and more transparent so that it fits with the skin color.
I honestly don’t think I’d like the lines on the face even if they lightened it. My suggestion to make both parties against and with it happy is to either make it part of a set of new animations or even better make it part of the clothing accessory stuff like how they have blue veins to put on the face and scars. Add it there but please don’t make everyone stuck with using it 
just a thought for the future update.
A glitch that has needed fixing for quite a while, now:
^ Please fix the blurred jawline… and give our boys their ears back! 
This face shape is: “Chiseled Square Stubble Shaved”.
The wrinkles added on the new animations weren’t necessary, maybe for some but not all of them. But the wrinkles looked super odd so in any future update your team makes, I think not adding those wrinkles would be better honestly. The wrinkles were added for most of the talking animations which didn’t make sense since most people talk without having that piece of skin on our foreheads show up like that. It wasn’t realistic and made our young characters look really old instead.
i actually like that their jaws finally move when they’re talking and generally opening their mouths as it looks more realistic, but for the most part, the brow creases are too defined and unnecessary in some animations. it makes the characters look like they instantly aged by at least 20 years.
In the future update I’d like to see the animations as close resembling the old ones and the mouth movements to be the same speed as the old ones. The wrinkles between foreads should be gone, they’re so unnecessary. The corners of the mouth shouldn’t move too much, it looks like they’re chewing food and not speaking. Snarls and gaping mouths should be gone too. The most important is the speed of speaking should be like the old one, fast and not slow and lips not to change shape/get distorted while speaking (for instance soft heart lips become fat with some animations and change the whole appearance of the character), then the update can be tolerable.
There was one new animation that I quite liked, which was the “talk_sheepish_rubneck” [the mouth and jaw movements were still off putting… but after the animation had played, the male characters faces looked kinda flirty and cute] … but I still really like the old one too.
So I would suggest keeping both, the new one could be titled: “talk_flirt_sheepish_rubneck” or “talk_sheepish_rubneck_flirty” or something like that.
I liked the intent behind a lot of the animations, and think they would improved if the lips moved a little bit faster (they were very slow compared to the speed of the text) and didn’t distort as much in shape/size. I’d love to see the older animations be kept near identical, so they can convey the same emotions/meaning that we’ve been using them for for years (so we don’t have to change our old, completed chapters), but then adding in the new animations with the eyebrow wrinkles and snarling lips but categorize them under new names. Many of them had their uses, but they were much more dramatic than their originals counterparts, completely altering the meaning of scenes. It would be nice to see them added with different labels that are more accurate, like furious for the very angry snarling animations, or devastated for the quivering lips and eyebrow wrinkles on sad animations.
I think the appearance could be improved by doing several things. Choosing a more natural looking color for each skin tone, I think that could help prevent the unibrow / cartoon effect the grey shadow gives off. Reducing the amount of wrinkles – specifically since Episode tends to skew towards younger audience / casts. Like if there was an ability to choose between four or two wrinkles between the eyes it would work for both older and younger characters. Reducing the thickness of the lines, I think this would also help with people feeling that their characters have aged through the update. If it blends more into the face it might come across as how the original update was intended — expressive, not necessarily old. (I did like the way character’s looked with a few exceptions, the main issue is how it conflicts with the character’s age.)
Also wanted to add that I still think a great compromise to this issue is to provide more new animations that convey the same type of emotion the older ones did. If we had a versatile range of emotions then it wouldn’t be as annoying if one expresses a greater sense of anger.
The lip bug. It’s everything about the lips. Their size, movement, the way they seem to unhinge on some animations (like idle_jawdrop animation), the speed. Everything.
I liked the furrows – just not the color of them or their size which aged female characters especially and were very dark on lighter tones. It made the expression very jarring when paired and surrounded by older animation that weren’t updated. I think making the furrows less large and less dark would make this a non-issue. As it was, they were very startling to see.
I liked the sad animations. I think they definitely needed to be toned down a good bit and certainly not necessary for every sad animation we have. These would be a lovely addition to the catalog as standalone animations. That way we’d have a selection between sad/disappointed looking and pure devastation.
^^ Applies also to the angry_animations. They need to be toned down a bit and made as additional animations – which, again, allows the writers to choose to use them instead of having no choice.
Yes, absolutely. Like I stated on the other feedback thread, I was excited to see new animations. I just didn’t expect them to look that extreme. I think it would be great to see more emotive animations to be added as their own ‘group’ like neutral, happy, furious, devastated, embarrassed etc.
Pretty much everything I said above about the lips and the darkness/size of the furrows. They are so dark and big that that’s all your eye is drawn to because it looks SO out of place. I thought that the idle_pregnant_tired_loop animation looked absolutely awkward. The character didn’t look tired, they looked on the verge of tears.
@Tory why not just have the team make a whole new style. Like there is Classic, INK, and Limelight. Why not just make a whole new style? This is just a suggestion of course but I think it would be something that everyone can agree on. Even those who may have liked the new animations to some extent.
