Dec 29, 2023

2023 – The year in review

2023 will forever be remembered as my “One Year War”, the year I decided to see how many builds I could cram into a 12 month period for the LOLs. This year was the perfect blend of opportunity meets motivation and I think I managed to take full advantage of it. On a side note, I feel I’m also pretty organized this time around, having completed all this stuff almost a week out from 2024.

Upgraded photo booth

I’ve pretty much had the same photography set up since 2014, It wasn’t until I took pics of the EX Impulse, Darilbalde and Jesta earlier this year that I really started to feel like I hit the limits of my current booth.

In the EX Impulse photos that I took earlier this year the white and highlights seemed really blown out, as with the red on the Darilbalde. The Jesta being a dark kit took quite a bit of post processing in order to darken the background but that also made the kit itself look quite weird.

So I decided to take a bit of a risk, shake things up.

First I purchased a 60cm3 lightbox from Amazon. Anubis seemed to have some pretty good success with something similar and I just wanted to see what kind of results I could get.

Check out my Patreon posts on the matter for my thoughts.

I didn’t quite like how it turned out and decided to update my booth instead. First I got some softboxes with brighter bulbs and adjustable intensity and changed my black cloth backdrop, yes the same one since 2014, with some Musou Black.

I also replaced one of my frontal lamps which had been sitting on 2 random storage tubs for years with another LED softbox with adjustable intensity. After all these changes I felt that was some improvement in the lighting, but much like Takumi from Initial D Season 2, there was quite an adjustment period to be able to get the results I wanted. Now instead of just flicking on the switches and turning on the lights, I now had 3 sets of lights with adjustable brightness and color tones to deal with.

After a bit of an excuciating 6 months of messing around, tuning, I remembered the lightbox I purchased from Amazon earlier this year had a cloth door which you could zip up. I fashioned out a similar door using bulldog clips, bits of cardboard with aluminium foil and the results were very promising.

I think with this door method I can completely remove having the need for frontal lights and rely on the reflectors alone. I do feel the shadows are a bit better in this version and I will continue using this set up for a bit.

I replaced my backdrop some Musou Black, got some softboxes on the side and replaced my front lights with reflectors. The difference is night and day and my photos look pretty much how I want them to straight out of the camera instead of having to edit them.

Upgraded paint booth

I’ve been using a Sparmax SB-88 for a few years now, and while it has the benefit of been pretty quiet, it only moves a measly 60CFM which I found is not enough to clear the overspray especially when clear coating or priming in my personal experience.

There have been quite a few generic booths popping out in the last few years and even water curtain booths which really made me reconsider my set up, and it wasn’t until I got FOMO at my failure at obtaining one of these water booths that I really set myself to create the ultimate booth.

Enter the AC Infinity Cloudline S8.

This beast is 8 inches and moves a whopping 800CFM at maximum pull, making it more than 12 times stronger than my old booth. At full blast it can self-propel unless fully secured, even at sub 50% settings this thing can easily suck up an A4 piece of paper and hold it against the filter. It’s also “relatively” quiet; and by relatively I do mean it is not 10x louder despite being that many times more powerful.

The booth itself is an Artystation Whimori, which I selected because it was the largest booth I could find in Australia.

Paints

This year also finally saw the long-awaited restock of Gaianotes paints at Sealmodel, which MildCustoms and I took full advantage of. I also managed to try out Finishers Paints thanks to the recommendations of AI Paintworks and I really like their line so far.

Visited Rhypla builds

Rhyan has been a key person in growing the Gunpla scene, he’s hosted GBWC in Australia a few times up until 2019.

Since COVID he opened up his own hobby shop name Rhypla Builds in Kogarah NSW, coming here was pretty much a mandatory trip to pay respects and sit down with one of the all time greats.

Gunpla

After a pretty successful 2022, I began to wonder, what exactly are my limits? How many built kits could I possibly churn out in a 12 month period?

As it turns out, 32. This by far eclipses last years’ 22 builds, since I only did 2 MGs last year and the rest were mostly decal-less HGs. This required me to have multiple builds going at the same time and spending at least a few hours each day doing something build related like prepping parts, painting, doing decals or assembling, totalling up to around 770 hours over the course of the year. What may have also helped was the somewhat extended sabbabitcal from almost all forms of social media, reporting daily to my Patrons and just focusing on solely on build activities.

This pretty much consumed all of my free time, with only Friday nights being dedicated to gaming with friends. I absolulely wouldn’t be doing this again as it pretty much requires my cicumstances to be perfect and it’s just not sustainable in the long run.

In the end I managed to average around 2.5 builds per month, with some months where I managed to stockpile enough “completed” builds to get 4 or 5 done. Also I’d note that this probably would not have been possible without the Witch from Mecury lineup being around as most of these builds were pretty quick builds that could be smashed out in around 20 hours.

Despite all the work I do not feel burned out at all, rather it became somewhat of a daily habit that I developed and looked forward to each day.

12 MG
17 HG
1 FM
1 Musume
1 RG

WIPs carrying over to 2024

* MS General Ma Chao
* RG Hi-Nu Gundam
* HG Gaplant 2
* HG Huckebein MkII

Most masking – MG Strike Rouge
Longest build – Tied FM Forbidden / MG Nu Gundam ver.Ka at 56 hours
Fastest build – HG Michaelis at 8 hours
Least favourite build – Tied between MG Strike Rouge and HG Huckbein Mk2
Worst seamline(s) – HG Huckbein Mk2
Favourite build – Exia R4
Biggest dissapointment – HG Huckbein Mk2
Biggest surprise – Tied between HG Schwatzette Gundam and Lfrith Ur
Number of lost parts – 2
Number of broken parts – 3
Worst fail – Lost a part on the Gundam X, had to purchase another kit

Games

Since most of my time was pretty much consumed with just building, I didn’t really get to play all that many games even though 2023 is pretty much the nexus for so many great releases. During my Friday night gaming streams I managed to finish Halo Infinite, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, Wasteland 3, FFXVI and Resident Evil 4. I also just managed to start playing Baldur’s Gate 3 in December.

I also had a very brief stint playing Street Fighter 6. I played Zangief as usual and managed to rank up all the way from Rookie all the way to Master. I did kinda enjoy playing the game when a match was on, but the waiting between ranked matches did cause me a fair bit of anxiety and in the end I felt that I longer wanted to experience that.

2024

After this monster of a year I am going to (figuratively) quit while I’m ahead and slow down just a tad bit. I have some “tech debt” I need to clear up such as painting Dygenguar’s Zankantou, fixiing up Zeta Gundam’s beam rifle and so on. My working areas are also in dire need of cleaning up after being in non-stop use for so long.

I’d also like to go back to building Musumes, I kinda avoided them this year because I had real anxiety about painting skin tones again. I’ve also got a few 3rd party kits like the Ruling and Estailev that I would like to try. There is also the Huckebein III HG, but after the big disasspointment that was the Mk2 I and not really holding my breath for it. I also have quite a number of undocumented builds that I’d like to start taking pictures of again, with perhaps a goal of taking at least 1 picture a day.

In terms of games, the only thing that I can remember is coming out next year is FF7 Rebirth. At some point I’d also like to stream Super Robot Wars OG.

Finally thanks to all my Patrons who made this feat possible, you guys provided me the much needed motivation to power on and push myself to new heights. I do not consider myself a YouTuber or personality by any stretch and I don’t find the engaement on social media that rewarding these days, but I definitely am very motivated to keep you guys up to date on the Discord as well as just chilling out.

Hugo Flores
Fong Yik Tze
Ace Pilot Gunpla
LoBakGo
AI Paintworks
JishanF
Nick Mathiasen
Brandon Joza
Raith
Jesus Mendoza
thesanckingdom
granzon2
Eric
Corvus Oculum
Devin Chadwick
Side6
Nick Foust
Jmadaboss
TS Gunpla
Maleke Thomas
KapitanPrikol
Cameron Grantham
Matthew Walker
Ignacio Candelario

Saint-ism Patreon

See you next year and get ready for the next battle!

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