I can't believe it's been over a month since I made that already, I wanted to make a little doc so that I could
- Delete it off Lappy so I have more room
- Look at this in the future and compare what I'm doing then and now
1; Work
I opened a FireAlpaca file and started drawing, I didn't have any ideas for what I wanted to do and usually I would have a clear vision for projects like this. Nothing came about, so I just freedrew whatever I wanted. My Psychonauts animation took a week for only 5 frames, since I did it in a very odd and unconventional way. I wanted to make things simpler for myself, so I let the line art be more jagged and used layer settings for shading. I made a few bits and pieces but I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I decided to make a quick retelling of the story. The song was tricky, originally I was going to use We're off you know by Klaatu, didn't choose it because it didn't flow very well and I was very scared of copyright issues. I settled with Bryan Scary's Venus Ambassador later.
Originally, the crewmates were wearing nothing, and there were some very strange shading decisions I made. I fixed them later on so I'm thanking myself for keeping all the layers separated and labelled. I'm not really sure why I make things harder for myself but I always do that, so I guess I shouldn't expect anything. I knew if I drew the sketch traditionally and transfer it onto my computer, it would be very easy to line, but I of course didn't do that for some reason. Instead I would paint it with no sketch and continued slapping on paint until I finally decided to just draw the damn sketch. You can see my development with backgrounds throughout the animation, the gift shop is my favorite.
When I was done with frames and backgrounds, I would export them in folders that I should have probably named better. Editing the clips together was such a nightmare, the more images I had on there the more it would lag. That is mostly because my laptop isn't that powerful but sometimes I wished I just knew how to use Blender. Doesn't even matter anyways since I'm using flash now LOL.
2; Unused & Sketches
Sadly, the majority was lost when I went back to re-export and decided to replace my files. I have a gif on my art gallery back when it was going to be an animation meme.
3; Sidenote
I was complaining to a friend during my spring break about the state of animation memes, along the lines of-
"The animation gets better every year, but I just really hate the songs they use.. I should just make one myself with a song that I like."
I haven't done anything during the whole break and I thought this would be a nice side project to work on.
I thought I was only going to spend 2 days on this, but it took 2 weeks, It probably would've been done earlier without school though. When progress was chugging along I made posted multiple W.I.Ps and a release date that I actually went through with this time. I was shaking horribly, the excitement was so overwhelming, I hadn't made anything that big since like 2018, I thought I was going to quit animation forever. It's odd though, I haven't been so motivated to finish animations in a long time. Of course I animated stuff but I hadn't had that sense of euphoria that I used to feel when I was first starting to animate. I think might be regressing.
4; Other Newer Projects
As of current, I'm making a Jazzpunk AMV and I learned that I'm better at drawing with a mouse. My project before that was a quick animation on flash, first time using it. I have 2 very simple games and a children's book being worked on as well, they're still in the stick note phase so I'm planning on atleast one of them releasing during the summer. I'd rather not show W.I.Ps of them currently, they are much more personal projects and I hold a different respect for them compared to my fanarts. Speaking of fanart, here's a W.I.P;
Thinking about making a big drawing after this animation. Who knows we'll see.