Final Verdict: cartoons it is! (part 1 of 2)

(the animation featured above isn't what i'm currently working on, i'm still sticking to the animation i've been working on since may, but more on that in the part 2 post!)

i'm back! and while it's not a very surprising answer, i've ultimately decided i want to stick with animation, it's where my passion is! i realized the issue wasn't so much that animation in it of itself wasn't working out for me anymore, it was the way i was doing it that's fallen out of date! although december has been my big proper break, i've still been pretty busy during this time, entirely on my own terms though which has been freeing! the stuff i've been working on has been the most fun i've had animating in years! the three big changes i've made that contributed to all that, and will be a big help moving forward, are these: a complete transition in art style, planning MUCH more before i jump into doing the actual animation, and drawing much rougher during the pre-animation phases.

(feel free to skip ahead to the final paragraph starting in bold if you just wanna hear about the new stuff!)

in terms of my art style i'll be using for animation from now on, i'm basically going all-in on the more geometrical style i've been using for music videos here and there, like the entirety of stupid horse! the more noodly style that's been most recognizable to my videos is no more for the most part, at least in animated form. the exact reasoning behind this choice is much more complicated and a bit too personal than i'm willing to put in a patreon post, but to put it simply: i just have a lot more fun animating in this geometric style! you'd think the style would feel more limiting with what looks like more rigid shapes, but it's the exact opposite for me, it really gets my creative juices flowing and feels much more natural nowadays!

without delving into too much detail, the more thorough planning and rougher-drawn animatics i'm working with now have been a BIG efficiency boost among other things! i used to plan and animate in short bursts, going back and forth between the two as i went over the course of a project, but that was basically a sort of improv way of animating that just doesn't work well for the careful storytelling i want to do in the current project. animating whatever i planned on the spot meant that it'd be much harder to change later on, being an especially big waste of time if i wanted to re-do a shot or scene altogether! nowadays, i've been strict about not doing ANY animation until the animatic has at least been completely finished and reviewed!

when it comes to drawing rougher, i basically just re-discovered the fact that i can just start with sketches LOL.. i had a habit of just immediately drawing what would basically be the final keyframes and then animating between them from there, which works fine enough for the simpler designs i worked with before, but becomes much more inflexible and cumbersome now that i'm working with more detailed characters! so now i'll basically draw out the whole animatic on 1 or 2 layers very loosely, later doing clean-up by drawing over the animatic, splitting the drawing into multiple layers as needed and filling in any missing details on the characters. then i'll animate using those cleaned up drawings!

with these new changes and techniques, it's lead to me being much more capable of anything i had been before, which is a big relief and surprise since i felt that with the heavy toll of mental illness on my mind over time, i was losing the ability to animate to the same level i did before! i've been having a lot more fun making animations, and have been much more proud and confident in my work, with improvements that i think show in the final animation!

so, what have i been working on this month? what will i be working on next? the first thing i'll mention since it's smaller-scale and i don't have immediate plans on finishing it, is an animation of "the whole world and you" by tally hall, which is the attached video above! it's mostly just a cleaned up animatic with only one moment of proper animation, but i had a lot of fun making what i did so far, and i learned a LOT from it, being how i discovered the three new animation strategies i mentioned earlier! i might pick it up again later after i finish the main project i started that i'm still working on, and that's a refresh of "nothing for nothing" episode 1, which i'll talk about more and include the animatic for in the part 2 for this post within the hour!