Anniversary Video: First 2 Minutes Preview

Hi! Patreon looks weird now, but I'm just going to ignore that. Let's all pretend they didn't just turn their logo into a pebble for no reason.

I was planning to do a newsletter today, but I am currently grinding to get this video done, so expect that later in the week, probably Saturday. But I figured I'd show a little preview of it before it goes up Saturday! The full video will be about 5 minutes.

Here's also a little behind the scenes:

I wanted to keep the anniversary video simple, mainly by avoiding a ton of animation. But I still wanted some kind of dynamic, 3D component, and had the idea of looping something.

That lead me to the idea of walking through an endless hallway of stuff from videos throughout the year. I also put things in the foreground that could get "in the way" of my Premiere editing, which I think adds a lot and makes it feel like a lived-in scene.

That's as simple as taking the foreground objects, hiding everything else, and rendering them on a transparent background. That way, it's a "layer" that can exist on top of my video editing.

It was super fun pulling assets from old videos and "designing" the hallway, balancing the placement of everything. It also lead to little jokes and stories I could tell with the assets, like this one which is my favorite from later in the video:

I kind of want to do it every year to reflect on the past year of videos. It encourages me to push the unique 3D assets a bit (which I feel like I've been getting slightly lazy with) knowing it can end up in a video at the end of the year.

I'll be finishing this up today and Friday, and then this Saturday, the anniversary proper, should be a fun day! If everything goes right, on October 7th you should see:

• This video
• A big celebration stream + a supporter QnA after
• A newsletter/reflection on the past year

In particular, that newsletter I want to focus on some of the goals I had for myself this past year and whether or not I hit them, and seeing if they're realistic for 2024.

Thank you as always!