Just a quick post to say thank you to everyone who followed me! Newgrounds is the website where I feel most comfortable posting my work, and I'm grateful to anyone who has at least a passive interest in what I make.

Hi there! Back in the beginning of the year shortly after uploading EDY-EM: OVERLOAD, I said that I’ll start posting updates on the progress of my next big personal project, a pilot for this trailer of Music Makers.

…Well, here’s one!

Character Designs

Way back in February, I got down mostly final designs for the main characters that I will animate for this project. Recently in the past couple weeks, I went over and did a few refinements on the designs, generally simplifying details to make sure that I don’t get too crazy animating these robots. It matters a lot given the length of the animation, which I’ll get to shortly.

I also put down simple references for background characters in the first few scenes of the animation. I normally don’t make a lot of one-note designs at the same time, so it was interesting to work on this many while keeping them distinct from each other. One of the character designs is actually a revamp of an old character I made back in ’22!

Storyboarding and Animatic Stages

Starting around early spring and into mid-summer, I worked on the script and storyboard for this project, then I later worked on a rough animatic. I think the general ideas came out pretty well, even if it’s at a very rough pass at this point. Similar to EDY-EM: OVERLOAD, it’ll be animated to the timing of the music, but the setting and some of the shots will likely have a different overall look and feeling compared to EDY-EM. I’m pretty excited to work on it regardless, especially on some shots!

My biggest concern regarding going deep into this project would be the length of the animation, as it’s definitely the longest animation I will work on so far. There are also some types of animation that I’ll be trying out for the first time. It’s very intimidating! It’s partially why I’ve been hesitant on committing more to this project, but it’s also why I’ve worked on a few other animation projects this year.

Project Cadenza and Other Things

Recently for this year’s Robot Day, I worked on a pretty simple animation as a submission. It got frontpaged and an honorable mention in the final results! (Thanks MindChamber!)

More importantly, this animation serves two-fold as: 1) a prologue to Music Makers by establishing a small introduction to the setting, and 2) a personal assignment on working under a limited timeframe. The amount of time that I had to work on File 00 is around the same amount as the trailer for Music Makers. Given my personal opinion and reception to File 00, I’d say that working on this helps me build confidence on working on longer projects.

I’ve also worked on that Kamen Rider animation a little bit back, which was meant to be part of an unfortunately canned collab. The amount of time I’ve had left to work on Kamen Rider O’s! is similar to Project Cadenza, so I also was working on a similar deadline and with a similar goal to that project: to work relatively quickly. There’s also another animation that I’m currently working on, but I can’t give out details on it yet. All of these projects have helped me prepare to work on the pilot for Music Makers.

That's it!

I’m expecting to start working on rough drafts for the shots once I finish the animation I’m currently working on, probably around the start of winter.

wow

anyway, look at this cool animation sequence

Hi, it’s been a couple weeks since I posted my first full animated short, EDY-EM: OVERLOAD! Given the reception that it got, I want to give commentary into some aspects of the production of this short.

Initial Concept

Some shots from the animatic I made for EDY-EM: OVERLOAD.

As stated in my first blog post regarding the project, this was something I had in my mind during and after working through several animation jams through 2021 and 2022, where I felt confident in making a full short. Initially, I wanted to animate something short as a response to an art trend on ex-Twitter, where users draw their characters with the color palette of modern Cartoon Network infomercials. This was reflected in the color choices in the animatic that I made (shown above), but I opted to go from cyan to navy blue to make the night scenes more obvious. Eventually I decided to turn this idea into something original and a bit longer.

I also wanted to expand on the ideas presented from my first movie submission on Newgrounds. A fair amount of animated work that I did since then was entirely based on animating to the music, so I wanted to try my hand at animating a music video next.

Music Choice

Given the character and her background, I wanted to look for some electronic music that would feel appropriate to animate to. A few friends suggested I look at music made by @vurb, and I found this one that I liked a lot.

I wanted to base the underlying plot behind the animation around both the tone of the music, the mood that I got from it, and the name of the track, so I came up with the idea of someone being overworked at their job. This comes from personal experience of both working at my real-life job and treating art and animation as not just a hobby, but a discipline. There were weeks that doing both of these at the same time can make me exhausted and frustrated, which is what I wanted to display when I was making the animatic for this short. However, I do not think I have the capability yet to talk about topics like this through artistic expression, so I just tried to focus on primarily making the animation fun to watch.

Notably, the song itself was updated to a newer version while I was still working on the animation. I wanted to incorporate the new section that was added into the song since I briefly thought up of a better climax/resolution to the plot. However, I decided to refrain from doing so due to time constraints.

Favorite Shots

These are a few shots that I really liked animating because I either learned something new or improved on the things that I animated before!

Screencap at 0:24.

Despite the lack of action, the section from 0:13 - 0:28 (and 1:15 - 1:16 to a lesser extent) is one of my favorites to work on since it’s my first time I did actual lip syncing. The only experience I had with animating mouths beforehand was done to audio with no actual dialogue. Although I do think it’s a bit unrefined, matching the general mouth movements to the syllables from the VA’s audio was a nice challenge.

Screencap at 0:58.

Everything about the concert section at 0:28 - 1:01 was probably the most fun I had animating despite the amount of work, but I feel 0:49 - 0:56 particularly stands out to me. Previously, I worked on an animation loop that involved dancing to the audio portion provided, and this is my weakest work in my opinion. That is why I really wanted to make the choreography and camera direction as best as I can make it, especially since the 14 seconds before this shot act as its build-up. There are a couple nitpicks that annoy me a bit on re-watches, but I felt like I pulled this specific shot off very well.

Screencap at 1:18.

The sections at 1:11 - 1:13 and 1:17 - 1:23 were done with additional editing by using the software DaVinci Resolve. I haven’t had much experience editing with DaVinci before this project, and it took me a bit to navigate through its imposing interface. Nevertheless, I’m excited about what I can possibly do with this for future projects since that can possibly cut down the amount of work I need to animate in Clip Studio Paint.

1:17 - 1:23 was also notable for me because this is the scene that changed a lot from the original idea I put down on the animatic. Originally, I wanted to animate Edy doing the same gestures but rotating in place, and the background would also scroll panoramically. After considering the amount of time needed to do that and with some input from a couple friends, I decided to cut it down to just alternating between the two backgrounds and color templates.

Next Steps

EDY-EM: OVERLOAD was a personal success; I proved to myself that I am capable of making a full animation short given enough time, effort, and self-discipline. However, working on this project has also made me learn that it demands a lot of time and effort from me, especially for a project animated and edited all by myself. I think the biggest takeaways I have gained from working on this project for more than a year is that 1) I need to set some reasonable deadlines, even with passion projects like this one; and 2) depending on the time and resources needed, I have to decide when a shot looks “good enough” to devote time onto other shots.

These two look familiar…

Those takeaways will matter a lot, as I’m currently brainstorming a follow-up to the “fake” trailer for Music Makers! One of the reasons I worked on EDY-EM: OVERLOAD is to see if it can be a proof of concept to what I want to do with Music Makers. I feel confident enough that it’s definitely possible; I already have some ideas for the music choice, basic plot, and character designs that I want to do for the “pilot”. However, although I haven’t started any actual work yet, the scope of this project would likely be larger than EDY-EM: OVERLOAD. I’m expecting it’ll take at least the same amount of time, if not longer, to create something that I’m happy with, so that is why I’ll have to keep what I’ve learned from OVERLOAD in mind. Whenever that time comes, I’ll start posting periodic updates on the project like with this one.

Closing Thoughts

I’m very, very happy that this animated short got on the front page. Although some of my previous works have been frontpaged, this is the first one where every part of it is entirely original and that is solely done for my personal goals and enjoyment.

I’d like to thank some people that helped me on this project:

• @LilSpook and @immadametal for devoting time to do voice work again;
• @kiyo, @Zeon02, and @Nine for providing feedback during the production process;
• @Kekiiro, @Slimygoo, @ForgeFrog, @DrewPBalls, and @Bacun for general kind words and support as I worked through production;
• @PhasmaGORE for providing words that helped me push to get the project done by the end of ‘23.

I also would like to thank (almost) everyone who has left a comment on the video. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Hi, I figure I should make a recap post like I did for the past couple years.

This year overall has been fairly busy for me, though it might not seem that way with how much creative works I've put out. I focused a lot more on animation than in the past couple years, which took more time overall than making an artwork piece. I've also been busy in my personal life--I had the opportunity to travel somewhere for vacation during summer, and I also was preparing for a couple important events during the autumn/winter season. Despite these setbacks, I felt like I've still learned a lot as an artist and animator, as I began to explore an art style that I wasn't fairly comfortable with at first and continued gaining experience in animation when I started going deeper into back in late 2022.

Animation Collaborations!

The Friendly Frog Collab

The first of two animation collaborations I was involved in 2023! The prompt for this collab was very liberal in how one can interpret it and the frogs themselves, so I decided to take it as literally as possible: a poison dart frog jumping in a forest. This provided me an opportunity to study how animals move and how it'd translate into animation. In this case, poison dart frogs can hop so fast that the camera can only catch them in a blur frame-by-frame, so I decided to focus more on making the keyframes look good and create few in-betweens. If I were to improve on this animation, I probably would have tried to implement blurring in the in-betweens as well, especially since I learned that Clip Studio has tools to simulate that. Overall, this was a fun thing to animate since it was so different than what I've animated up to that point.

'23 Summer Fest Opening Animation

Here's the other collab I was in! I was glad that there's an opening this year and having the opportunity to work on it like in previous years.

I decided to animate about 8-9 seconds since I've gained enough experience to be confident in completing that much with the allotted time. The setting for this opening is a beach, so I needed to learn how to animate water, both as part of the ocean and in general. For the parts that I needed to work on, I mainly referenced two things:

1) This specific shot from Avatar: The Last Airbender, where Aang rises from the ocean in a pillar of water

2) This handy video by Howard Wimshurst

Reference #1 was useful for the first part of my section, while #2 gave me a decent enough understanding to animate the crashing wave in the second part.

This was really fun to learn and animate, as this was another animation where I had to draw references from real life like with the Friendly Frog Collab. It also gave me an opportunity to draw some characters made by some of my friends!

...and that's it! Those are pretty much the big things I've worked on for 2023. I will say that I recently did a study on line art that made me feel a little more comfortable working with it, which I feel is important since I'm getting more into animating. I noticed the effects of that study lately in my recent work.

One thought that I had in mind as I animated throughout the year is the question, "Is it worth the time and effort to make this shot look as good as I can?" As an example, the shots I did for the Summer Fest intro are pretty smooth for the most part, but it took me a lot of time to work on those shots that I cut it a little close to the deadline, more than I would've liked. Situations like this and a couple others from past jams and collabs have made me think that there are going to be times where I need to quickly learn that a specific shot looks "good enough" and just move on, or that I have to make revisions to certain ideas if they can't pan out. I've had to change the general idea for a specific shot in this project to make it a lot smaller in scale than I wanted, but it's necessary for me due to lack of knowledge on video editing.

This sort of situation is one of many things that I have learned working on this long-term project that I should keep in mind in the future. It's a test of self-discipline; working on this animation short alongside the collaborations, my smaller works, and my personal life has been mentally draining. It's an issue that has been with me for a long while and one that I've been gradually learning to handle. Even when I finished this project, I'm still unsure on how I feel about it at this moment. I still sometimes wonder if the amount of time and work put into this animation will show despite its relatively short length, or whether or not I should've taken more time to work on this earlier on in the year to cut the amount of time spent on it. The only thing I can say for sure is that I've learned a lot of things from working on the project for this long, and I hope the animation shows them well enough.

"...wait, what project are you talking about?"

It's finally done! Please watch it below if you're interested:

Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a fruitful 2024!

(Link to full, uncropped illustration)

Hello, it's been a little while since my last animation update! I've been so busy in the past few months that I unfortunately didn't have much time to get much work on this personal project until recently. It's why I titled this post "Update 2.5"; it's just a small update on the animation progress. I'll go into a bit more detail on why I haven't been able to work on it in the next couple sections...

Having a job is hard!

Throughout summer and continuing on from my previous update, my workplace has been getting a lot of workload that it had to call in mandatory overtime to account for the extra work. The longer work schedule was very draining, which is why I went on vacation in July! (I won't share the location I went to, but I'll say it was a beach resort.) Fortunately, it seems that the amount of workload has lately been decreasing, so I should have a bit more time to recuperate during the weekend and potentially work more on this project.

Summer Fest 2023

The festival occurred last weekend! If you haven't had time to check out some of the panels, you can find the stream VODs for days 1 and 2 here and here! A couple panels that I personally find informational and interesting to listen to are Slimygoo's The Case for Traditional Art (day 1, 4:59:20) and ricksteubens's Linework for Dummies (day 2, 1:15:06).

I also had the opportunity to work on this year's festival intro! You should check it out if you're interested; there's a mix of new and returning animators who worked hard on their individual parts. I like to thank @Kekiiro and @Slimygoo for allowing me to contribute to this intro; it was a great learning experience!

So, what about the animation?

Here's a screencap on my progress sheet for it:

I was able to shave off a bit more shots as well as give another scene a tiny bit of polish. There are a couple more scenes that I should be able to knock out relatively quickly before delving into the more intensive shots. I'm also starting to work in voice lines for some of the scenes that have spoken words in them. Unfortunately, I don't have any ex-Twitter links to the newly finished shots, so apologies for that.

That's all for now! I'll try my best to keep working on this!

Hello, I've been working a lot on my short since the last update! A heavy amount of workload at my job for the past few weeks and some mental issues have affected progress on this, but I was able to finish off half of the shots last night! Here's an edited screenshot of what my current progress sheet looks like:

While it's a great milestone for me to hit the halfway point of the final draft, some of the remaining shots are much more animation-intensive than the ones that I've finished. In addition, I'll be simultaneously working on some other stuff during the next few months that will affect the time I have to work on this project. Due to this, it's likely that the short will have to be pushed back to around fall of this year (or winter, if worse comes to worse) than summer that I originally wanted, apologies.

In the meantime, I shared some shots that I finished on Twitter if you want an idea of the final product! I'll occasionally keep posting some more shots as I get through them.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Hello! About a couple weeks ago, I finished my rough draft for my short! You can check out about 2/3rds of my progress on it through these Twitter links:

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

As a sort of celebratory thing, I worked on a short animated loop of the main character waking up after a night of work! It's also a way for me to figure out how I want the art direction to go once I start finalizing each scene.

I have no real deadline for this animation as this is a personal project, but I do want to ship it out sometime during the summer since it's relatively short (~1:30). If I can't get it done by then, then hopefully by autumn. In the meantime, I'll keep occasionally posting progress updates on Twitter!

Well this is a bit late...

I wanted to get a recap of last year done last week but I've been a bit busy with things, one of them being coming back home from an vacation overseas on New Year's Day! I was feeling tired and irritated from creative pursuits last month; luckily, this vacation came just in time to relax a bit. One of the main reasons I travelled overseas was to attend my cousin's wedding! I actually made an illustration for her and her husband:

I still need to plan out how to print out a canvas so I can directly send it to them. Anyway, let's move on to a personal review of my creative works last year!

Newgrounds Winter Festival 2022 Opening Animation

Having learned a lot in animation in the latter half of 2021, I wanted to put what I learned to the test in a fast-paced environment. News about the sequel to the 2021 Summer Fest came to me, and given I had experience working on that, I figured it'd be a convenient method to test myself.

I wound up actually doing a lot more for the animation than I expected. I actually started my main shot--the giant Girlfriend sequence--doing the latter half of December 2020, so I had extra time to help out covering other shots. The giant GF idea was probably my biggest idea in scope by then, and it's kind of a precursor to other animation ideas I had later in the year.

Palate Pallete - a personal artist study project

After working on the opening animation for the winter fest, I was left wondering what to do next. Aside from contributing a piece of artwork to Mabelma's entry for the Flash Forward Jam (more on that later), I didn't do much.

There was a constant thought that bothered me whenever I drew something back then: my art style seems lacking in something. Although I had a decent grasp on the fundamentals of art, it felt like I can't mold that understanding into creating something that is unique and that I like. Talking about the concept of art styles one night on Discord, as well as the idea of the "voice" behind the art, @immadametal suggested to me to try studying artists that I like and try to draw like they do to get a better grasp on their styles.

So I did a personal project to do just that! You can read more about that here.

Even though the project helped me learn a lot about how people can go about with their drawing process (especially in shape theory) and my personal style evolved a bit since then, I still feel like it's not something I'm personally satisfied with yet. That might just be a sign of doing something similar to this again to broaden my understanding, or to get back to working more on fundamentals. Either way, I do want to evolve my style to something similar to the studies I did below; they're the two that I liked the most, both in how I achieved my goals and how much I like the artists that I studied.

Participating in Newgrounds Events -- Collabs, Jams, etc.

Although I participated in only a fair amount of events happening on Newgrounds last year, they were actually very important in developing my skills rapidly, just like last year!

Flash Forward Jam - Mabelma's Trophy Collab

Mabelma was looking for help on the forums from anyone to contribute art to his entry for the Flash Forward Jam. I thought a funny, literal idea would be to contribute to it would be to make a trophy of a trophy girl/race queen. Maybe one day, I might revisit the character design and update her.

Summer Lovin' Collab

The first of the few events in the latter half of the year where I really went all in on animating. I was really bummed out that there were no Summer Animation Jams this year, as that was very helpful for me to kickstart animation ideas while not dragging myself out. When BrandyBuizel announced a one-off animation jam for this summer, I immediately went to work on my (first) entry, pushing myself to go beyond the static camera shots and low-key movements I've been used to doing so far. I still vividly remember one of my friends on Discord going crazy over the animatic I did for the volleyball shot.

I'm really proud of both entries I made, one for the personal push of going into uncharted territory, and another for getting both of these done within a week or so. It also renewed and revitalized my confidence in both animation and creative pursuits in general; I might have trouble refining my voice in illustrations, but I think I spoke loud and clear with animation.

Chenso Club Contest

Coming hot off the grill of the Summer Lovin' Collab, I really wanted to do more animating. Something where I can attempt something dynamic like the two entries I did for that collab. While working on other things, the Chenso Club Contest came up about a month later, and animated entries are accepted! Knowing that and basing my knowledge of the game entirely off the screenshots and the trailer, I got to work on animating something. Said something wound up being the 2nd place entry and winning me a neat coffee mug. Wow!

What caught my eye from the preview stuff was the attack where Blue turns into a giant blue buzzsaw mid-air. I took creative liberties to make her move and slice through enemies, eventually landing on the ground. Although I'm really proud of how the final product came out and how much I stuck to the source material, I couldn't help but notice that I didn't draw in the chainsaw trigger in the last shot, which bothers me a bit.

Sketch Collab 2022

You can watch my entry individually here.

Looking for more opportunities to satiate my need to animate, I looked to the Sketch Collab as a more relaxed way of just throwing out potential ideas to animate. Then I learned that the participant cap has been reached. Then later I learned that the cap was removed.

My entry is a potential scene of a larger idea I had in mind for a long while, starring the characters that appeared in my entry for the Epic Trailer Jam last year. The idea is that these two characters are training together in a laboratory-like control room as a re-occurring event in their job, with a scientist character watching over them and taking notes. It's partially why I didn't put up my entry on the Art Portal, because I do want to use or build upon what I did for the Sketch Collab for a longer animation. And there are some ideas in that animation that I do want to build upon--the moving first-person camera shot, the extreme shading and background darkening.

What's next?

I've been working on an original animation! You can see more details about that here. These are my rough animation updates for the first half of the short:

https://twitter.com/eigenbanana/status/1600928199893872640?s=20&t=ssVjB7MSI7K-kuKNuiY3-w

https://twitter.com/eigenbanana/status/1610342858116022273?s=20&t=ssVjB7MSI7K-kuKNuiY3-w

Other than that, I really do like to participate more in NG events than the last two years, if time permits. Not only are they fun, but I get more and more convinced that doing these really helps me with expediting the creative process. That is especially important for me as I tend to take things slower than I'd like.

Here's to a productive 2023!

Hi, I've been working on a short animation for the past month or so! I've gotten so much experience animating--especially in the last few months--that I feel confident enough to make a short as the next step in developing my skills. It's going to star this original character:

This is a character sheet I created (and recently edited a week ago) as a personal reference for the animation project! She's an OC I made back in 2019, and her design was revised for an animation jam last year:

I have no timeframe as to when it'll come out. Since this short is much longer than most of my previous projects, it'll probably take a while. I do plan to post work-in-progress shots on Twitter as sort-of status updates though. For example, I posted my current progress on the rough draft yesterday!