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!