animation update! mixed news, but i'm getting somewhere!

so the bad news first, it is going to take at minimum 1 more month, likely 2 or more depending on the circumstances until i'm able to be on adderall again. the good news though! is that i found a good way to still be productive during this time, and it's for something meaningful: nothing for nothing! the one i've been working on since may of last year that takes place in the future, specifically.

i think i've come back around on animation in terms of what i actually want to do with it, i think i've ultimately realized again that i don't really want to make a music video right now and any attempts have been fairly fruitless, and that i do want to go back to my original plan of getting 'nothing for nothing' episode 1 out some time next year! so what i've been doing in specific is writing out all of the episodes, where currently the script for episode 1 is nearly 100% complete! meaning 'nothing for nothing' will be more writing-driven than strictly storyboard-driven, because i'm very bad at coming up with lines in the moment. writing a script first has been a big help in general for getting ideas down and making things seem more interesting and natural!

the second part to my plan is i want to make an Extremely rough animatic for the episodes once the script is finished, where the drawings would just be thumbnailing-level quality with really rough voice acting just to get a feel for the episode in action plus get all the timings down. my general thought is that i'll leave some scenes like action scenes up to storyboard-driven planning, while the rest will be writing-driven! it's probably not gonna end up that binary, but it's a good baseline to work off of!

it's weird to think its almost been 2 years since this iteration of 'nothing for nothing' has been formulated, i think the first draft of the first episode came to be in april 2023, but the vision now is more clear than ever and i have better confidence that i can finish it! my partner wants to help with animation as well, so that should expedite the process a good bit once it's time for that! though they have their own physical health issue that affects their drawing stamina so we don't want to push them too hard.

i think i mentioned it before, but i also want to play my cards a lot smarter when it comes to animating a full ~10 minute episode mostly by myself, i wanna practice a more limited style of animation for scenes that don't really need anything more elaborate, saving the big guns for where it really counts! so more like what you'd expect from a tv production, just with more focus on animation direction so it still looks cool when the animation is more limited. episode 1 is going to be my test, and episode 2-4 will be the true pedal to the metal with a proper team established!

given that writing and doing simple drawings right now has proven to be effective during this medication-less time, i really want to focus and stick to this idea instead of jumping around so much. i think it helps that this is something i'm truly passionate about and want to put out into the world, it's easily been the thing i stick to the most and have been developing in the background this entire time!