Hi there!
This website isn't fully built yet! So some things like this spot right here are still being worked on!
Introduction:
Hi, this is the logbook I had to make alongside my latest animation, and later on, this website as well.
As I'm writing this, I’m in the final year of my current studies at Cibap in Zwolle. For one of our final assignments, we pretty much have total freedom to do whatever we want, as long as it meets the minimum requirements, of course.
If you’ve read the animation page before this, you might already know that I started this project without planning to make it my school assignment.
It actually began as my intake assignment for the next school I want to go to (which I luckily got accepted into!), namely ArtEZ University of the Arts.
If I graduate, I’ll start studying animation there in early September 2025.
The intake required me to make either a storyboard, an animation, or a comic.
I misread it and assumed I needed to make all of them. And, being the person I am, I came up with an extremely ambitious concept for a story.
It ended up being way too big to finish on time, even while working 12 hours (or more) a day. But I still managed to create a very expansive storyboard, a script, and a lot of visually interesting scenes.
Since I had already spent about five weeks on this cartoon, including the time allocated for this final assignment, I put the original story concept I had in mind for school on the backburner and made the intake animation my school project instead.
So, as you might notice, the logbook doesn’t start at the actual beginning. It picks up about two or three days after I made it my school project (I forgot about it, to be completely honest).
Disclaimers:
First one, and probably the biggest one!
This is probably a very boring read for most people. Unless you're one of my teachers, me, or just extremely bored, I wouldn’t recommend reading this.
It wasn’t written for entertainment, after all. It’s just me describing a very, very, very long and time-consuming process.
I do plan on making a making-of video once the cartoon is finished.
I planned to host the logbook on this site from the very beginning, but until pretty late I didn’t have the time to actually put it here.
For the longest time, I wrote down whatever I did each day on a bunch of A4 papers.
Probably the least organized way to go about it, and now I’ve got to deal with the consequences.
The logbook also wasn’t written in English originally. I didn’t really think much about how I wrote it, as long as it got the idea across.
That does mean I now have to translate everything into English, and I definitely could have written some parts a little clearer.
So, in case things seem a little jumbled or inconsistent, just picture me hunched over my messy stack of A4 papers like a linguist trying to translate a manuscript written in some ancient lost language.
And finally, I forgot that dates are actually useful in logbooks, especially at the beginning.
I worked on this project pretty much every day, and each segment should represent one day.
Later in the log, you’ll see I started adding dates to each entry.
I decided to keep the early ones as they are, since I can’t write down the earlier dates with full confidence.
I will write down "THE NEXT ENTRY:" instead of the date on each entry I'm not fully certain on.
Alright, that should be it!
Logbook:
FIRST ENTRY:
(Likely to be February 24th)
Alright, I’m starting this logbook a bit later than everybody else. I only decided to make this my assignment a few days ago.
So to the teacher reading this: I didn’t start logging my project late. I just started it late in the overall timeline of the project, alright?
I just had a week off from school. But because of my on-location intake happening the Saturday before, and since I had been pushing myself hard to get as much done as possible before that day, I ended up feeling completely strung out for most of the break.
The time I could manage to be productive, I spent working on my portfolio site, since that was going to be reviewed by the intake committee at ArtEZ University of the Arts.
It’s fine though. I need to learn how to take breaks, even if I don’t like doing that.
If you don’t take care of your body, especially when you’re working too hard and hunched over a drawing tablet until the early morning, your mind will eventually catch up to you. Then you're kind of forced to take a break anyway.
And when that happens, the break is usually a lot longer, more exhausting, and ends up making me feel worse.
I’m feeling better now and I want to get back to work, but just to be safe I decided to take it easy today.
It’s currently Monday evening, the first week back at school.
To give some context to anyone who’s not a classmate or teacher: this project doesn’t actually get a ton of time during school hours.
We get four hours every Tuesday and another four on Wednesday. The other days are taken up by other classes, and Friday is one of those set-in-stone “do your homework” days. I usually end up working from home or hanging out with friends and not doing much at school. Though most of the time, I do actually work from home.
I figured I’d use this first entry to describe my original plan.
Just to be clear, most of these entries won’t be this long or detailed. Some of them might just be, “I did a thing all day and I’m going to redo it tomorrow.”
This is a logbook, not a novel.
But since it’s the first entry and I don’t really plan on doing much tonight, I might as well.
I also tend to write the same way I think, so my sentences kind of turn into paragraphs really fast.
My original plan:
I realized I wasn’t going to be able to juggle both my PRO-YOU animation project (that’s the name of the assignment, by the way) and the cartoon I was already working on for my now-finished intake assignment.
So I decided to put the original idea aside for now, though I still think it’s a fun concept.
The idea was to make an absurdist comedy cartoon set in a western-style world.
I really love when a piece of media takes place in a kind of creative sandbox. If it’s done well, anything can happen.
A lot of my favorite shows are like that. Take Adventure Time, which is probably my favorite show ever. The world is super weird and goofy, but the writers still manage to hit deep emotional notes that could bring a war veteran to tears. (Probably.)
Another example of this creative sandbox idea is when a show combines different art styles and makes it work. Like a hand-drawn 2D character cutting a sleek, vector-styled carrot with a stop-motion knife.
Two shows I love that do this really well are The Amazing World of Gumball and Smiling Friends. The latter especially uses that kind of contrast for comedy.
I wanted to do something similar with my cartoon. As you can guess, that would have made things pretty complicated. Maybe even more so than the massive cartoon I’m already working on.
The story was about two characters: an alien and a police officer.
They meet when the alien’s 3D-animated ship crashes into the officer’s colleague, right in front of him.
The officer panics, thinking he’ll be blamed for killing his partner. So he dresses the alien in the dead guy’s clothes and brings him back, acting like this is just a minor inconvenience.
When they get back to the station, the sheriff seems to realize something is off, but then brushes it off. Right then, the alien shoots him in the face.
The officer freaks out and yells at the alien, and for the first time, the alien responds in English. This makes the officer even angrier because he thought the alien didn’t understand him.
They argue a bit until the officer realizes he needs to cover up the sheriff’s death.
So they end up replacing him with a clunky robot from the alien’s ship, dressed in the sheriff’s clothes.
Somehow, nobody notices. The cartoon ends there and it’s meant to feel like the first episode of a longer series.
Like I said, I still think this is a solid idea. It just wasn’t realistic to pull off in the time I had.
Alright, that’s it for the first entry. Again, don’t expect most of the other entries to be this long.
SECOND ENTRY:
Today I did some background work. A lot of the backgrounds were lacking detail compared to others, and that started to bug me a lot.
Tomorrow I plan on doing a bunch more. I want to put everything I’ve got so far together as a little showcase soon, and I want it to look as good as possible. So I plan on spending this week, and possibly the week after, making the work I rushed for the intake into something I can be proud of.
Examples of an extremely noticable upgrade:
OLD:
NEW:
THIRD ENTRY:
Pretty much the same as yesterday.
I asked my friends for feedback a lot, like I always do — especially when I’m working in the same space as them.
Most of the time, I don’t get a lot of feedback that’s really worth noting. The same goes for teachers.
My school doesn’t have many people who focus on animation. I think there are two teachers. One of them, as far as I know, mostly worked on animation geared toward marketing. The other one, I can never seem to find.
That’s alright, but it does mean it can be hard to get feedback from teachers on certain parts of this project, especially the animation-related stuff on this website. And when it comes to things like backgrounds, I trust my friends’ artistic opinions enough that I’m not about to take my whole setup over to a teacher just to show them two images.
I do ask teachers for input whenever I’m working on the script, which has been happening a lot lately.
As with most of my work, I also ask people in online chatrooms I’m a part of for feedback all the time.
But sadly, giving good feedback isn’t always easy, and sometimes it’s hard to get anything truly helpful.
In any case, here are some of the upgraded backgrounds I did today:
OLD:
NEW:
FOURTH ENTRY:
Did some more background work and tweaked a few frames in the door scene I made — changes that most people, except for me, will probably never notice.
I was mostly busy with another class today, though.
FIFTH ENTRY:
Today was a little rough. I didn’t sleep very well, and my concentration was at an all-time low.
I still managed to get some work done, even if it was minor.
I redid the line art for one of the backgrounds because I thought it was in rough shape. I also started another background that will probably need some more attention. You’ll see why in a day or two, probably.
SIXTH ENTRY:
Today was a good day, at least health-wise.
I slept in a lot, got a bunch of rest, and I feel much better — though it did cost me more than half the day.
This tends to happen every Saturday. Because I overwork myself so often, I end up really tired by Friday night.
I still got some things done, though.
I downloaded Blender since I’ll need it for some of the later scenes. I have to make a lot of shots involving tiles, and I’m not about to do a bunch of Pythagorean math just to get the angles right.
I spent some time getting used to the program and also worked on my portfolio site for a bit.
Saturdays are usually the days I either go out with friends in the evening and drink a lot, or I watch a movie with my family. I’ve been skipping that stuff a lot lately, and since the pressure of the project’s deadline isn’t crushing me just yet, I wanted to spend some time with my parents.
SEVENTH ENTRY:
Today I made the base for a background in Blender.
It took me a while to figure things out, so I wasn’t able to render it yet.
Tomorrow I’ll ask Rosan, a friend of mine, for some advice since she’s great with Blender and I really don’t know what I’m doing.
I had to spend a lot of the day on another class again. Really hoping I can keep up with both classes equally.
EIGHTH ENTRY:
Today, I got some help from my friend I mentioned in yesterday's entry.
She showed me a much smarter way to set up the shot I needed, and it only took about an hour to get everything perfect for rendering.
Because I draw each background really big to avoid potential scaling issues in the future, and because I need to be able to see a lot of detail in the render, it sadly took a lot of time.
In the evening, I finished most of the background.
NINTH ENTRY:
I finished the acorn shot.
The background didn't take a lot of time and the animation didn't take any time at all.
I went on to set up the tile guide render for the next shot.
This took a while, but eventually it rendered and I started on the lineart. It's not the most fun piece to draw for me. It's not that I don't enjoy drawing trees. It's just a lot of detail for something that's only going to be shown for a few seconds and I'm afraid to waste my time.
TENTH ENTRY:
I'm still working on the panup shots lineart.
I'm not enjoying this to be completely honest.
It's taking way too long and it's just tedious work.
I'm also in a mild motivation dip right now and this scene is not helping.
ELEVENTH ENTRY:
I finished the panup shots lineart and have started coloring every little part to make the painting easier, and cleaner.
It's much like the lineart, taking waayyy too long to be fun. I keep getting distracted too, so that definitely doesn't help.
I guess it was bound to happen sometime. You can't do a large project without a motivation drop at some point.
At least I don't seem to be able to!
I'm hoping that I can climb out of this quickly.
ELEVENTH ENTRY:
I did a huge script revision.
The longer I went on the more I kept seeing the things I could improve about it. I sat down to try and make it a lot better today and kind of look for some inspiration for the voices.
Joe will just be my normal voice, but I'm not certain as to how I want to tackle Benny.
You know the thing that annoys me most about these little art blocks I get sometimes is that I know how fast I can work normally. Not being able to set your mind to it without clear reason just sucks.
TWELFTH ENTRY:
I had an idea to get me out of my little motivation depression today.
I decided to include the portfolio site into my project. I have to spend time on it anyway cause we get graded for it seperately too and it's a great way to still do something productive and creative, but just step away from other part for a little bit to gather back the motivation.
So today I remade the wizard on my front page and started on the rework of my navigation arrows.
It's another Monday so worktime is limited, so I'll have to finish those buttons tomorrow.
