Well, I guess I'm a professional animator now

On speedrunning my first commissioned animation in 9 days.

Greetings, my fellow vagabonds.

Around 18 months ago I posted my first video to my YouTube channel which married editing with some hand drawn animation. The video in question followed a sinister duck who showed up on recordings of various notable events throughout history - see below, but viewer beware…

The animation of the wee duck dude was about as basic as it comes, but I made the most of it with various shuffling of frames, adjustments to frames per second, and how I edited it with the footage used.

Following that, I got a little more ambitious with my next animation. I had actually started working on this one prior to the time travelling duck, but spent a bit more time in post where I collaborated with David Park on the music and had it mixed by a Finlay Jones.

The animation itself ended up with an original score, and was an ode to the classic body-snatcher films I grew-up watching.

I then worked on a parody of the 1960s Aquaman cartoon, where myself and my pal Kevin Logue hand drew (no tracing!) everything used, and I wrote lyrics with Nadine Garland to the tune of the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon. I recorded the song, admittedly quite poorly, and hey-presto I had my most ambitious animation up to that point.

In the year that followed, I animated a dark satire lampooning the YouTube algorithm with more original music, my first animation featuring a kaiju which began as a character design evolution of a character used in my very own real life bird rescue video, a post-apocalyptic Teletubbies animation without realising it would coincide nicely with the trailer for the film 28 Years Later, and of course, my 2nd kaiju animation featuring the vocal talents of my wee niece.

Those, and various other videos, were book-ended with a short animation to accompany a song I wrote and recorded, all of which I made in a 4 day speedrun in the final days of 2024; an appreciation song for my patrons which doubled as a anti-capitalism rant. This was a tough one, which required one shift exceeding 24 hours to get it over the line in order to meet the self-imposed deadline. But, this moment of apparent madness proved to be a fateful one.

Eleven days later, I was approached by the Boston-based band, Dwelley, who had found the appreciation song animation on reddit. It was a further 4 days after that when I saw their message on reddit (for reasons which are much too dull to write about here).

I messaged back, and we began exchanging emails.

Their initial pitch was for a 10-15 second animation (with the intention of looping it throughout the song) of a bipedal creature, with a stone for a head, walking into a nature scene. The creature would be carrying a bag of seeds, would plant said seeds, leave the scene, and a plant would grow containing a copy of the creature, who would also then leave the scene. All of this had to be completed by the launch day of their single ‘Stone Heads’.

I liked the brief and took a few days to think it over.

I eventually got back to Dwelley with a pitch of my own: I told them that I thought I could fill the entire runtime of the song (over 4 minutes) with a fully animated story - the only catch being, I’d need full creative freedom due to the extremely tight timeline.

Worse case scenario, if they didn’t like what I did, or I didn’t get it all finished in time, they’d still have the original 10-15 seconds.

They agreed, and so began a 9-day speedrun which nearly melted my brain.

I put in some serious shifts, anywhere from 10 to 12+ hour days, and on the final day pushed into 24 hours… again.

Naturally, on the last day I ran into some horrendous rendering problems in DaVinci Resolve, my editor of choice. Through some trial-and-error I did manage to figure out fixes for the issues. One small bug did find its way into the final animation, but you wouldn’t know it was there unless you knew what you were looking for. Of course, it will haunt me until the end of my days.

After all the drama of the rendering issues, I finally sent the video off to the band. I had a flurry of requests from members to access the animation on Google Drive, and when all was said and done, all members of Dwelley were pleased with the result, which is below.

While not perfect, I’m pleased with what I managed to make in my 9-day speedrun.

More importantly, this animation was the first I was commissioned to make. I hadn’t even been advertising my availability for commission, it hadn’t even entered my head.

I’ve had supporters on Patreon (who got early access to the animation), and via my Substack, for a while now, which has kept me going while I’ve been figuring all of this creative stuff out, but it is a milestone of sorts to be able to say “I’m a professional animator.”

I’ll now return my focus to a giant video essay project I started last year and one I naively thought I could finish by the end of 2024. There is so much more to do.

But while I work on that behemoth, I’ll enjoy the glow of having my first commissioned work out in the world.

See you all soon.

Cheers,

Fargo.