(video uploaded on 4/17/2021)

Learning ANIMATION in 30 Days is a video that I started working on after quitting Tetris back in 2020. As the name suggests, the video follows me recounting the past month where I spent several hours a day practicing animation. It’s definitely the most effort that I’ve ever put into a single project, but I’ve had a hard time calling myself proud of it. I have a lot of complicated feelings when it comes to this video (more on this later), but first, let’s analyze it:

Structure

Over the 23 minute runtime, the video follows a pretty rigid structure. There are 3 main “scene” types:

Animation Showcase – A showcase of the animation of the day. There’s occasionally images/videos shown overtop, but for the most part it’s just the animation looping as I talk about it. I considered having more going on visually during these sections, but I found that it helps a lot to be constantly watching the animation to reference for details as I mention them. Usually accompanied by upbeat and casual chiptune music.

Concept – A concept that I learned represented by a card along with my explanation of it. The scene also includes images and examples to aid the explanation. The use of cards to represent stuff has become a staple in my videos, and these ones use my earliest design. The song and background for concept scenes are the same every time.

Reflection – Instead of animation and technical skills, the Reflection scenes focus more on emotions and personal growth. While the other 2 scene types are pretty casual, the tone of the reflections are a lot more personal. Reflections are accompanied by slow and emotional instrumentals and a dimmed out animated background (shoutout Toyoi Yuuta).

If you’ll forgive the ugly visualization, this is the full layout of the scenes. Blue represents animation showcase, yellow is for concept, green is for reflection, and any exceptions are black. The video is grouped into chunks of 1-2 animation showcases followed by either a concept or reflection.

The problem with these scenes is that many elements become stagnant over the 23 minutes. There are 3 main areas where I found the video to be stale:

Environmentally Stale: All 3 of the scene types are put in a similar setting. Each of them include image(s) overtop of a pixel art background with very few exceptions. It would’ve helped a lot to keep it fresh with things like showing myself IRL talking to the camera or showing things off directly in Aseprite while explaining. The video could’ve had much more variety if I’d been more willing to break out of the boundaries that I set for each scene type.

Tonally Stale: The video tries to come off as positive and inspiring, and I don’t think it did a bad job at that. The problem is that when it’s the only vibe being projected for the whole 23 minutes, it starts to lose it’s effect. The video would’ve had much more depth to it if I included one-off segments with a wider variety of feelings such as suspense, frustration, relief, disappointment, etc.

Perspectivally Stale: The entire video is shown from the perspective of someone looking back on an already completed 30 days of animation. This is mostly caused by my approach of going all-out on the challenge during the 30 days and worrying about making the video later. However, had I considered recording stuff during the 30 days, I could’ve shown scenes from the present tense as they were happening instead of just in retrospect. This could include things like showing places I got stuck on, cool solutions to minor problems, or even the exhaustion after making some of the later animations that took over 9 hours each.

Even though it gets stale in many ways, I don’t actually think the structure is fundamentally bad. In fact, I think that the way it’s laid out is also a positive. The scenes are connected smoothly and it feels natural to slip into the flow and continue watching.

If I were to make this video again, I would keep the structure similar, but create multiple variants of each scene. Instead of just one type of animation showcase, I would make multiple. This could include retrospective explanation, showing myself in the process vlog-style, timelapses with voiceover, stream highlights, etc. This would solve the problems with perspective and environment getting stale.

As for the tone, I’d make a more conscious effort to have a tone in mind when going into each scene and making each one different than the last (even if only slightly). For example I’d make a note to go from casual/unscripted/informal talking in one scene to a calm explanation in the next. When I’m not paying attention, my default narration voice ends up coming out (which I’ve used for almost every video on the channel). My narration voice is still something that needs a lot of work, so making sure I do each recording with a specific tone in mind would make things a lot easier.

Other Weaknesses

Bad Intro: The intro to a YouTube video is supposed to be the hook, but for this video it ended up being the spot with the least attention allocated. In my intro, I communicate:

• I’ve been interested in the art of animation
• It’s hard to start
• I tried to start in the past but never stuck with it
• Why I’m using pixel animation
• What’s in the video

This takes a total of 43 seconds, which is disgustingly long for a YouTube video, especially in an age when the average intro takes less than 20 seconds. If you look at the list of stuff in my intro, only the last point is really necessary. If I really wanted to include the other stuff, putting it into the meat of the video instead of the intro would be much better since I’d have the viewer more invested by then.

Too Slow: The pacing of the video in both narration and editing is slow and smooth the entire way through. I don’t think this is inherently a bad thing, but I went overkill on the slowness of it. Long pauses between sentences, slow transitions, scenes that could’ve been trimmed down, etc. The video could’ve had the exact same content and vibe while being 30% shorter if more attention was paid to compacting it down.

Additional Thoughts

As I mentioned earlier, I have very mixed feelings about this video. I don’t think it’s bad, and I’m definitely glad that I made it, but there’s context that makes the video awkward to me. To put it bluntly, this video was a big ego-check for me. I put a ton of effort into both the challenge and video, but despite maximum effort I still couldn’t produce a video up to my standard. When you exert yourself to the best of your abilities, you find out what you truly were capable of.

A great example of this is when a high school student says that they could get straight As if they wanted to, but their grades are average because they don’t try. I was very much like that with making videos, thinking that I’d be able to create a masterpiece if I tried. In reality the masterpiece that I envisioned was nothing but a fantasy that I fully believed since I never put in enough effort to prove it wrong.

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Anyways, this is a new format that I’m trying out where I criticize stuff that I’ve made. I’ve been thinking of how to use this site for a while now, so I figured this would be a good fit. Even if nobody gives enough of a fuck to read what I wrote, I’ll still have gained value through analyzing and learning from my past mistakes.

If by chance you are interested in reading these, I have a backlog of about 10 other creations of mine that I want to criticize, so I’ll be posting those over the coming days/weeks. For now though, thanks for reading!