I used to work on a webcomic series for roughly eleven years. A series which shall remain unnamed (you wouldn't want me to die from embarrassment, would you?). I did it because I had a huge obstacle to overcome as an artist.
Hang on! Let me go back even further!
I was one of those guys that started doing computer generated imagery at a very early age, when CGI was at it's infancy. I mean, the original Toy Story wasn't even out yet. I was in elementary school and I was doing computer animation with vector-based graphics. It was cool, I was making (at the time) nice pictures. I wasn't really thinking too much of it but I knew that, as an aspiring special effects artist (not to be confused with visual effects, special effects are the old school stuff with smoke and mirrors to trick the camera) that this was going to be the new way forward for the film industry. Of course, the pioneers of the industry new that way better than I but I always took comfort in knowing that I managed to see it myself. You know, proof that I wasn't a complete retard.
I devoted myself almost exclusively to the creation of CGI. I played games, yes, but nowhere near the amount that I do now. Back then, my craft came above any form of entertainment as I was essentially creating enterainment itself. Do you know what that does to an artist? To go headlong at such an early age?
It means that I had practically zero traditional art experience. It's really bad considering that all the tools are designed for those artists in mind. Cameras and lights are configured with different lens and intensity as they would in real life and animation shares the same principles such as Keyframes.
I didn't know how to draw and that was made obvious when I got to college and saw that my peers had absolutely no technical know-how yet had amazing drawings, paintings or photographs. Sure, I had advantage(s). Primarily, I knew what the teachers were talking about where the other students struggled to adapt. The thing is, the teachers didn't know what to do with me. They were there to train artists to use softwares... you know, to push buttons. I knew the buttons and (more importantly) knew how they worked, so I had to become an artist.
So that was eleven years ago. I wanted to have a reason to practice regularly; to hone my skill. How did I go about it? I started drawing a webcomic because the basic idea was to produce something consistently every week. With it, I learned not only how to draw, but how to tell a story or the timing of jokes, composition and layout, colours, etc. I stopped working on the webcomic about the same time I started doing Lets Plays, actually. While I would've loved to continue the series, something was amiss which lead me to abandon the project.
I was doing it because I wanted to get better at 3D; to do animated shorts. I was doing that more than anything else. I wasn't doing what I fell in love with. My choice of words is very particular here because last week was a significant romantic episode in my life (one of the many reasons of my absence on Youtube). While the reality of that episode greatly pained me, I've come to the realization that my life wasn't necessarily about WHO I loved, but WHAT.
What, indeed. So it's about time that I continue what I do. Not only as a job, but in my spare time also. To keep the creative spark alive. I've been attached to my webcomic series mostly due to the time investment involved to polish the characters and to create a very unique world. It didn't take too much brain-storming to adapt the core fundamentals of the characters and humour into what will be a trilogy of two-minutes-long animated shorts. So, in the end, what I've done for my webcomic will yet again serve me in what I do: to make awesome shit.
I had the idea of an animated short loosely based on my webcomic for about a year now. All from a simple concept art, really. The illustrations shows what would happen during the first part of the trilogy. It only became a trilogy shortly after my romantic episode when new and better ideas started to pop up. I suddenly had so many cool ideas that I had to split them up or else I'd run the risk of never being able to complete the project. The goal here is to have each parts of the trilogy stand-alone while telling a larger story when played back-to-back. So the focus is to create the first part which will most likely take another two years to complete.
A long time, you may say. Well, I've been living with the characters in my head for eleven years so two more is practically nothing. I'm in pre-production right now, working on storyboards to flesh out the pacing. How will this affect my Lets Plays? I don't know. I suspect that playing games will be a weekend affair allowing me to focus on the project while I upload videos during the week.
Bah! It feels like I'm rambling and I'm too tired to check and see if anything I've been saying has been coherent. Good luck making sense of it all!
Here's the original concept:
