Overview

There have been many goals with this style update. One that came up recently, but was important (I don’t know how I forgot about it honestly), was a redesign of animal characters. I think I was was tunnel visioned on completing all of the puppet errors, but as I was finishing up the redesign for the human characters, I realized that I did not really like making animal characters for the shorts. This was not ideal, because I have A LOT of animal stories that I want to tell, but making them have been a pain and the designs don’t ever look consistent.

Along with the design issues of animals, I also did not have animal puppet templates. I recall that when I was making either the V2 or V3 version of the puppets that I wanted to also make animal versions, but I never got around it. This is not too bad but I did want to make an effort to get this down now.

The new designs of the animals are following the principles I’ve established with this new update. Its focus is to simplify, and make the process of animation enjoyable for me. That does come at the cost of detail (which honestly, I do miss), but the advantage is that I should be able to tell a wider range of stories now. Also, I think it’s important to mention that I will most likely do a few alterations before I deploy the new designs. It’s not about making things perfect, but I am putting a lot of effort into maintaining a certain quality of aesthetic. This means that I have to constantly look at different things throughout this upgrade process to make sure that future me is keeping consistent with the standards that past me set up.

It’s a tough balancing act.

That said, I am a lot more happy with these new designs than I was with the older ones. They’re more cohesive with the previous looks and are easier to make. Just like the character redesign, I feel these new designs channel the energy I had when I initially started making these shorts. Somewhere along the way it felt as if I was losing a lot of passion making these shorts and I think you can see because of how often things were changing. However, I’ve learned (re-learned, really) how important it is to channel the vision that YOU want for your art, and not to let faceless algorithms dictate your creative process.