Style Updates 8 - Stylesheet

Intro

This year has been very fast paced, but in terms of the progress of the new style and puppets that I have been making, it’s been fairly slow. Usually I set aside maybe 1-2 months of work for updates, but currently I’m in month 6. Fortunately, I wasn’t in a rush but the slower pace is something that I’m not accustomed to yet. It has its pro’s and con’s though, like all things. Aside from all of that, July and early August was huge for progress. I was able to complete most of the stylesheet, which had been the longest part of this re-design process. I will stress that it’s not 100% done yet, but functionally, there aren’t many things that are going to be changed for the final draft.

Overview

Funnily enough, the style sheet revision was a late addition. I was tearing so many things apart that I figured it was time to re-do the aesthetic language of the content.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To start, the purpose of a style sheet is to ground the aesthetic language so you can reference it for later. You want something that you can refer back to as time goes on, because you will develop and improve, get bored, or just slowly change. This sheet helps you keep things consistent and if you plan it well, you can account for much of the creative process before you go into production which helps stop the style drift even more.

The 2022 stylesheet - not a looker, but worked for a little

With that in mind, if I’m being honest I was fairly unhappy with the previous level of my production. The old style was fast and loose and so many elements changed from short to short. The disparities also grew more as time went. The first year or two I think was good style wise, but once year 3 hit it all started shifting. There’s many reasons for that, and I’m not going to go into that here, just know it was a pain in the ass.

Knowing that, one of the big goals for the stylesheet was standardizing and simplifying the background looks. Looking back, backgrounds were perhaps the most inconsistent thing about my older shorts. Backgrounds…are a pain to make. They take forever (relatively), and in my case, were far more complicated than they were intended to be. In fact, I know the exact moment when I knew I screwed myself with the background designs. It was the first Christmas short I made in the “Moment of My Time” series. When I was making it I knew that I was setting a precedent that was going to be frustrating to keep up with. It only spiraled into more difficulty in later shorts as well. Much of the difficulty stemmed from the detail level, and short composition. For a standard, head on shot, things weren’t too bad, but once that angle changed, I can’t tell you how fast production spiraled down. So during this refresh process, I wanted to be extra detailed on what the limits were for making backgrounds.

Another important consideration I had was that I wanted this style to last for years. At least 5 years if I’m being honest. I don’t want to reinvent the style every year, and preferably if things go well, I can still make it fresh and exciting for longer than 5 years. It takes too much time to make these considerations and looks to have to do it on a yearly basis. The time it took me to put this together could have actually helped me move to a weekly schedule of uploads, so it is of maximum importance that redesigning the style happens as infrequently as possible.

The new style sheet - so fresh, so clean!

Outro

In summary, I’m happy with the changes to the style. There’s a much stronger design foundation here, but not to the point of being creatively restrictive. I think I’ll be able to make all the types of shorts that I want to make, and at a higher quality (and hopefully more frequent pace).

Finally, the next phase is updating the puppets in Toonboom. The puppets get decent updates on a yearly basis, but due to the changes that Toonboom is making to their licensing, this may be the final update I get to make for them so I’m giving it my everything to make sure these last as long as possible.

It’s going to be a wild ride.

-Until next time-