Being out in nature can be a surreal experience, and then the trees start talking with you. Whispering things…🌳

Artist Commentary

‘Weird Woods’ was the first short I produced for 2026. It’s part of the ‘Post Processing’ family for my short shorts collection. ‘Post Processing’ takes the place of the older ‘Giggle Gang’ shorts that were based on meme videos from Tik Tok, Vine and Youtube. It also expands on them with posts that I find on ‘X’ (formerly twitter).

Thank you to @notsorealfgs for your contribution

As far as why I made this particular short, the simple answer is that it was topical and would fit in well for a spring-themed short shorts. The original post gave me a lot of room to have fun for making the final video. Finally, I do try to add a touch of controversial elements to my work. Not enough to intentionally trigger people (because everyone’s threshold is different), but just enough to give people a bit of a surprise. It doesn’t necessarily mean I de-facto agree with all of the stuff I put in the video, just that they’re a tool for entertainment and hopefully discussion.

The Production

The production of ‘Weird Woods’ went very smoothly. The beauty of the ‘Post Processing’ family of short shorts, is that they’re very low cost to make, and tend to have much higher payoffs in viewership. I think this one in particular only took a few hours spread across a few days. The challenge of it was the use of a new lip sync rig that I made in the v6 updates. The mouth rig is pretty heavy, and when it was created, it was only for the front angle; however, by surprise it works in other angles pretty well (except for the KSP).

Another positive for this production was that I was finally able to incorporate the animatic making process for my shorts. All of my content before this sacrificed the animatic process for speed. It worked, but I never had a locked in timing for character actions, or a way of knowing how long the final render would be. That probably sounds strange coming from an animator (our whole job is timing after all), but it worked fine enough at the time. I started getting frustrated with the lack of precision as the shorts became more centered around Toonboom production. As I was working on my last freelance project, I began learning the app ‘Storyboarder’ so I could integrate animatics in future productions. It was a good choice, and I used the app for my shorts for the first time with ‘Weird Woods’.

Usually I try not to make too many new production changes as I’m in the middle of a project, but due to the small size of this short I figured it would be a good time to see what the effect of this change would be. If this was a more important project, I would have definitely not risked delaying production. That said, as far as gambles are concerned, this one payed off very well and I’m happy that I was able to upgrade my production in a seamless manner.

Finally, because I was focused on making the animatic, I decided not to create my usual storyboards (they do return in later shorts as I continued to upgrade my process). That means that I don’t have my usual scribbles for this short film to show you guys in the gallery.

That’s a wrap!