March has come and gone, so I thought I'd do some thinking on my first animation, which was my entry for the FNF Jam. I'd never really animated anything on the computer before, so I wasn't confident in my skills, but I decided to give it a shot anyway just to be able to say that I tried. And hey, I think I didn't do too bad for my first try! I can at least say that I made something on my own and I can be proud of it.

I actually had something completely different planned for my entry. I originally had a short where BF and GF meet for the first time before the events of FNF, and had concepts and storyboards finished. It was when I was working on the backgrounds that I saw that I had only a little over a week to finish and I realized that I bit off more than I could chew. I quickly decided to switch gears and, on the hunt for a new idea, I remembered PhantomArcade's idea for an intro to the game, and I moved as quickly as possible with that idea in mind. I still want to work on my previous idea--I think it's super cute!--but for now I'll have to put it on the backburner. Hopefully I can return to it soon.

The entry itself I'm pretty proud of--I LOVED animating the Lupin III jump and Daddy Dearest's sequence!--but it did have its own issues. After I went nuts planning out my previous idea, I went into this one with hardly any planning or storyboarding at all. Yeah, it did go a little faster, but parts of the process could have turned out better if I spent more time on them and started earlier than I did. I didn't take into account how long each of the components--timing, cleanup, colors, etc.--would take to complete, but at least I've learned my lesson from that and I'll try to take it more into account with future projects. Given that I'm not the greatest with audio-related things, the audio turned out to be too loud in the finished product, so I'll take care in that regard, too.

Something I didn't expect people to enjoy was the weird proportions I accidentally gave to Daddy Dearest--I drew him wayyyy too tall and that was something I hadn't realized until towards the end of the project. It was too far in to change it, so I had to leave it as-is. But I guess people really liked that and thought it was funny! It was completely unintentional but I'm glad that people enjoyed it.

On that note: a big THANK YOU to everyone who watched, rated, and left comments on the video! I really appreciate all of the feedback on it. I also posted the entry to Twitter but I've gotten much more feedback here than I have there. I've also gotten several more followers since I posted the video and to those that followed, a big thank you to you too!

Just a few days ago, I got scouted! I'm starting to feel a little more a part of the Newgrounds community and I hope that it continues to get better from this point forward. I can't wait to work on future animations and, once again, I'm very thankful for your support!

<3