CLIP: Notice anything different about me? Errm new haircut maybe? (A BOLD NEW PATH)

Animation has begun on the next video for Mashed. But this isn't your usual animated progress clip. Something about this one is different. It's a PaintraSeaPea FIRST. Let me explain.

First, I must ask you to watch this video. Just a couple shots I worked on this week. If you've watched a lot of my animations, is there anything different you've noticed about this clip? Out of the ordinary?

You see, as you may or may not know, due to how infrequently I've made this clear, for my entire animation career up to this point, I've made all my videos through the same pipeline.

I use Paint Tool SAI or whatever similar drawing software I have at the moment to draw a ton of assets, and save those assets as PNG cels, and then plug those cels into VEGAS or whatever similar video editing software I have at the moment as a fully layered, moving animation!

That means I have tons and tons of folders that look like this:

 Folders filled with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of PNGs meant to comprise an animation in its entirety.

I'd been doing it like this for years, just because, well, it was resourceful! I started animating for YouTube when I was 14 years old and all I really had was a free drawing software on my iPad, and a free editing software on my laptop.

You can imagine, though, how this is an absolutely crazy, insane way to do things. We're talking THOUSANDS of unique images per video, and every time I wanted to save a new frame or even just edit an existing one, I'd have to go into the drawing program and save it as a PNG. It was tedious, but I had gotten really adjusted to it so it wasn't any issue.

Although I had grown comfortable with this pipeline, the more I've worked at Mashed, the more apparent it's become how difficult to sustain this process is. There's a lot of limitations involved, mainly that no one I was collaborating with was able to work within what I was doing. If I needed to insert a background or the editors at Mashed had their own assets to implement, I would either have to insert it myself OR render entire clips as PNG sequences with transparent backgrounds. Which was even more space and hassle and upload time to deal with.

So, this month I decided to finally bite the bullet.

It Is With Great Honor That I Humbly Introduce:

 THE FIRST PAINTRASEAPEA PRODUCTION MADE WITH ACTUAL ANIMATION SOFTWARE!

That's right! I called up my Mashed co-animator and got hooked up with CLIP STUDIO PAINT!

This is such a huge step forward for me. It should, hopefully, drastically reduce the amount of time it takes for me to complete animations now. I mean, I'm cutting out an entire step of the process here, which was the whole converting-assets-into-PNGs-and-plugging-them-into-a-secondary-software thing. Now I can just draw stuff and make that stuff move all in the same program! No more file management! No more PNG sequences!

Better yet, there's other animators at Mashed working in the same software, too, including my usual co-animator who's also dedicated himself to learning CSP. So now the process should be much more transient, less divided between me and everyone else. I don't have to insert the backgrounds myself, and the editors at Mashed can make modifications to my shots all they want without me having to jump through weird hoops to make it work!

One of the most exciting parts I think is gonna have to do with the artwork. The lineart specifically.

If you're familiar with the art I do, animated or otherwise, I love giving everything texture. I love giving characters pencil-y lineart and having fun scribbly backgrounds and details. It's my lifeblood.

Sadly, that's had to take a backseat for a lot of my Mashed videos. Because my co-animator was working in Adobe Animate, a vector software, as opposed to my drawing software, which was raster, he wasn't able to have a lot of those same textures in his lineart. If you're not sure what vector vs. raster is, you'll have to look it up. Basically, it meant that I had to dial back the textures on my animations.

If you look at stuff like Sonic Babies or Floweratouille, I intentionally opt for a more basic lineart style in order to maintain cohesion. Now that we're all in Clip Studio, which is frame-by-frame raster software, the texture is BACK!! It's finally back! It's really, really subtle in this clip, it might even be too subtle in the resolution I rendered it at, but I'm going to ramp it up in the future. Absolutely. So look forward to that.

I don't want to be TOO dramatic, but I think you're all going to be looking at the new future of how I make videos. I'm not sure what the most major ramifications of this will be, but ideally it means I'll be able to make things way quicker with way less restrictions.

On a final note, if I can get just a touch serious, the prospect of choosing a full-time animation software was actually really intimidating to me for years. It was something that I knew would be for the better, but that I never wanted to take that first step. I dreaded the growing pains of having to learn a new program.

For the first couple days, it honestly WAS painful. I had to unlearn so many little details and muscle memories to adjust myself to a new process. It was one of those things where, I knew what I was doing was going to make things easier in the long run, but in the moment, having to suffer through learning something new was so agonizing.

I think I've gotten over it, though, which is why I was ready to tell you all about it! There's a few things here and there that I'm still learning, but on the whole I've started getting into a new groove that really works for me, which is a relief. Switching gears is one of the hardest things for me, so I live for the ease of a groove.

If I had to summate this little arc in more poetic terms, it was kind of like when you get hurt really bad, and you feel like the pain is never gonna end. But then 20 minutes later when it's all done with you don't even know why you were worried to begin with. Yeah... it's turning out to be like that.

Now all we have to see is how the heck we're gonna pull this video together in such short time. Pray for us, Paintrons.