Another 12 months of animatin’, illustratin’ and video creatin’ in the can! This was another pretty stacked year for freelance work and building up my YouTube channel. Read on for more details on each month!

January:

The year kicked off with the release of What a Waste, which I animated at the end of last year. I created a poster to celebrate it’s launch. I also had some artwork in print via an article in LeftLion magazine! I also illustrated my OC Drillbot ReV for the year of the rabbit and put out a new animation showreel.

February:

I did a valentines card for CherryT of the pair of us in Mario & Luigi style. I was also commissioned to do an edit of the van animation I did last year, this time with a car and some other minor tweaks.

March:

At the start of this month I hit over 1000 subscribers on YouTube, only took 17 years! To celebrate I put together a quick video talking about the past, present and future of the channel, using it as a test to see how I could start making more fully-edited, scripted videos using my PNGTuber. The first of these was an almost hour long video exploring my DVD/Blu-Ray collection.

April:

This was the month that I really pushed to get a load different videos out on my channel, with full illustrated thumbnails for each! This mostly consisted of a six-part let’s play of the Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, cut down from an April fools day livestream.

I also did an impressions video about the Super Mario Bros movie and a scripted video about Easter eggs I snuck into my animations, just in time for Easter! I also made a speedpaint video for one of the video thumbnails and made a new logo for the speedpaint videos.

There was also a birthday card illustration for CherryT inspired by the Mario movie!

May:

May was a pretty quiet month, mainly consisting of two illustrations: a quick one of an OC for mermay and a piece of fan art of vTuber Asha the Game Genie. Both of these were captured off-stream and turned into speedpaint videos.

I also made a supercut of a Netherlands travel vlog from 2018 with a bunch of additional footage that I never got around to editing before, in time for the 5th anniversary of our friends wedding that we attended that year!

June:

My first big freelance project finally arrived between May and June, an informational film about Credit Unions, done in a similar style to several films I did last year, but with more colour in the mix.

I also did a couple of livestreams this month, namely a reaction stream to a Nintendo Direct and a Sonic anniversary stream, a part of which was edited into a video of me drawing obscure Sonic characters from memory.

July:

With that freelance project done and dusted I dedicated most of this month to some personal animating stuff: mainly giving my PNGTuber a fresh coat of paint by improving all the animations with more frames. I made a scripted video about the process. I also made big progress on a re-animated collab shot that I finally finished in November.

August:

Browsing my pages you’d think I did absolutely nothing this month, but I was in fact deep in researching for a video series I plan to make for YouTube in the near future when I have more spare time for it. What started as a single short video idea deep-dived into a rabbit hole of fascinating stuff that I can’t wait to share with you all!

I also started animating an intro for this video series, which is currently sitting in sketch form and will be returned to next year when I can!

September:

My YouTube planning had to be stuck on hold as another big freelance project landed on my lap: an informational film about community lenders. There is some pretty fun scenes in this, and yet another loan shark character! This took up all of September and was released at the end of October.

October:

Just as I wrapped up the previous project another even bigger one was being cooked up: a sequel to What a Waste! Once the filming of the puppetry and the recording of the voice talent was ready I could get to work on once again animating faces for the returning apple character and the five new characters!

What a Waste was a pretty experimental film but this time around I had a working system in place to jump straight in and assumed I would be able to get this one done in less time. I technically did get it done in less time because the deadline for it was much tighter, but it was a crunch to do so, consisting in total of over 2000 assets!

In the short space between these projects I illustrated Rouge the Bat based on a Twitter trend.

November:

November was mostly taken up by wrapping up production on Apple-y Ever After. In total it took about five weeks, about a week longer than I planned, not helped by me choking on a slice of potato that rendered shallowing anything difficult for weeks! It was a good thing CherryT was around at the time to perform a Heimlich maneuver on me! Absolute life saver! A teaser trailer was released mid way through the month.

Once that was done with I went back and finally finished this shot for the Wario Ware GOLD re-Animated collab which I had been chipping away at on-and-off for around three years! It’s done pretty nicely on both Newgrounds and YouTube. The full collab should be out sometime next year! Speaking of which, I have another shot reserved that I need to crack on with when I’m less busy with freelance work!

December:

I have started another big animation project that will be ongoing until the end of January and should hopefully release in Feb. This has been the third project in a row with barely a breather between them and that on top of cinema work left me feeling pretty burnout, hence this quick doodle.

I spent the spare time I had at the start of the month to make a video about the latest birthday cake CherryT made me. I also took this opportunity to edit remasters of previous cake videos, including one that was never finished. Here’s the playlist for all six of them.

Apple-y Ever After finally released near Xmas, which meant I could publish this poster I made for it. Next month there will be a making of video published by Deadline and so far the film has been quite the hit, currently sitting at around 40K views!

Finally, I published an old Xmas animation from 2010 on YouTube, but because the original video had copyrighted music baked into the sound effects, I remade the soundtrack from scratch!