I Made a 4-Minute Animation in One Month. Here’s What I Learned.
By: Developh Organization
Tags: Creation, Youth, Burnout, Animation

A four-minute animation should take about 14 to 24 weeks to produce. I made mine in a month.

It sounds impressive — after all, what kind of creative doesn’t want to churn out incredible content faster than others? — but imagine yourself as me: a 17-year old girl with no professional animation experience, burdened with a load of homework and readings and the haunting feeling of ever-approaching final exams, being commissioned to work on an animation with two award-winning writers to be released in two weeks by the biggest telecommunication network in the country.

No pressure, right?

In retrospect, I probably should have realized how big of a job this was going to be, but even now I have troubles with procrastination and time management. Though I wasn’t experienced then, I knew that this was going to take a lot of time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears. Animation is just one of those art forms that take so long to create but a relatively short time to consume.

With eyes stinging and hands cramping, an animator sketches a cityscape background that they then have to line, color, and render. This keeps them up until the sun is glaring at them and their alarm is five minutes away from setting off. With an aching back and a bleary vision, the tiredness kicks in and everything starts to look the same. But they keep going, carefully crafting each frame and taking seven hours to finish seven seconds.

Yet, when the animation is done and posted, a majority of their audience (if they’re lucky enough to have one) will watch the animation once, maybe twice, without giving much thought to the hours of effort put into all the little details. Weeks of grueling repetitive work boiling down to a few minutes.

In animation, there’s just so many moving parts. Big animation projects done in a short time period are not meant for one lone animator. These projects often have gears that affect each other: from storyboarding to rendering, to voicing, to scoring — which is why most 2D animated movies take years to complete, and even short story time videos on YouTube take weeks or months to make.

Despite all this — despite the fact that animation is nowhere near easy and takes a lot of time and effort; despite having upcoming final exams and like, seventeen school assignments and groupworks looming over my every thought; despite the fact that I’m barely an adult with barely any professional animation experience — I made a four minute animation in a single month.

Here’s what I learned.

But first, let me tell you a story of a journey — my Hero’s Journey.

The Call to Adventure

One September evening in 2019, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, laughing at memes and ignoring the looming test that I had for Physics the next day. Then, I stumbled upon a post by Globe Telecom Inc. in their Facebook group, TheCREATORS, which was dedicated to artists of all media. They were looking for “storytellers” who were open to commissions. Well, I was a storyteller, and I was open to commissions, so I figured, why not? At worst, my application would just be ignored (a science high school student isn’t exactly the most compelling candidate), but at least I tried, right? So I sent in my illustration and animation portfolio, then continued to procrastinate for the rest of the night.

Come November, while I was still in school, I was surprised to receive a message from a representative of Globe. They were reaching out to ask if I could animate for them. I was pretty excited — after all, 17-year old amateur animators don’t get these kinds of opportunities often, so there was no way I could pass this up.

The moment I came home, I freshened up a bit and had a call with the representative. After discussing the details and my responsibilities, I didn’t hesitate: I accepted the offer and set off to work.

Crossing the Threshold

The next day, I received an email with all the important information for the project, including the contact details of the two writers I was to collaborate with. I sent them both friend requests on Facebook and soon enough they added me into a group chat. We went ahead with introducing ourselves and even hyped up the project. Then, we bounced around some ideas and suggestions for the story and animation. Eventually, we settled on weaving the themes of Christmas (since December was fast approaching) and #CreateWithLove (Globe’s campaign) together into one.

For the first few days, I thought that it was all coming together: there was a synergy between the three of us as we exchanged ideas and fleshed out the story. We were making good progress and generally just having a good time.

But a journey isn’t complete without some good ol’ bumps on the road.

Tests, Allies, and Enemies

The first challenge was realizing that our individual schedules did not line up properly. I was a student, which meant that I was awake from morning until night. However, one of my collaborators worked a graveyard shift and was only free from 7PM to 8PM, before she left for work. The other had work during that time and couldn’t come home until later. Discussing the story was hard because the two didn’t have overlapping schedules, so often I found myself with only one of the writers.

Soon after, I remembered that I had to present a first draft of my animation by the end of the week, but by the fourth day, we didn’t even have a final story yet. I had to help work on the beginning of the story to get the ball rolling.

Thankfully, we did get to flesh out our characters, which were limited to four so that I wouldn’t get too overwhelmed. While the writers worked out the rest of the story, I decided to start illustrating the characters.

Character sheet with the four main characters of the animation: from left to right, daughter, son, dad, mom.

Once the story was fleshed out, I started working on the storyboard (and consequent first draft). We didn’t have any music yet, so I made the storyboard with my only basis being intuition. I used Paint Tool Sai 2 to draw all the needed elements separately, such as backgrounds and characters, and Adobe Premiere Pro to stitch them all together. (I didn’t quite like Adobe Animate, so I didn’t use it for this project).

A side-by-side of the final render vs the storyboard of the first few scenes

By the time I finished the animatic, I was over a week late from the initial deadline. Fortunately, the people at Globe were kind enough to give me extensions. I had exams and Christmas parties to attend to that prevented me from dedicating all my time on the project, as much as I wished I could.

After finalizing the storyboard, I started working on the backgrounds. At this stage, I used a lot of references since I wasn’t confident in drawing backgrounds without them, and it helped me a lot. It would have been so much harder to finish them had I not had the guidance of multiple references while I was illustrating the houses and provincial scenes.

I also couldn’t afford to put too much time into picking and using colors, so I used a lot of blending layer options — most notably multiply for shadows and overlay for highlights. I kept shadows soft so it didn’t have to be too accurate but still helped retain a general sense of where the light was coming from.

Background scenes progress; from sketch to final render

Soon enough, by using references and coloring/rendering shortcuts, I finished working on all of the backgrounds. It was tough, but I was pretty proud of what I’d done so far. However, I couldn’t rejoice just yet.

Ahead of me, the bulk of the project remained: drawing the characters and animating them.

Death and Rebirth

When I started animating the characters, I hadn’t finalized how I wanted to approach it. I knew I didn’t have enough time to do a full frame-by-frame animation, so I tried to come up with a faster method. My initial idea was to draw each character frame three different times to have this illusion of subtle movement, so that the viewer wouldn’t assume that they’re just staring at a static picture. It looked something like this:

The original idea I had for animating the characters

However, it took me three days to animate the first scene. By the time I was done, there were barely two weeks until Christmas. I had six scenes in total to work on; drawing, coloring, and rendering every character’s movements three times was going to make me insane.

As the deadline grew closer, I became more tired and stressed. Even when school ended, leaving me the full day at my disposal, I still felt like I never had enough time. How could I animate these characters moving without having to sacrifice my sleep schedule and sanity?

Then — an idea: instead of drawing the characters moving, I could just move the characters.

That was it.

All of the elements for each frame were drawn on Sai2 and exported as separate images, which meant that I could move the characters and the backgrounds separately using Premiere Pro. I put my Premiere Pro knowledge to use and instead of drawing every single character pose three times, I made the backgrounds and characters move relative to each other, using a bezier curve so it wouldn’t feel robotic or stiff. This way, the viewers wouldn’t think that they’re just staring at still images stitched together. Thanks to this method, I was able to animate faster without sacrificing the movement of the characters.

But even with the shortcuts I took, by the end of December, I was nowhere close to finishing the project. Desperate, I drew as much as I could until my hands started cramping. I was drawing everywhere: in my house, at school, wherever I had to be. At some point, my parents and I were on vacation, and I was drawing in the car while we were sailing off to Bacolod.

Then, in the wee hours of a cold December morning, eyes red and butt sore after spending the night in front of my laptop, I put my pen down and sighed as the video started to render. It was done — this was it — I’ve finished the animation.

The Return

My journey with this animation that I did in a single month with barely any breaks in between led to a bad case of burnout. For the first few months of 2020, I had lost a lot of my motivation for illustration and animation (though luckily, because of the quarantine, I’m starting to get back on my feet.)

This project took a lot out of me. I was the lone animator (I should have asked a friend to help me out, in retrospect) and I had severely overestimated myself when it came to making animations within a short period of time.

I had pushed myself to get this done, though I wish that I wasn’t so ambitious about it and instead kept the video to one-to-three minutes. As the lone animator, I had to draw everything — every single element; every background, every character — multiple times, from sketch to render. Usually this is the job of three to four different people — sketch, lines, color, and then render. Not to mention the background art. It was a lot of work and effort on my part that my other team members couldn’t really help with, and it cost me a lot of time and stress.

Upon reflection, I’ve learned quite a bit from this journey, and I’d like to share those points, especially for aspiring animators and anyone else working on any kind of project.

First, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. Submitting my portfolio to Globe despite doubting myself led to an incredible opportunity that I would have otherwise never encountered, especially for a 17-year old amateur animator. This is so important for creatives, especially for those who want to pursue a career in the field. Your skills may get you far, but if you’re virtually invisible in a world that is increasingly becoming digital, then how can you expect anyone to see your work? Post your works on social media and interact with other creatives. Most importantly, don’t be afraid to seize the opportunities that you find. Send in your applications, submit your portfolio — sure, maybe you’ll get rejected, but have you ever thought of what could happen if you don’t?

Second: work smart, not hard. You can’t run on 100% efficiency all the time. As a creative, you need to take care of yourself so that creating content you love won’t burn you out. Burnout isn’t fun, especially when you’re in the middle of a commissioned project. It’s dreadful — not just for you, but for everyone else involved. If you can, use shortcuts in your work so that you can deliver more with less effort. For an animator, this means that no, you don’t need to detail out every single grocery item in the background of a two-second shot; and yes, please use references.

Stop overestimating yourself. I had to learn this the hard way. It may be easy to think that you can handle seven different commissions or hold positions at twelve different organizations at the same time, but you have to account for time to rest. Space yourself out and make sure you take care of yourself. Set boundaries and don’t be afraid to say ‘no’ to something you know you can’t commit to. If you are willing to take in multiple responsibilities, then manage your time properly and make sure you stick to that schedule — but remember: set aside some time for yourself. The more responsibilities you have, the less time and effort you’ll be able to dedicate to your well-being and other activities.

Finally, take fulfilling breaks. Even if it’s easy to mindlessly scroll through social media for half an hour, you gain nothing by the end of it. Instead, find hobbies/interests that you enjoy and involve things like active brain activity (like starting that book you’ve been meaning to read, or finishing that 3D puzzle platformer game, or hosting an online game night with friends and family) or social interactions, especially with your loved ones (like watching a movie or TV show or baking a cake together). If you can, keep yourself healthy with a 10-minute walk around your street and breathe in the fresh air. You will find that the most fulfilling breaks and endeavors are the ones that make you feel loved, proud, and warm. Thanks to these, when you inevitably get back to work, you will feel invigorated and motivated to keep going.

Overall, the making of this animation was oftentimes stressful, but I learned a lot about myself and how to approach projects that demand a lot of time and effort. I can only hope that my mistakes and advice would help guide you through any of your challenging projects. Remember: grab that opportunity, but be kind to yourself; know your limits, and rest well.