TLDR: I'm starting over with the animation I've been working on due to unsatisfying execution and inefficient work process.

Hello, fellow clowns! I'm back with an update on what's been going on. Sadly, it is true. I have decided that I will be starting over with Clown College story time video I have been working on. For those curious, here are the reasons why:

• The script was pretty bad. Or at least not as good as I would have liked it to be. Just to come out and say it, the story is supposed to be a completely fictional story set in a completely fictional world, and the script I feel didn't build it or present it correctly. In that regard I kind of rushed into this animation when it came to that aspect. Even designing the backgrounds was mostly off the top of my head, which is really not good.
• Also with the script, the narration was too Tell don't Show. Yeah it's narration, literally a tool for Telling your story, but I was going for having Curly the Clown to be one of those Unreliable Narrators. So while he might say one thing, but the visuals will say another. Visual Storytelling ladies and gentleman. Problem is, I never really gave Curly any real character other than being my mascot. I don't want him to be my mouthpiece, I want him to be his own character with his own thoughts, opinions, and personality.
• The voice acting I feel could be changed up, maybe not terrible, but I used my normal voice for Curly, and again, don't want him to just be me.
• The animation program I used was Krita, and while it's a pretty good animation software, it is not that great when used for such a long cartoon such as this. the audio was all one audio clip, so the animation was one big scene as opposed to multiple, so the program would start getting overwhelmed, glitchy, and slow, and would say "Not Responding" whenever I would try to boot it back up.
• It was a long video and due to all of the above, I just lost all of my passion for the project. I know animation isn't always supposed to, and going to be a fun and exciting process, but why finish if I wasn't going to be satisfied with the final result?

So what I'm planning to do from now on, is use Krita for GIFs instead of big animations, since that's how I personally feel the software is better suited for anyway. And the program I'll use it OpenToonz. I've actually used this program to animate a scene in a collab I participated in a while back, so I am already pretty familiar with the fundamentals of it already. I'll still be looking up tutorials so that I can learn ALL that is to know of the program so it'll be easier and less time consuming to figure things out and find short cuts.

And I'll make sure to split the animation into short scenes at a time before I sew it together into one cartoon sock. So as to not overwhelm the program and to be more efficient. And it can also give me easier leeway to edit any mistakes I come across when I'm far into the animation already.

Lastly, the new animation I'll work on next will be a small funny short, then the first story time will be a different story. Another problem with Clown College is that it doesn't really work well as an introduction video to the world, since most of it takes place in a dull dreary college tent. So the first story will be to explore the world a bit and give a good idea how it works. though hopefully all stories can give the audience a good idea about the world, in case the audience wanted to watch out of order.

Regardless, going to focus on one or two short animations for practicing my animation skills, and so not to bite more that I can chew.

Hopefully this wasn't too long to read, so used to the short baby posts on twitter, feels so freeing to be able to say as much as I want. But that'll be it for now. I shall keep you guys posted, thanks you for reading, fellow clowns!!