Bit by bit, animation by animation, I am getting closer and closer to reaching my final artistic goal. I can’t put to words what that goal is exactly, but I know that finishing “Gildedguy & the Green-Eyed Cowboy” is a concrete step forward in the right direction.

Idea Origins

Read More in the WIP post: Working on a Cowboy Anim

My previous project, FM3K, burned me out, and made me more cautious about animation as a career. Also, being 3-years into indie art, this animation was somewhat of a “make it or break it” project for me.

I actually had the idea for this animation back in 2015, when I first heard the feature song “Jesse James”. It was initially sparked by my desire to do something fun and bombastic. A spectacular “I Want” type story. It would serve to better acquaint the audience to Gildedguy’s goals.

I thought this was going to be a tale about what I want. But as I kept
pushing, and extending the story further, I learned more about desire itself.

Production

Context: It’s important to know what was going on behind the scenes, since your daily environment is the greatest influence on your project. Artistic output is a surprisingly practical matter.

So a bit of my personal life:

As you are aware, animation is a desk job, and it is important to augment a sedentary lifestyle with activity. Although I did increase my time outside, exercising, and walking trails, I also got to spend more time with family.

I’d been rather focused on making Gildedguy work, and my immediate family has been understanding of that. I had believed family time was a sacrifice. In some ways it is.

But throughout this project, family has been more of a boon. FYI, I have two brothers: one younger, one older.

They understand me, and where we don’t get each other, we trust. I lean on them a lot. They are the two closest people to me in my life. More than my friends, my fans, and even more than my parents.

Unlike other stories, for all of Story 5, it was just me, Chris, and Andy living together. If there is any family unit that can compete with the strength of marriage, it’s fraternity between brothers.

I guarantee you that this animation would have been twice as difficult if I wasn’t with my brothers. This allowed me to truly explore different styles. At first, I was eager to take advantage of 3-tone shading. And then hatching.

And then 3D-modeling.

And then a charcoal-y motion comic style.

A modern JeokHwa stick fight style.

Like two dozen different web animation styles.

And finally a paper craft/story book style.

I was free to draw inspiration from whatever source at the time. I give a lot of credit to patrons, but family was instrumental.

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I’ve posted 2 public Twitter threads covering how I developed the 3D and cameos for this animation:

1. [Twitter] Tracing over #3D…
2. [Twitter] All of the storytime animators I referenced…

There are also many more behind-the-scenes info and lessons learned on Patreon:

1. Mixing 2D + 3D (Making of Cowboy Story 5)
2. YouTube Animator Cameos (Making of Cowboy Story 5)
3. [SPOILERS] Epic 3D Bar Scene Process

One of many Story Goals

One thing I wanted for Gildedguy in this animation was to show off what he could do. He’s not just some shiny knight, he can be greedy, immodest, and ruthless. I highlighted this in the “stick-fight scene”, which I had planned to do as a core part of the premise of this project.

My main inspiration for this was X’s Erase Humanity, where, instead of nicely dueling someone else’s creation, he straight-up desecrated EVERYONE’s characters. Very disrespectful! Something about that spoke to me. It was more the gesture than the content, that said “I’m ACTUALLY fighting for something here, and I’m willing to risk reputation for it”.

I’m far from the best stick animator. I look at others, who can actually depict extreme speed and impact, with admiration and envy. Imagine the exciting stories you can tell with those technical skills.

The stick fight scene is my attempt at doing it too. I started my animation hobby with stick fight flip-books. Ten years later, drawing sticks is still fun.

Max Level

This animation feels like my peak capacity in terms of visual quality. There are over a dozen layers of lighting effects on top of the base linework.

Gradient shadows, cast shadows, harsh shadows, hatched shadows. Gradient highlights, god rays, rim shines, bloom, and sparkles. Each effect multiplied over the unique key frames in the animation. The pipeline was applied to both characters and backgrounds.

The result is a video containing frames that rival even some of my best illustrations. It did come with downsides (extra effort, maintenance, rendering time). Keeping it looking this polished was a major pain. You might have noticed I had to cut some corners when it came to the ending.

I don’t believe the high amount of polish was really necessary, so next time I’ll tone it down.

I won’t revert the quality back down to meme levels (gildednutz), but I dare not push the “shininess” any further.

For my next trick…

I’ll be animating something that brings me joy. I won’t try to engineer it so hard. I’ll follow my intuition, but not fall off track like I did with FM3K.

It’ll be less about the technical skill, and more about flow and rhythm. There won’t be any lyrics: Just pure music and animation.

With the electrifying power of EDM, I’ll try to make the viewer (you) feel alive.

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