The deadline for the NATA Pro Round passed this week, and I submitted something for that! You may have missed it, but you can see it here. It's called Narcissus and here are my thoughts on it:
- I really like how it turned out visually. I was afraid that doing it lineless would take too long like it did last year with Until It's Gone, but I made some changes and now it's as fast as regular animation.
- The animation turned out better than I expected as well, so that was nice.
- The plot was kind of pointless. However, I don't entirely regret this, since last month I kind of forced myself to marinate in sadness because I had to work on something sad for an extended period of time and I wanted a break from that. I don't want to do another meaningless movie any time soon, though, so I'm going to have to strike a balance of some sort.
- The music worked well. Last time I tried to make a comedy, Until It's Gone, the music and plot ended up so bland that I reworked it all to make it sad again. This time the music made it seem less bland, and that was good.
I'm not confident that I'll make it through NATA, and if I do happen to I know I won't be winning it again, but so far this year has proved to be useful already, so I am ok with that.

Next up: I'm kind of starting to make animation tutorials. The first one I made is a brief demonstration of how I did that little ripple effect in Narcissus.

I'm not sure if this will become a regular thing that I do or not. It won't for a little bit, anyway, because as you can tell I'm not that great at making these. If you want me to try to teach or explain (read: ramble about) something about animation, and you accept the fact that it's me that'll be making it, you can let me know and I will maybe try.

Lastly: Work is interesting, as usual. I work at a summer camp, and I generally get home late and too tired to work on things. So if I do make it to the next round of NATA, that'll be interesting to juggle. It might actually be a little bit of a relief if I don't, although if I do, of course I will make it work somehow. We'll see how it goes.

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