Achievement Unlocked - Mile High Club Entrance Fee (Patreon)

And there goes my first ever attempt at animation. 

I started by studying Richard Williams's Animator's Survival Kit. It's got 5-stars on Amazon. It must be good, right? It's a great book, but not particularly useful for my intended use case, as one might imagine.

Honestly, for a first try it went a lot smoother than I was expected. The actual frame-by-frame animation was relatively easy; fun even. What was a major bitch was actually painting/coloring all of these frames. It's extremely repetitive and time consuming, even with copying and pasting. I initially wanted to do give her a much more goth look in accordance with Arlinath's input, as well as much more depth and detail with shading, lighting, and "liquids", but doing so would just take so much extra time it didn't seem worth the effort for the first run on a project I didn't care that much about.

I looove how the hand-job animation turned out, though, admittedly I should've spaced the frames out more to slow it down. It's honestly an easy fix, but I'm just too damn tired of working on this at this point to make the change.

A lot of the time was also spent learning Clip Studio's strengths and limitations. The great news is it doesn't really have any sincere limitations: the program basically just refurbishes layers and layer folders as cels. As such, anything you can draw in the program normally, can be animated. 

That strength is a double-edged sword, as in its current state, the timeline UI is kind of a hassle to work with, and is clearly an appended limb rather than an integral part of the program. I'm sure this will improve as time goes on, as this is only the first English release of the animation feature.

This one took a really long time partially because it was a pretty long and complex one. Typical moron in me insists on shooting for the stars right off the bat. Shorter 1 or 2 second looping animations will be MUCH easier and less tedious to work on, so expect many more shorter looping animations in captions from here on.

For the caption, I really wanted to do the "Achievement Unlocked" effect (using my logo LOL), but I had no idea what the achievement would be, until I heard Nickelback on the radio while eating at a local fast food restaurant. That settled the matter quite easily.