hey gjys and gjrls! 

so it’s been a fun few months of nata for me, and now it’s all done. my final submission, 'your art is shit,' is now online. i thought it’d be nice to do a quick retrospective on my experience on year 3 of entering, so i queued up all my videos and barfed out some thoughts on them, along with thoughts on where i’m at with animation in general.

if you don’t want to read all this self-centered junk, just know that there’s a big announcement coming your way in the next few days once a few details are finalized! it’s loosely related to the sarcastic collabs, and you’re going to love it.

‘loves me, loves me not’ - my open round entry for the theme ’ten facts.’ i really like this one. it was a great warm up to just do something totally abstract and strange. basically, there had been this girl that i was chatting up, and i started to get to that stage where you’re just wondering ‘does this person feel the same way i do?’ nothing came of it in the end, and i just felt that i had missed out on a lot while i was just sitting there, uselessly twiddling my thumbs.

‘white noise machine’ - my novice round entry for the theme ‘surving ___.’ there was this girl i was seeing for a minute, but we pretty quickly realized that we were more into each other platonically than we were romantically. the breakup was mutual, but she made a sarcastic comment about how she’d have trouble sleeping without my white noise machine. i thought it was a really nice image, the way you feel when someone leaves you manifested through all these small, once-insignificant objects. 

‘we watched fireworks (on tv)’ - my pro round entry for the theme ‘a tragic misunderstanding.’ after all this junk about romantic relationships, i thought it’d be nice to move over to a familial relationship. this was a nearly entirely accurate representation of my childhood fourth of julys. i was afraid of fireworks, so i spent my fourths bonding with my great grandmother, easily some of my best childhood memories. i thought it would be nice to cement those memories into an animation before i get old and forget all of them. and no, @tomfulp, i’m not deaf, ya goofball.

‘your art is shit’ - my final entry to nata 2015, for ‘against all odds.’ after covering most of the other types of relationships in my life, i thought i’d cover my relationship with art. i had originally (a month or two ago) written up this big blog-post about what i labeled ‘artistic dysmorphia,’ this thing where people constantly down-talk their own work, whether it’s because they’re humble, modest, insecure, or whatever. i haven’t posted that yet, and maybe i don’t really need to anymore, but the short revolves around those ideas; how it’s not helpful to compare your own art to others, how hard it can be to ‘make it’ as an artist, how sometimes you have to accept that your work just might be shit, and that it’s okay to make shit. if your art is shit, so is mine - so is his - so is hers. it’s all just art in the end. 

if you’ve followed my work for a while you’ll notice a few of my previous characters and styles appearing in the short, it was neat to see how my techniques have changed. speaking of style, working on this one was a blast. i did a lot of (semi) blind contours for this piece, drawing things without looking at the screen. made for some beautifully weird lineart. i love it.

when i started nata this year, i knew that i wanted to stick to one theme throughout the whole thing to make my pieces have a cohesive feel to them. i chose to keep everything centered on love. i think it worked out well. 

i also need to give shoutouts to @thegoatee, @codeblackhayate, and @sirundead. these guys all came through for me each time i asked over the tournament. i always asked them for help on literally the final day of each round, and they all came through with some fucking awesome work. you cats are the best!

anyhoo, that was my nata. i had a blast. if you haven’t, go check out thesilleguy's entries too, he’s been fucking on point this whole tournament. 

all my <3s,
dylan