Welcome all. This is a continuation of my “Year 1” blog series that covers the first year of making my social media content. In this blog I will be talking a bit about my meme content, and giving some insight into the backend work it took to make it.
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The meme content started development in around February or March. I decided to expand the type of content I was making for a few reasons:
I didn’t want to produce all of my stories while my social media accounts were still small. There would be a possibility of really good stories never having their time of day because they were released too early. These stories also demand a higher quality production cycle than I would have been able to give them.
I wanted a format that would be quicker to produce than my storytime shorts. The production cycle for the low-end storytime shorts were about 2 weeks, and I knew that as my audience grew I wanted to invest more time into the stories, so I needed to offset the production time with smaller content.
In addition to a quicker production, I wanted a class of content that would fit in the 10-15 second range. My storytime shorts are usually 30-50 seconds, and I wanted something in a different time niche, so I could target a different audience.
I wanted a format with original characters. I don’t have many opportunities these days to create original characters and animate them, so I wanted a format that would give me that level of freedom. I also wanted the characters to be a blank canvas, where I could have fun with making them as weird and wacky as possible.
Once I figured out what my goals were, I did some research. I noticed animators would use popular videos for reference in their animations. These usually consisted of a small voice sample from a movie. As I looked more into it, I came across several very large animation channels (Nutshell Animations, King Science to name a couple) that sampled popular tik tok videos. I thought that was brilliant, and decided that would be a good start. It checked off my most important box, which was a shorter production cycle. Animating from these videos meant I wouldn’t have to record, write a script, do research on a topic and so on. I would be able to use proven, popular audio as a reference point to make a funny short. Even though there are many animators doing similar things, I thought this template would work for me because I could bring my production experience and entertainment background to the table for fun interpretations of these popular moments.
“Nutshell Animations” was the biggest influence for development of my meme content. Check out his pages on Youtube, Tik Tok and Instagram @nutshellanimations
No bones about it
As stated earlier, I wanted this class of content to have original characters that were like a blank canvas. In developing my meme content, I originally planned for 3 animal characters. As I continued developing the idea, I realized animating animals would be a nightmare because oh how I intended on animating the shorts. The original idea was to make use of my after effects plugins, so I wanted the characters to be able to be made and animated in after effects. Once I decided to abandon the animal idea, I went all in on humanoid characters. Once I got the designs figured out it took some time to find good names for them, but eventually I did.
Their names are: Bo, Little Bo and Peep
These reference images are the templated designs I used for animating these shorts, but they look slightly different once I transitioned production into Toonboom Harmony
Kind of cheesy, but I like it. These are the 3 starters for these shorts, but I do intend on expanding their family in the future. They’re unique enough to be differentiated from each other, and are also limited design wise so I can dress or design them in ways that work for whatever videos I reference.
After making a few shorts, and seeing how well received they were I decided to make a production transition. Up until November of 2022, I had been animating the puppets in After Effects exclusively (with very, very limited assets). Now the shorts will be animated in Toonboom in 2023 and beyond. Changing to Toonboom has already shown a massive boost in quality and the expressiveness of the characters. I feel like they’re turning into fully realized characters now
Final thoughts
The meme content is something that I didn’t think I would enjoy making, but I was very wrong. I’ve enjoyed animating these characters and they force me to use different creative muscles. Due to the nature of the content, I do classify this meme content as experimental. With how things are sampled, produced, animated and received, each short is a vastly different experience from one to another. It is because of this wide spectrum of possibilities that they will play a much bigger role in my content strategy for the future. This does mean more memes and in higher quality too! Exciting times, eh?
That’s all for this blog. In the next one I will go over the last class of content I developed this year, called “Moment Of My Time”.
-Until next time-
Kyle