Year 1: Storytime

Welcome all. 2022 has been a crazy year (for many, many reasons), but what I’m going to be talking about today is my story time content. I’ll be making a blog for each family of content in celebration of making it through 1 year of posting.

Storytime

It took me a while to figure out which kind of content I wanted to make and how I would balance my desires for the kind of content I wanted to make with what works for social media. Along with that I needed to figure out the lowest quality I’d be willing to put out as a standard for my self, and means of differentiation from other content creators.

I started producing my first story time short last November. The idea came from how friends and family would reminisce over crazy stories and experiences. As you get older, the time between when you see your friends and family grows, so when you reminisce about the past, a strong connection to those memories build up. That was the kind of feeling I wanted to capture with these shorts.

As far as the style, I was inspired by the TV show FLCL (Furi Kuri). It was one of my favorite shows growing up, and there were 2 scenes in the show where the style went from hand animation to this trippy pseudo animated manga strip. I’ve loved that look ever since I saw it. I figured it would be a good way to produce my shorts, as the animation quality was limited and there was a larger focus of motion graphics as opposed to hand animation. Since I wanted these to come out bi-weekly, I needed to find a way to produce them quickly and that manga style turned out to be the smartest choice for me.

Since social media platforms have all been moving toward shorter form content, I also figured this would be the best time to start telling my stories. I tried something similar with my “Frame of Mind” series a few years ago, but I wanted to give this the best effort I possibly could since I felt the platforms were being more fair to short form video. In addition to that, the shorts are designed in a way where I will be able to expand them into longer form content one day.

That’s all for this one! Come back for part 2 when I talk about my meme content.

See you later!

Bonus

Here’s some never before released shots of my storytime pilot. As you can see it looks very different' to the final product. The characters were a bit more proportioned and organic. However you can also see that some of the original spirit from the pilot made its way into the first short. I eventually re-made the pilot as storytime 6: Nasty Homeless Man Poops In Public