Happy New Year everybody! Before I discuss my plans for this year, I need to get some things off my chest regarding my content from last year. At the beginning of 2022, I set some goals for myself to experiment with my animation techniques and content type by embracing Blender for 3D animation, pinning down the basics for frame by frame 2D animation, establishing a dominant art style in my work, and sharing more of my original ideas and characters. Unfortunately, I don't feel like I completely met those goals, for a lot of reasons I'm going to discuss.

I don't want to say that 2022 has been a complete failure for me, because I am proud of quite a few things I made this year, like my CGI Veggietales animation and my mixed media Shrekfest film, Shrek: The AI Generated Script, which I would say is my most technically advanced work so far and the one I'm most proud of considering the effort I put into it. I suppose my issue comes more from my general lack of content, and my lack of experimentation with said content. For the former, I believe that the explosion of success I had in 2021 contributed to a specific way in which I view my content, which I don't feel will be healthy going forward. I don't think my general sparsity of uploads has helped me in that regard, and it's not because I was actively working on things that took a long time to make.

To put it bluntly, the second half of 2022 was one of the hardest times of my life, and that definitely contributed to my creative burnout and lack of motivation to work on things. On top of balancing community college, a part-time job, and researching into colleges to transfer to, I was also juggling two unpaid remote animation internships for a work experience class, and I was NOT prepared for the workload I would receive. I devoted dozens of hours to both those internships, just barely getting the required hours needed to pass the class, and I barely had any time for personal animations. While I don't regret having them, as they did give me meaningful experience into what it's like working on collaborative animated projects, I do regret having them while balancing a lot of other life stuff, including a very rough period involving my family. I always felt like my animation and illustration skills weren't advanced enough to complete all the projects I had in the set deadlines, and by the end of it, I felt so burnt out that I never felt inspired to animate anything for a couple of weeks afterwards. It's only recently that I've felt the drive to animate again.

Lastly, I feel like I've been trapped making the same kind of content for a while, with not enough of the experimentation I hoped for. It seems all I feel comfortable making is reanimated collab parts, animations of voice acting dubs, or just in general stuff based on preexisting properties. It's not that I don't enjoy making this kind of content, because I really do, but these aren't the kind of videos I would be keen to show at a film festival or put on a job application. I always intended for this account to be a place of personal experimentation and a stepping stone into a career in the animation industry. However, I believe thinking that parody stuff is all I can make has prevented me from allowing my original ideas and characters to come to fruition, out of fear that people won't like that as much as they do my other content.

So with all that said, what are my plans for 2023? Well, I've decided to refocus my efforts, at least for the first half of this year, back into making animations for this channel. I've laid out a list of smaller projects I want to make in the coming year, with tentative deadlines to plan for. If all goes well, I hope get all those projects out of the way throughout this year, so that in 2024, I can transition into making longer-form, original short films with more personal stories. I also want to see if I can revisit my Blender Donut video and truly expand it into a series of short films, with the hopes of releasing a new episode every month or two, so you can look forward to that. Finally, I want to solidify the opening of a portfolio website featuring my best works, so that I can put myself out there for employers who would be keen to hire me based on interest in my work. If all this doesn't go according to plan, I can at least say by the beginning of 2024 that I had a productive and fulfilling year.

Thank you to everyone who has stuck with my videos this long. I apologize if I came off like I was rambling, but I felt I owed it to my audience to update them on my plans for 2023. Nothing makes me happier than seeing that the content I create brings joy and entertainment to others, and that's what gives me the inspiration to keep moving forward. Let's all hope for a prosperous 2023!

Tldr, a lot of life stuff has kept me from making the videos I want, so I hope to make everything I want to this year and make longer films in 2024.