Hello everyone! It's been a while since I've done a serious journal regarding my happenings. I hope everyone is doing well despite the craziness of the quarantine.

This is a report of my experiences and trials of the animation YCH I've done last year. Specifically this one: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/31565743/

I currently have only a few people left to do on the animation list and it will be finished. However, I believe now would be a good time to talk about it. A few questions came to mind by me and other people as I was working on it. "Why is it taking so long?" Being the main question. There wasn't one main thing keeping me from finishing them all in a timely manner, just a lot of small things which combined to slow me down to where we are today. Honestly, if it weren't for the stimulus given out a month or so ago, I'd probably still be stuck halfway on the list. So let's step back for a moment and start from the beginning.

A year ago, I was having trouble financially. Technically, I still have them but it was more so in the past. YCHs I've been handing out were not pulling in the money needed and my regular commissioners were practically zero, likely cause I was pumping out YCHs so much. A paradox that I only recently have gotten myself out of. I can't remember how the idea came about, but one day, I decided to make a YCH using animations. The first few times I've done this was using only a few keyframes, which worked well by themselves. So, using that as a template, I decided to dust off my old Flash program to get back into animating, only for YCHs. I figured, "It shouldn't be that difficult, I just need to have the proper frames and add layers for extra stuff. Shouldn't be that hard."

And it was only a month or so after that I saw it was a lot harder than I realized and bit off more than I could chew. The reason for this was a few mistakes that could have easily been avoided the long process and delays that were caused by them.

The first one was how I made the template for the YCH. The first time I made it, it was only to get the visual out for the advertisement and wasn't structured for easy workflow. To put this into perspective, in order for me to properly edit the animations in the beginning, I was opening different windows in the program just to make sure I was adding the details properly. Something that should have taken a few minutes took hours. It wasn't until the 3rd or 4th one that I had to stop working on the animations to redo the entire structure of the file to make for a better workflow, which took a few weeks. By then, the money I had gotten from the commissioners was used up to pay bills and buy the time needed to keep working. This leads up to the next part.

When I first priced the animation, I was overconfident and thought I would be able to clear out each animation a week at a time, no matter the stuff added in. I priced it as much as my regular art commission as a frame of reference, not thinking that I'm technically doing 11 pieces of said art in each animation even with the old shortcuts animators use to ease the workflow. So when I got the payment, I was easily able to do the first few animations without worry as it helped pay for the bills for this month and a little next month. Then as problems started cropping up, both in real life and in the program itself, I started to worry. However, I kept at it, fixed the issues that cropped up, and kept going. The next bill was coming up, so I started making more YCHs to help compensate and mitigate the time lost. It wasn't until a month or two after, when I was struggling with the 6th slot, that I realized the second issue: I was working a significant project set at a below-average compensation. Now, this might seem odd to say, given I was the one who made the prices in the first place, but it was more due to the lack of experience and I haven't done the math until months afterward. Think of it this way: I was paid, on average, 50 dollars per animation. The amount of work I put into each one is roughly around 10-12 hours, maybe less. So, for the sake of simplicity, let's say it's 10 hours. We divide 10 hours with the 50 dollars, and we get "5 dollars an hour" for each piece. However, there were times where I could complete a piece in less than 5 hours. Which changes the amount to "10 dollars per hour." Keep in mind, though, often those pieces were either flat colored or lines. This doesn't account for the ones who ask for shading. Which is also my fault for adding the workload myself, even more so when I didn't add a limit to the number of slots. I should have kept it at 5 or 6 to learn from the experience and adjust accordingly, but I foolishly left it open and let greed/pride overcome me at the time. I also couldn't ask for more money, as I have already set the price beforehand and felt the delays were ultimately my fault to begin with. So combine that, with the YCHs I had to keep making to pay the bills, the delays started piling in.

I had scheduled accordingly, instead of working on it 3 times a week, I had to work on them an hour per week due to the workload of the other YCHs. Only time I was free enough to get more time was when certain YCHs got unexpectedly popular. YCHs were structured in a way that, when I was finished with one phase, I had everyone on the slots ready for the next phase and the next until they were done by the 4th or 5th day. Thus allowing me to complete them and return to work on the animations. Which were few and far in-between. This doesn't account for the times that Flash, the older versions I have, crashes when ya try to feed it something it doesn't like. By regular estimations, I should have finished 6 months after I first made the YCH.

This, however, didn't work out as planned as I had Real Life issues that cropped up. These happen to be things that many have experienced in the past. This includes sickness, house repair, dealing with family affairs, general responsibilities, unexpected life events like a tree falling over in the yard and having to be cut down to prevent the city from finding you a thousand dollars, and so forth. There was also an issue where my paypal was hitting a negative balance due to a miscommunication with my roommate's grandfather, who had pulled money that was transferred from his account through my account cause of something that happened back in December and no one told him of it. The biggest one, I'm sure many of you know already, is the whole pandemic thing going on since January. Ever since it came into full effect in February, everyone got his by it in various different ways. It also hit me indirectly the first few months, with my slots filled for YCHs going from 2-3 to 0-1. Then again, that could have been from other factors but I don't have much to go on. The only good thing that came from the pandemic was the stimulus check. If it weren't for that, I would have done another Emergency level commissions just to stay afloat. Which would have meant more work and more delays for the animations. By then, I was already suffering from the dreaded "burnout". Something I recovered from last month after taking it slow the other months. It's also one of the reasons I've not done personal artwork for so long.

As I stated before to other commissioners, as long as I was paid, I would finish any works I was commissioned for. Might take longer than expected, but they always get finished in the end. I do apologize for times where it gets delayed, yet I will try to get them finished whenever possible. From this experience, I've learned a fair few things in regards to YCHs, animations, and work in general. I learned that trying to do something with skills you haven't used in years is often a bad idea when you're trying to use it for commercial purposes. I also learned that, when offering work, control the flow to prevent getting overwhelmed with both work and information.

I won't deny that I'm an experienced artist capable of good works, but in the end, I'm only human. I make mistakes and the best way to move forward is to acknowledge them and learn from them. Find ways to improve from these mistakes to be a better person. Bad things happen, this is something that I've learned will always be inevitable. How you deal with these bad things is what shapes people. I do like to do animations in the future, but I will need to rethink and remodel how I do them. I might do commissions of them, but they need to be done in a case-by-case basis for now.

And that's my post-mortem for the Muscle Animation. It was a crazy long YCH project, hopefully the next one would turn out better.