GLO vs. AKIA Production log

Damn WHY ARE PEOPLE SO GOOD AT DRAWING THESE TWO

Art by @Netonotnero

Mind you I didn't ASK to be given this vision from the cosmos, I was simply going about my day doing stupid stuff and then was blasted the storyboard like a prophecy from destiny herself who decided that this storyboard either dies in the rut or I become it's vessel, it's tool to will this thing into sheer existence, determination, the 5080 in my damn laptop and alot of Balatro ASMR.

And damn it I will, at the cost of my sanity and over a HUNDRED SHOTS to work on....

And the good news is that we're 50% done here.

I say "we" because theres actually alot of help from wonderful friends to pick up the slack from my dumb buns while I was burnt out and off to frolick in the shimmering sunset alongside the special lady for a few days.

But I am back to it, im back to painland. Lets frikking do this.

Something i want to also credit time saving methods is GooStudio's goophysics addon that allowed me to do cape physics for complicated shots like these. And generally save me a bunch of time, every shot is always me deciding whether its better to animate it by hand or delegate it to 3D which has its pros and cons

3D vs 2D

Before I get to talking about 2D which is arguably my specialty, I need to talk about why I decided to implement a 3D rig into the workflow.

I remember the director of Evangelion making a comment regarding the difference between making an animated film vs a live action film. When youre making an animated film, you start from scratch which opens up an infinite amount of possibilities but when you're making a live action film, you have your possibilities on hand, you just need to cut and edit to get the best one.

I see 3D the same way to a lesser extent, there's moments where my mind just genuinely fails to get the right angle and im juggling between willing to sacrifice a bit of 2D's free range just so I can have data that I can freely test and manipulate however I want without redoing my work.

But at the same time, 2D is genuinely the most expressive ive made animation work. When I need GLO's hood to stretch a certain way in 3D i'll have to either simulate cloth physics, adjust vertext groups for the lattice, parent two parts of the hood to a bone for the rig, etc etc etc etc.....

But for 2D, if I want GLO's hood to stretch a certain way, I just draw it.

Im juggling between deciding the two and don't get me wrong, you can *have* both by using 3D as a guide to animate over, you can have the best of both worlds and some of the best animated films ive seen do exactly that

Im just deciding to choose one or the other because I'm kinda too tired to be doing cleanup on alot of shots. If a 3D model helps me skip that then I am super duper ready to take that offer.

Its 5:30am as I type this, I can see my computer growling at me to get back to work so I'll leave yall with this.

Whatever you're going through, it'll get better.

Mostly just my thoughts

"Dont get cold feet around me~"

"Don't try me."

It's been some time since I properly talked about all this, its mostly updates to the project but I kind of needed to remember more that this is supposed to act as my diary because fun fact, I tend to ✨️𝓼𝓮𝓵𝓯 𝓲𝓼𝓸𝓵𝓪𝓽𝓮 ✨️ when I work on these projects.

I keep to myself, I hide about my feelings in the production but something i kinda grew to understand is that talking about my project helps, it gets people knowing more about what I do and it lets me find some kind of outlet to talk about the stuff behind the scenes. If you actually do read this and find it all interesting, then genuinely, you are the type of person I'm creating for.

I've also had to speak to some people and upon maybe some closer retrospection, I think in a sense I might start marketting GLO vs Akia as an indie animation. I was maybe a little aversive to the idea because indie's kind of a buzz word right now but in a literal sense, this project is with a very...VERY small team, its nonprofit and it has zero backing, I have some wonderful friends helping me out but most of it is backed by my direction of the story and my skills/intimate knowledge of the craft.

Oh hey look she has hands

Animation is hard, and I remember speaking to people who would say that Im pretty much climbing a mountain in these regards, which speaks volumes when it comes from one of the more masochistic animators I know. Im not sure if I really plan to seek funding for something like this? But who knows, maybe people will like this, maybe they wont.

Either way, I'll enjoy what I made

Till next time!

WE HAVE A TEASER OUT NOW OH MY GOODNESS

Realistically, the project is about 30% done but I can see the pace picking up more the faster I get with this blender oriented pipeline.

Ive been still improving on using this program and I think the more i learn about blender and 3d the more this project becomes doable. Im not sure if im completely successful in bridging 3D and hand drawn but I think the outcome is acceptable.

I also have to be doing more jobs soon to help keep food on the plate but Ill be making sure to pass time up for this ^^

Oh….my god.

Time just flew by huh? I’ve kind of been too cooked up working on this thing that I’ve forgotten to make a post so lemmi sort of round up all the stuff that kind of happened since then- maybe a bit about my personal life but for the most part, it’s just project related.

Right now I’m sort of scrapping for money since this project is netting me a wonderful 0 dollars, which is why I’ve been contemplating on starting a patreon- not really with the hopes of being successful but mostly just to try and be able to pay for a week’s worth of groceries every now and again without ditching this project. On top of family issues, health issues etc.

Since the last update me and some wonderful friends who chimed in to help manage to get about 30% of the thing done, I’ve kind of also made the decision to have more shots done with 3D which mind you isn’t a light decision but I wanted to really make this easy on myself yet I didn’t want to sacrifice the art style that was already set out for the project so I spent some time and came up with this

I would still like to try and improve on the style so that it’s better translated while also improving the model so it can reach the more livelier animation I do when hand drawn but for now this will suffice because lord is doing cleanup going to take my soul here.

I’ll try to update the blog more, maybe not on a schedule anymore but more on a “if I feel like it” basis because there is a lot to talk about, but for now-

Okay I lied a bit, production actually did start way after I made that first post and as I write this very post I am agonizing over the 3D environments but I did wanna make two proper introduction posts before I get into the meat of things.

The 3D environments look really nice by the way, in my opinion. I spent quite a bit of time making them look nice from different angles which is maybe not that high of a bar since its...yknow a corridor but I promise it could've looked alot worse.

Ive had some friends who look at the stuff I do and theyre like "woah bruh thats quite alot for a duel" and im like "thats what im saying broooo, im fighting to push an agenda here...."

I have a dentist appointment first thing of the week which is always gonna be fun but assuming it doesnt knock me out of all productivity, I'm gonna see if I can finalize some more scenes before I finally....finaallyyyy get into animating these characters.

Tough week but that's why we gotta get tougher.

Animation by Sooshywww

Talking about Akia here’s a weird one, she’s literally not my character but instead she belongs to AK or @AK913000 on twitter whom I’ve had the pleasure lately of calling one of my best friends. I don’t think I’m exactly the right person to talk about her history and I think the only way I can do this post justice would be to properly thank AK for giving me this chance to use her character.

But in the honor of doing my best to properly introduce her in this post, I will give it a try and explain exactly who is Akia. Let’s begin!

Barring my first post that talked about the design process of GLO, we’ll be mostly talking about her story and why she’s in this to begin with. Akia’s an assassin with a cunning voice to compliment the looks she holds that charm men to her advantage. She’s quick and light on her feet compared to GLO’s slow-yet-methodical approaches and carries specialized weapons on her operations.

Said specialized weapons really dial in various poisons, toxins and chemicals rather than projectiles that pierce through the opponent. She is quite literally the definition of “silent yet deadly” if she goes into a fight.

By the time of the animation, Akia is on the hunt for various ingredients from an institution known as the Metahuman Regulation and Containment Initiative aka. The MRCI (more on that later) in the hopes of helping important people in her life develop a necessary cure for a dangerous virus that’s been spreading. However it is an unfortunate time to pick out that specific building to rob from as a certain Itsy bitsy spider also had other plans on what to do there….

What happens after? That’s for the duel to tell you once I can get my ass to finish it!

Believe it or not, I actually have drawn this person so much to the point that I can draw her from memory for the most part. Seeing the first time I’ve drawn her and the recent times I’ve drawn her is absolutely evident of that, I like to think I’ve gone a long way when it comes to blending my art style with ak’s due to the influence she’s had on me.

The proportions of my own style were rather closer to human so it took me a while to understand that glorified stickmen or “g-sticks” can also be closer to stickmen than actual human figures. Like I can stylize them how ever I need to and that the average thing people can suspend their disbelief to make way for this carefully chosen art style is higher than I thought.

It’s taken me a lot of drawings to even get a little bit closer to how I imagined she’d look in a more palatable style. Drawing comics back and forth helped me a lot when fleshing out their dynamic early on.

And since we’re here before I wrap up this blog post, I wanna take the opportunity to really appreciate AK who I’ve had the pleasure of having as one of my best friends for a while. There’s no amount of support and advice anyone gave that compare to how much she contributed to this and if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be so ready to go all out in this because…I am ready to put in my effort. I’m so happy with how much of an impact Akia had in the story I wrote for GLO and the best thing I can do is to make a good spectacle that can get people to love Akia the way I do.

Genuinely thank you AK, cheers to 2026 because despite all the bullshit that happened, you have my back as much as I have yours.

GLO and Akia look cute together in the art lowkey

GLO vs Akia is now in production!

Recently I wrapped the storyboards up and now things are kicking into high gear with rough animations, clean lineart, backgrounds and whatnot.

This is also a first for me as I’ve rarely taken the opportunity to be this open about the process of making an animation from start to finish but I’m hoping by updating this blog and posting the backlog of drawings I’ve done with great friends I get to fill this with a great history that’s both as entertaining as informative. Currently I work a job that leaves me free on the weekends so I’m relying on the old diary writings as I continue to keep working on this shot by shot but I’m hoping that you look forward to how it goes, more details later.