Saturday, August 10, 2013

Reflections on the Nerdist animation

As of today(Saturday August 10, 2013), the animation I have done for the Nerdist Channel on youtube has reached over half of million views in less than a week. To say that this has been a mindblowing week would be an understatement. Since the night that youtube featured my animation on the front page(Resulting with little sleep that night I might add), it has been a wild ride filled by support from the fans, family, friends, the Nerdist Channel, Youtube, Chris Hardwick, Meltdown Comics, the Indoor Kids, Patton Oswalt, and so many others . For all the shares, likes, comments, retweets, & tweets sent my way: I want to say thank you tremendously for supporting my art.

When I was originally asked to do the animation, I was honestly very scared to do it. Typically animations of this length are typically done by a team of animators and artists since animation takes a looooooooong time. That's why when you go to any Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks film, there will be hundreds of position just in animation. Although this seemed like a daunting task at the time, I decided to do it just to see if it was possible to make it on my own. Even if it turned out to be a disaster, I knew I wouldn't forgive myself for not taking a chance. And I have learned soooooo much doing this animation:both from the successes and mistakes in the animation. The people at the Nerdist Channel were very understanding and very collaborative throughout the process.  Whether this will be the last or the start of many animations for the Nerdist Channel, I will continue to push myself as artist and try to make cool, interesting things.

As a final note, I wanted to make sure that we were able to help out the community from this animation. Most of the art projects I have done in the past I tried to make sure that some money was donated to a charity like $200 given to the Red Cross Foundation for doing a poster for the podcast the Indoor Kids. So for the Nerdist Animation, $500 was given to the Make A Wish Foundation. And although it may not be a lot, I hope its enough to help someone in need.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at dspellmn@msn.com

Thank you for taking the time to read this and thank you for the support.