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NGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGUHHHHHHH

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Welcome to Scribble Kibble! Wait, wait. Welcome
to Scribble Kibble, a show about animation

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from the perspective of an animator. I’m
going to talk about one of my animations this

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time because I don’t want you to hate me
yet for ruining the things you love.

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Speaking of love, this episode’s focus is
on Love Is An Open Door, which people have

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described as “cringey” and “cute.”
Cringey because it involves the hated and

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feared show My Little Pony and the Disney
movie Frozen. If you can look past that...

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heh… it’s cute. And look at all these
video game references. If you want to watch

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it before I disassemble it into itty bitty
pieces and show you what it looks like behind

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the scenes, I put a link to it around here
somewhere.

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I think maybe down there. Maybe. I don't know.
You can find it. I have confidence in you.

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So what does it take to make an animation
that mimics the show style of My Little Pony:

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Friendship is Magic? For an experienced animator,
a completed 2 minute and 40 second video breaks

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down to 185 hours of work.

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The backgrounds only took 25 hours because
I reused a lot of pieces from other projects

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to save time.

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So for every minute of animation, the animator
spends 60 hours of work. That’s longer than

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a week at a full time job. That’s - well,
I don’t have to explain it, you can have

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this magical experience for yourself! Plug
your headphones into your favorite music playing

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device, download the song, “Love Is An Open
Door,” and listen to it for 8 days without

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sleeping.

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I just had to prove to myself I could copy
the show style like everyone else, didn’t

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I?

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I took this project on as a commission. It
was to be a surprise gift for Ink Rose, the

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person who drew up the storyboard for the
whole video. The storyboard was sent to me

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in secret and I based the whole animation
off of it. So except for this one spot I cut

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for time, the finished product is pretty true
to the original boards. I didn't add a whole

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lot in there. Just gotta stick to the boards
and get it done.

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The first thing I worked on was building the
characters. Each character is a puppet made

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of tons and tons of pieces that you can change
and move around. It makes animating relatively

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fast, clean, and inexpensive. So at first
I thought I might download a royalty-free

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fanmade puppet to work off of, but in the
end I just... I just didn’t trust them to

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do what I wanted them to do. Some of them
are actually over complicated. It would take

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me just as long to figure out how to animate
someone else’s model as it would to just

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draw my own. I mean look. Look inside the
guts of this thing. It’s a mess.

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When you see an animation made with puppets
THIS is what’s going on underneath the surface!

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Just picture that next time you see a pony
animation. That's what's going on underneath

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that.

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Ponies are built in a stack of layers, and
if you organize them poorly from the start,

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your animation is going to turn out wrong
and it's going to be hard to work with. It

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just won't work right. And that's especially
true with hair, because hair needs... you

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can't just, you can't just draw the hair as
it is. It has to have multiple pieces so it's

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bouncy when it's animated. I mean, if your
hair was one massive strand, of course it

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would be stiff like cardboard! I notice that
in a lot of fan pony animations: stiff hair,

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overall stiff movements, and twitching ears.
Do the ponies in the show constantly twitch

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their ears? No.

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If you want to copy a show, studying the movements
of the critters on screen is key. It’s not

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just about drawing the art the same way. This
is animation! Animation is movement! Movement

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is life!

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Love Is An Open Door is animated using only
three perspectives. The front, the side, and

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the three quarters (which is the space between
front and side). I did throw in a back perspective

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at the last minute because I couldn’t get
away without it due to this balcony shot.

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I could have animated them going into the
tower from the side, but the balcony scene

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- it was just worth it to draw that back perspective
so I wouldn’t have to animate the mouths

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singing for that part.

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There’s also a sitting pose and a standing
pose. Which, I didn’t bother to draw the

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standing pose in Illustrator. I fudged it
with a bunch of already finished pieces from

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other poses.

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But once the bases were done, I had to make
costumes for all of these different situations.

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And costumes turn out to be really interesting
because you have to reference the storyboard,

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the real material the storyboard might be
based off of, and then boil all of those things

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down to a simple, clean design that can realistically
be animated... on the body of a horse. [laughs]

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Ok ok, that’s enough about character building.
I’ll save it for a tutorial. So, backgrounds.

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Yeah. Not much to say about the backgrounds,
really. It’s a lot of drawing and inventing

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things to look at. And since the storyboards
were pretty bleak in terms of backgrounds,

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it was a lot of imagining work to think of
something to put back there that's a little

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more interesting.

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I’m most proud of the first one because
I spent a lot of time on that since I knew

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it would be on screen for so long. Everybody's
going to have to stare at it forever. Originally

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there would have been strawberries and marshmallows
on the fondue plate, some more details like

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that in the room, ponies walking around behind
the glass, but no, I couldn’t take it anymore

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I just... I just couldn’t listen to an analogy
about love and doors anymore. Close the door.

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No more open doors! No more love! You’re
letting the bugs in! CLOSE IT ALREADY!

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I don’t like this background. There’s
too many clashing colors, the depth is all

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wrong, and the ground is really weird. Blech.
And why are there bananas on the carpet here?

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And look at this wonky head movement. Wait,
slow it down. Slower.

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Broken back, broken nose, broken noses, broken
hair, Illustrator pattern lines, Paper Mario,

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flickering design, depthless night sky. Yes
folks, we’ve got it all! Ooh, ohh, there’s

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that flickering again. And that’s what happens
when you don’t convert Flash pen tool lines

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to fills. Man I wish I’d noticed those earlier.
That’s... that's going to bother me now.

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I ruined the animation for myself.

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I don’t want to think about it. Let’s
go on a relaxing visual journey through the

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raw animation files.

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[music]

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Animating this sort of thing is easy but time
consuming. All you are doing really is picking

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which pieces of the pony show up and where
they need to move to. For someone like me

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who is used to drawing frame by frame, used
to drawing individual pictures for every single

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thing you see, animating puppets like this
feels soul crushingly confining. True, I mean,

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you can draw new pieces if you don’t have
what you need. And that's what puppet animators

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always tell me, "Well yeah, you can draw the
new piece and it's fun." But to me drawing

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puppets is not the same. It’s the difference
between making a sculpture out of factory-produced,

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perfectly molded pieces and making a sculpture
out of an infinitely malleable lump of dough.

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The craftsmanship of sculpting that lump of
dough is what I love about animation. It doesn't

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look always as clean as the factory stuff,
but it's got character. [laughs] It's got

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character. And if you know what you're doing,
you can make something amazing that no factory

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in the world could make.

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So by the time I’d finished 99 hours of
tweening puppet parts, I had sunk way too

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much time into the project to do the swirly
transitions the storyboard called for and

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to add sound effects and fine tune the animation.
So I was happy to that see Josh Scorcher added

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scene transitions and sound effects after
I gave him the completed file. And he added

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a joke to the end after the credits too.

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And that’s how Love Is An Open Door was
made!

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That’s it for today. Come back next time
for something I didn’t make that is not

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pony-related. Is there even anybody here who
doesn’t like ponies? How did you sit through

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all of that just now? How did you... what?
Anybody? Uh… hm. I think everybody's gone.

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Shoot. Next time I have to remember to tell
them to visit my website and leave a tip on

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Patreon or PayPal.