WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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NGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGUHHHHHHH

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Welcome to Scribble Kibble!

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Wait, wait.

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Welcome to Scribble Kibble, a show about animation
from the perspective of an animator.

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I’m going to talk about one of my animations
this time because I don’t want you to hate

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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.”

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Cringey because it involves the hated and
feared show My Little Pony and the Disney

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movie Frozen.

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If you can look past that... heh… it’s
cute.

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And look at all these video game references.

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If you want to watch it before I disassemble
it into itty bitty pieces and show you what

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

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I think maybe down there.

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Maybe.

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I don't know.

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You can find it.

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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?

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For an experienced animator, a completed 2
minute and 40 second video breaks down to

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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.

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That’s longer than a week at a full time
job.

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That’s - well, I don’t have to explain
it, you can have this magical experience for

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yourself!

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Plug your headphones into your favorite music
playing device, download the song, “Love

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Is An Open Door,” and listen to it for 8
days without 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.

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It was to be a surprise gift for Ink Rose,
the person who drew up the storyboard for

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the whole video.

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The storyboard was sent to me in secret and
I based the whole animation off of it.

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So except for this one spot I cut for time,
the finished product is pretty true to the

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original boards.

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I didn't add a whole lot in there.

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Just gotta stick to the boards and get it
done.

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The first thing I worked on was building the
characters.

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Each character is a puppet made of tons and
tons of pieces that you can change and move

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around.

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It makes animating relatively fast, clean,
and inexpensive.

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So at first I thought I might download a royalty-free
fanmade puppet to work off of, but in the

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end I just...

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I just didn’t trust them to do what I wanted
them to do.

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Some of them are actually over complicated.

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

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would to just draw my own.

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I mean look.

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Look inside the guts of this thing.

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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.

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That's what's going on underneath 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.

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It just won't work right.

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And that's especially true with hair, because
hair needs... you can't just, you can't just

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draw the hair as it is.

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It has to have multiple pieces so it's bouncy
when it's animated.

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I mean, if your hair was one massive strand,
of course it would be stiff like cardboard!

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I notice that in a lot of fan pony animations:
stiff hair, overall stiff movements, and twitching

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ears.

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Do the ponies in the show constantly twitch
their ears?

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No.

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If you want to copy a show, studying the movements
of the critters on screen is key.

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It’s not just about drawing the art the
same way.

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This is animation!

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Animation is movement!

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Movement is life!

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Love Is An Open Door is animated using only
three perspectives.

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The front, the side, and the three quarters
(which is the space between front and side).

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I did throw in a back perspective at the last
minute because I couldn’t get away without

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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.

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Which, I didn’t bother to draw the standing
pose in Illustrator.

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I fudged it with a bunch of already finished
pieces from 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.

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[laughs]

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Ok ok, that’s enough about character building.

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I’ll save it for a tutorial.

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So, backgrounds.

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Yeah.

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Not much to say about the backgrounds, really.

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It’s a lot of drawing and inventing things
to look at.

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And since the storyboards were pretty bleak
in terms of backgrounds, it was a lot of imagining

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work to think of something to put back there
that's a little 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.

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Everybody's going to have to stare at it forever.

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Originally there would have been strawberries
and marshmallows on the fondue plate, some

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more details like that in the room, ponies
walking around behind the glass, but no, I

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couldn’t take it anymore I just...

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

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Close the door.

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No more open doors!

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No more love!

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You’re letting the bugs in!

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CLOSE IT ALREADY!

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I don’t like this background.

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There’s too many clashing colors, the depth
is all wrong, and the ground is really weird.

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Blech.

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And why are there bananas on the carpet here?

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And look at this wonky head movement.

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Wait, slow it down.

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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.

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Yes folks, we’ve got it all!

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Ooh, ohh, there’s that flickering again.

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

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Man I wish I’d noticed those earlier.

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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.

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Let’s go on a relaxing visual journey through
the raw animation files.

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[music]

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Animating this sort of thing is easy but time
consuming.

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All you are doing really is picking which
pieces of the pony show up and where they

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need to move to.

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For someone like me who is used to drawing
frame by frame, used to drawing individual

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pictures for every single thing you see, animating
puppets like this feels soul crushingly confining.

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True, I mean, you can draw new pieces if you
don’t have what you need.

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And that's what puppet animators always tell
me, "Well yeah, you can draw the new piece

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and it's fun."

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But to me drawing puppets is not the same.

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It’s the difference between making a sculpture
out of factory-produced, perfectly molded

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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.

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It doesn't look always as clean as the factory
stuff, but it's got character.

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[laughs] It's got character.

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

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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.

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So I was happy to that see Josh Scorcher added
scene transitions and sound effects after

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I gave him the completed file.

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And he added 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.

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Come back next time for something I didn’t
make that is not pony-related.

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Is there even anybody here who doesn’t like
ponies?

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How did you sit through all of that just now?

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How did you...

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what?

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Anybody?

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Uh… hm.

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I think everybody's gone.

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Shoot.

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

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or PayPal.