Frogessey was the magnum opus of my college animation career. A five minute film of 2 frog brothers on a journey to who know where. When I started this project, I had only two things in mind for this film: a tall and lanky frog and a short and round frog.

I always loved shape language in character design, and the “tall, lanky and short, rounder” trope was just too classic.

I also gave my characters names, even if they aren’t named in the film. Their names are silly and goofy, just like them!

When making this film, I had to make some tough decisions. Like, should I use voice acting? Should there be dialogue at all? What’s the end goal for these characters? Is there an end goal? things like that.

A lot of my questions were answered during critiques from my peers. Those same peers who told me that I should not make my film longer than 3 minutes if I wanted to keep my sanity.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you see it), that was a critique I did not listen to

It wasn’t all sunshine and lily pads, though. Sometimes, this film made me feel like croaking (in a “I wanna quit” way).

But I was able to continue on my journey! With a whole lot of emotional support.

Another struggle I had was my work load. Yes, I know it was my fault. Yes, I tried cutting down my film as much as possible. But being a senior in animation isn’t just one class. for the whole year.

To be a full time student, I needed a certain number of credits each semester, and they were all studios. And if you didn’t know, studio classes are 2.5 hour long classes with varying levels of work. Four classes, some with big projects that had overlapping due dates.

There were a lot of struggles that went on on this project. One that comes to mind is the lack of equipment in the first semester. In my classroom, the computers provided did not run the software that most of the class needed.

The majority of my class used Toonboom Harmony, but our computers only had Adobe. The room next door, that we usually held 2D animation classes was scheduled for a class at the same, time, and they got dibs on the room.

Fortunately, the first semester of this project consisted of background, storyboarding, and writing. So to combat that kerfuffle, I switched to other programs. It helped me get more practice in other software like Photoshop.

Sometimes, this is how I felt

It’s no secret that simple character designs make for simpler animation workflows, but pushing designs to be as simple as possible makes it so fun to push the shapes to the limit. It also makes the many hours of animation fly by so fast.

Animation is one of those jobs that if you love it, you can lose a whole day working and not even notice.

But I could get through it because I cared about this project. This film was my baby, and I wasn’t going to skimp out on the quality just because I was tired!

Perseverance is a virtue!

In the end, I’m super proud of this film. I might’ve struggled with it a lot through the year I worked, but the struggle made it all the better. Working on an animation for a very long time can make you hate animating sometimes. But once you finish, you think…

“Huh. I wanna do that again!”

And so the cycle continues.