Hey there! Hikarian here, burning up with the desire to write about my thoughts. So much to tell, so little of an attention span. Oh well, guess I'll just have to start from the beginning:

WARNING: Lots of reading ahead! Feel free to skip to whatever headline you find relevant - I wont blame you :)

NATA

It's been about two months since I decided to enter NATA 2012. Now, the first challenge was to make an animation about "discovering time travel" in only 25 days. I had never worked with a deadline, and with my experience of projects taking up to a year, it seemed like an impossible task. I ended up making a very simple animation about a little astronaut, getting sucked into a black hole. I wasn't exactly proud of what I had accomplished, but I was glad to have proven to myself that I could make a movie in a matter of weeks.
There were a lot of great entries for the open round, so I had never expected to make it to the novice round, but none the less, this is where I found myself after the judging had commenced.

So began the novice round, where I went up against Pahgawk (another 16 years old animator). I was very excited, and for a whole week, I was caught in a state of joy and anticipation, in which I couldn't think about anything but my animation. However, this is also where I made my biggest mistake.
You see, for a long time, I'd been feeling that I wasn't improving at animating at all. To me, my drawings seemed lifeless, and their movements forced. I knew that something had to be done, but I didn't know where to begin. With the fire of another failed animation hanging over my head from the open round, I decided that I would do everything in my power to take it to the next level! But there was the deadline to keep in mind, and therefor, just like with my open round entry, I chose the idea and made the whole storyboard on the very first day, so that I would have more time for animation. Choosing a path fast, is a technique that has worked very well for me with exams, but it doesn't really translate to making a movie. I had thought to myself, that if I even wanted to stand a chance against Pahgawk, I would have to show strength in what I saw as his weaknesses: artwork and animation. And so, I completely neglected the planning process, which is what makes half of a good movie. I thought that I could lean back and let the story write itself, but I let my guards down too fast!

As most readers have probably worked out by now, I ended up losing the novice round. I scored 73.1/100, while Pahgawk got 89.4/100, so there's quite a substantial difference. I'm pretty happy with my artwork score of 19.38/20 though.

What I feel that I have to work on now is concept and delivery - as well as trying to evolve a fresh and unique drawing style of course.
The only question is where to begin...

FUTURE PROJECTS

I have quite a lot of ideas to choose from. I've always kept a notebook with ideas of animations to make, but lately I've had so much inspiration from the NATA tournament, that the number of projects on my to-do-list has increased substantially. On one hand, I feel the urge to start some new great project, but on the other hand, I wish to keep things simple for now.

- I recently acquired TVPaint Animation, which is an awesome program, which is used much in the 2D animation industry. I would really like to try to work with this software on a project, but I feel that I should not start anything too complicated with a program that I do not yet know. I have to find an idea that can be executed in about a minute.

Another thing is that if I were to make an animation in TVPaint, I don't think that I would be able to do the whole project in just that program. I would like to make the backgrounds in Photoshop, and maybe put it all together in Adobe After Effects. However, I don't know much about After Effects either, and so I would like to make another small project to get familiar with it.

This little project isn't really an animation, and I'm not even sure if I should put it on Newgrounds if I were to make it. It's nothing special, you see. It's just a 4-picture comic strip that I made a while ago for school. As it is now, it's in Danish, but it wouldn't take much to translate it into English. I would do the short narrating myself and redraw the whole thing to divide it into the proper layers. Then I would just put it into Adobe After Effects and play with the camera till it looked good, thereby getting familiar with the software. It is very different from what I usually do, but it's always fun to try out new things!

- When speaking of comics, it is worth mentioning that I've been thinking about doing a manga-styled web comic for quite a while now. I've been playing around with character designs, only to find that I do not yet possess the drawing skills needed to make it into the series that I've dreamt about. Sometimes it's a good thing to rush into a project, but I feel that this idea would be wasted if I were to do it now... Also, there's so much other stuff to do.

- During last years summer holidays, I was just about to do a Blu-inspired stop motion film, but the one thing that stopped me was the weather. The main character (if that's what you wish to call it) is one of my dragons, and it would go through a lot of different medias such as computer, paper, walls (drawn on with chalk) and Ipad. As things currently stand, I find that there are other projects taking my priorities, and it wouldn't exactly be to improve classical animation skills, but it would be fun to try and direct a movie in that way. Who knows, maybe this summer will be the time that I finally realize this project? Or... maybe not...

- Lately I've been thinking way too much about future projects, and somehow the ideas have even been invading my dreams. Heck, not long ago I even dreamt up an entire script for a Doctor Who parody! It's been a long time since I last did a parody, and after NATA, I do feel like I could need some easy animation to go around. It would also be nice to get back into lip-syncing.
So, I'm thinking that I'll be holding an audition for The Doctor and some random female assistant in the near future when school is over. Of course, if there's a voice actor out there reading this, that's interested in the job, feel free to send me your Doctor impression or a take on what you think that this female assistant should sound like. My email is: sif.p.savery@hotmail.com

WEBSITE

The few people that have followed me for a while may have noticed that I've recently changed my profile pic. One reason is that I needed some change from that 2-years old picture of my silver dragon, but as a matter of fact, it is also all part of my great website scheme!

...For those that don't know, my website is www.sifps.dk, feel free to leave a comment in the guestbook :) ...

Anyways: over the past year, my websites popularity has been increasing. Just last month there was an average of 21 people that visited it per day, and I find that to be quite a lot at this point. Believe me, I have no idea what people are doing in there! However, I'm going to try to give them a reason to stay. Right now I've only used a default template as the design, things look very boring at this point. I'm hoping to use some of the summer holidays on initiating a complete redesign. Some old drawings will be lost, but it will all be to make room for the new ones.
Also, I will try to integrate my blog better, so that things don't have to be so scattered.

"And what does all this have to do with her new profile pic?", you may ask. Well, that's a good question, thank you very much for asking! The thing is, that it's part of the new design I'm planning. On the different pages there will be different drawings of me with different hats. Why? Well, you see... I just have this thing with hats! They are nice!! I may have to work further on some of my drawings of myself before the redesign though.

Anyways, thanks for listening... or rather reading... Have a nice day!

- Hikarian here, signing off :)