For this week’s blog, I’m doing a bit of self-advertising to talk about a video series I’ve started called Quick Reminders.  The videos focus on the adventures of two stick people, New Cheerful Employee and Disgruntled Senior Employee, as they explore the dos and don’ts of office life in POT. It’s rather enjoyable, but it’s taught me a few things in the short time I’ve been working on them.

First, animating videos takes a long, long time.  The first video I did was only about three minutes long, but it took a good six hours to put together, even with computers doing most of the work.  I can’t even fathom how long it would take for a professional animator to put together a half-hour or hour-long cartoon, since they’d have to put far more effort into the artwork than I do.  Next time you watch a cartoon, take a moment to thank the animators for throwing countless hours of their life into making a project designed solely for your amusement (particularly those cartoons done before the advent of computers, when everything had to be hand-drawn).

Second, thinking up ideas to make videos enjoyable takes a long, long time.  It would be easy to simply list off reminders for the office and be done with it, but that can be boring.  This means writing a script, figuring out how to make corny yet informative jokes, and keeping it within a set time limit.  I don’t see how professionals can do it.

Finally, it can be really hard to think up material for Quick Reminders, mainly because our office runs rather efficiently and the workers work well together.  This means that sometimes I end up rehashing things you’ve heard from the bosses or fellow media folks a thousand times, only now you get it in stick person form.

In conclusion, I want to say that the reason I bothered to do a whole blog on this is because I have an incredible appreciation for anyone who works with any form of animated entertainment, as they have to come up with a much greater, higher quality amount of material than I do.  Keep in mind that as cheesy and short as some cartoons may seem, the people who made them probably bent over backwards to create such silly shows.