End of 2023 Update
Hey guys! We’ve reached the end of 2023, so it’s time to look back at the year and get ready for the next!
Check out the new compilation video to see the whole year in review!
1 Million Subs
First off, I got a million subscribers. Insane. It still doesn’t feel real and I’m so happy to everyone that subscribed! I remember in June realizing just how close I was getting to a million and how quickly I was getting new subscribers. I was not prepared for the huge bump of subs in July and reaching it by early August. I was on vacation and I had to scramble to make a celebration drawing to post on social media. I even remember posting minutes before leaving to see Oppenheimer lol. In 2019/2020, reaching a million subscribers felt like an impossible pipe dream and now it’s actually here. Thank you so much.
The only caveat on such an incredible milestone is my channel is likely not as healthy as other channels with a million subscribers. A lot of my oldest subscribers come from my old Undertale videos from back in the day and many of them have stopped watching. But, I’ve known for a while this would be an obstacle I’d have to overcome. Just gotta keep posting and growing until they’re just a small piece of my sub count!
This year I’ve also made some of my favorite animations ever! Shorts like “Emma hates crowds,” “Surviving the week,” and “When you drop your phone” turned out exactly as I had hoped and I’m still incredibly proud of them. It was a joy to rewatch them as I was making this year’s compilation video.
Speaking of, the compilation video is in 4:3! The entire year, I’ve been animating the extra space on the left and right, just so I could expand them out for this end of year compilation. I wanted the video to have extra value for people who have already seen them and showing more of the shot felt like a cool way to do it. Will I do it again? It depends on how well the video performs. It's a lot of extra work and, if that time would be better spent making new videos, it could be hard to justify again. Which leads me to some negatives for the year…
Where are the videos?
In 2022, I had a compilation video with 22 shorts. Now I have a video with just 7. While this year’s shorts are generally longer, the compilation is still 2 minutes shorter. I released less animation this year and that’s not even mentioning the two other full videos that I started on and still haven’t finished. What happened?
The obvious one is that making full videos eats into my time to make shorts. I did spend a lot of this year making animation, but much of it wasn’t seen on the channel because they’re in these unreleased videos. I’m just one man, so there's a limit to how much animation I can produce. I think I just hit that upper limit.
My shorts got far more ambitious. All my shorts were longer with more shading, lighting, effects, and more detailed backgrounds. I even used some CGI for 6 out of the 7 shorts. I definitely stepped up my short game, but that meant they took longer to make. I was just pouring all this effort into them and hoping the amount of work would equal more views. But that didn’t always happen. And with how little money they actually make, it wasn’t the smartest financial move.
Probably the biggest factor is: I got a job. Over the summer, I started working part-time to pay the bills. It's good work, I enjoy it, and I'm going to continue it going forward; but I thought I could maintain my YouTube output while working this job. Turns out I could not. I burnt myself out in June and July trying to burn the candle at both ends and keep up my monthly schedule. I only feel like I fully recovered this November. I need to make sure I don’t burn myself out like that again.
Alright, so now we know what happened, how are we going to make next year better?
Next year
The number one priority for next year is getting these two long videos completed. I’m going to dedicate a large amount of January to finishing the Q&A. Earliest it could come out is February, but I won’t make any promises so anticipate later. The Patreon-only Q&A will be made after the first one is done. I wanted them to be released at the same time, but I don’t think that is practical at the speed I’m working at. Hopefully it won’t come out too much later. Once both Q&A’s are done, work will resume on the introvert animation.
While these are being worked on, I will occasionally pause to make shorts. The plan is for these shorts to be released monthly and for them to be at the quality of “Happy Christmas” or “Skill Issue.” Not super long and hyper focused on the joke or point of the short. I’m going to treat animation frames economically, like each additional frame is costing me money. Bigger elaborate animation will either be exclusively for full videos or be used sparingly and with limited scope in a short. I’m hoping these shorts could be finished in a week, so I still have time to work on the bigger videos in between breaks from my job.
I also might try making occasional illustrations of my characters, so the month-long gap between shorts doesn't feel so long; however, that is far more in the air.
That’s my thoughts on last year and my plan going forward! If everything goes well, we should have some incredible animations. Thank you so much for supporting me and I’ll see you all next year!