Ideas have to be tended and nurtured, like flowers in a garden.  Sometimes it takes years for a story to come to fruition before even one word is written down.  And unlike others, I don’t base my work on other people’s creations; stories, games, or shows… I have a simple litmus test; do my ideas infringe on anyone else’s copyright? If the answer is yes, I won’t do it. Everything I do is new and original.

Everything you see on screen has to be created from scratch… the characters, the clothes, the sets, the graphics…  Each requires different software programs and special skills to create everything. The work requires days and weeks of intensive painstaking creativity and work to make it look presentable. It’s the most time-consuming part of production.

Animation teams usually storyboard and block their scenes, but being a solo artist, I proceed from a script with a clear idea of how I want the scene to go in my head.  I start animating and lighting and placing cameras to get the various shots I want.  It’s a time consuming process, that produces only about 30 seconds to a minute of animation a day!

For the stills/comics pages, it’s a two-stage process; rendered images from the animation program are individually brought into Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop for typesetting and final adjustments.  Animated Gifs and 360 images have their own work flows, and each takes time.

For the animated shorts, I use Adobe Premiere, where all of the elements; final animation clips, sound, dialogue, effects shots, and music are brought together and elaborately pieced together and synchronized to give you that final look and polish.  Each 1 minute video can take a day or more to complete at this stage.  Any effects shots, requiring additional graphics or special effects have to be created and processed through After Effects, which can require additional programs and knowledge to create all the additional effects you see.

I use Propellerheads Reason to quickly produce music and sound for all my work.  Even so, this is a separate process that can take days, if I’m working on a song with vocals.

Leave Comments on the Website and Social Media.  Your comments really help me know how I’m doing and whether or not there’s anybody out there!  Believe me, when you spend all day staring into a computer screen working your heart out, it’s nice to get some feedback and human interaction!

Believe it or not, marketing is a full time job that costs money.  You can help out alot by telling your friends about Anima Saoku, and sharing content through social media.  By doing that you’ll be helping bring more people to the site which in turn helps me find new supporters.  Your help would be really valuable in this area!

I post on social media daily to tide you over while you’re waiting for the next Friday release.  Want to shout at me?  It’s easy to do it there.

Likes tell social media ranking algorithms and search engines “this content is good!”  – which helps extend my reach through social media and improves search engine rankings for the site.