Originally published in Portuguese on February 25, 2022. Read the original.
To set the scene: I recently moved to São Paulo, and I’m literally in the middle of a whirlwind called a final thesis. The title says this is the first post, but the project has been running since mid-2021.
Prelude
I started a Bachelor’s in Design at UTFPR in the second half of 2017. I was living in São Paulo back then, but I moved to Curitiba because the course was in person (and who knew I’d miss going to college so much from 2020 on). During the pandemic I got really into social media — I had just discovered TikTok and my account was blowing up. I even wrote a post here on the blog with the tips that worked for me at the time, “How to Get More TikTok Followers: 7 Tips to Grow”. But it took a big toll on my mental health and left me with a real aversion to social media. On top of that, I watched Netflix’s documentary The Social Dilemma, which introduced me to the topic of social media vs. mental health, and I’ve been researching it ever since.
Also, during college I discovered a fascination with animation and with making it. I was already in love with anime, Cartoon Network shows and a few other things, and when I realized this could be a career for a designer, I started steering my efforts in that direction.
“But why are you telling me all this?” you ask.
Calm down, anxious person! This isn’t a TikTok. Anyway, for my thesis I decided to create something that brings both topics together — animation and social media — in an animated series that deals with the subject in a comedic way for the YouTube crowd (read that in the voice of a 2012 gaming YouTuber).
In short, the idea is to make comedic chronicles about the habits of heavy social media users — slang, iconic moments, memes, controversies — trying to keep up with and educate the kids who are so easily influenced by these corporations.
The project
“Se flopar, nunca postei” (roughly, “If it flops, I never posted it”). This phrase and its variations are part of Brazilian internet slang, and they capture the anxiety and the drive to perform online. I chose it as the series title because it sums up the characters’ main desire: to become famous influencers and content creators.
The format will be almost like an animated sitcom, following the lives of these characters who decided to live together in one house to get more exposure and spend less.
My biggest references for the series aired on Cartoon Network: 6Teen and Total Drama Island (both from the same studio), plus other teen shows that dealt a lot with American teen culture.
With that, I built the characters and had my first glimpse of the episode. (Saying it like this makes it sound easy, but I did extensive research on the problem and the target audience to get here — I’ll probably talk about that another time.)
What now?
Now comes the headache: animating. I had worked a lot with After Effects and thought moving that knowledge to Toon Boom would be a breeze. My mistake was being optimistic. I’m going through a slow learning curve trying to rig a character. My deadline is the end of May, so it’s tight.
That’s why I started this diary — to help me organize what happens while I work and bring a bit more logic to my deliveries. (Plus, when I’m 40 I want to read this page and feel nostalgic.)
So, over the next two weeks I need to:
- Finish drawing the backgrounds;
- Rig the 5 characters.
Wish me luck and cheap coffee.
