Note to self. Stop playing fuckaround and be productive.
Anyway, welcome back! This is Todd from toddYoungONLINE. Let’s do another flip through with a Canson from the mid-nineties. You’ll see a lot of kind of the same stuff, me developing characters that I had in mind at the time.
They are what they are.
They are a source to return to. I haven’t done anything with them, yet.
I’m going to sidetrack and talk less about the sketchbook, it speaks for itself and I can’t really add much about it.
But, if you’re like me, and sometimes you find yourself with large blocks of time as a blessing, you have to use them productively.
You gotta.
I found myself lately staring at the wall regrouping and reformulating,. Not pressuring myself to get things done, but working on ideas, not trying to get in my own way of completing something. I started doing the podcast YoungTales.fun , if you haven’t seen it.
Don’t stop yourself from doing things that you want to do, that you like to do, or want to try or experiment with, and, as somebody that’s always kind of worked on things alone and had larger, larger visions or larger dreams of projects it can be overwhelming to think about. You want to produce an animated something or, graphic novel, or some something. And that’s kind of always been me. I’ve had people kind of flutter in and out of projects here and there, but they’d never been around long enough to get anything done. My possibly unpopular opinion may be, I like the idea of AI.
I don’t like the like the idea of I going out on the internet and taking copyrighted materials, but, there is potential for animation, or other projects, that if you can put in your own work and tell it what you want it to do you can get a result. Like having it animate your characters, maybe you do the keyframes and it will tween them. That’s kind of cool. I’ve been a person that’s always worked on developing my own assets whether it’s music, writing, drawing, painting or whatever. Coming up with my own unproblematic stuff to use.
I’m at an age where I remember, people decrying, templates. They were the death of graphic design. Then stock photography or stock anything, but they were/are an opportunity for people that want to capitalize and monetize their skills and assets to have an outlet to, to create things that other people can use for their projects and be a potential passive income stream.
You know, it’s like when he when things get more accessible, like PowerPoint to create presentations and whatnot, there’s always doomsayers. Professionals will always be needed. Accessibility and progress aren’t the enemy. It’s the lack of ability to observe and adapt that are.
So I don’t hate it. I really don’t.
I’d like to be able to realize my vision for any type of project more efficiently. I’ve seen people say it’s for the people that don’t want to do the work. But, sometimes you have a vision and you just want it done. Nothing wrong with that.
It will be cool to be able to feed in your ideas and your assets in and be able to have something to help you more easily, more accessibly, finish your project. I see it as an opportunity for artists to potentially license their work for use. Yes artists want to be hired to do whatever, but if licensing brings in the money, and gives you the opportunity to focus on other stuff, I say do it.
Sometimes it’s the learning and the journey. That’s the point. Or sometimes it’s that end product that’s that’s important.
It doesn’t matter how you get there necessarily, but I say that with the caveat that you should still do it responsibly and ethically. Or not, depending on the type of person you are.
AI potentially lets you watch any movie you want, starring whomever you want, even yourself.
Love it or hate it, then potential is pretty amazing.
I keep having more and more ideas that are beyond the scope of what I can do alone and I don’t have necessarily have the capital to complete them, but I can try them on a smaller scale and, try and complete them at a level that I can then come back to them.
That was one of the ideas for my podcast, if you haven’t heard it again, YoungTales.fun ,focusing on reading stories. Fairy tales and public domain literature. I wanted to do animation and needed material to start with. Everything that I read is in public domain. Currently reading through the Brothers Grimm, I’m about to finish that, then moving on to Hans Christian Andersen, but I downloaded a bunch of public domain works from Project Gutenberg.
I think we’ve all had stories read to us. I still like to hear stories read outloud, but the idea was, anybody can do it you’re not going to read the story the same way somebody else is. With it being able to do a podcast or vlog there’s no reason not to produce something if just for the experience of doing it.
You’re going to interpret it differently. Your voice is different. Somebody may like to listen to your voice. They might like to listen to somebody else’s voice. It’s not a competition.
So it’s a way to create a thing and to put it out there. I do a straight read, with just my voice, a theatrical read with music, voices, and soundfx, with the intention of eventually using final product to create animations.
I will bundle the vocal versions and offer them on platforms like Audible.com , use them on my YouTube Channels to help build an audience. Hopefully create meaningful content that starts generating some passive income streams.
I purchase assets from Humble Bundle, music packs, sound effects, whatever I think might be useful.
I also found Eleven Labs for AI voices. It’s $20 a month, but they have some really good natural voices. I’ve bought a couple of other things like Blaster Suite. I found it a bit more limiting, it does have it’s potential and I haven’t tried it in a while, so maybe it’s evolved.
Eleven Labs has some really natural voices, and it gives you the option of text to speech or upload your vocals and have them converted to another AI voice so you can still get your reading. You can even upload voice sample and get some really good results. It also has sliders that let you play around with some of the emotion get different reads when you regenerate it.
One issue is you don’t necessarily have much control, but it’s still kind of cool and for 20 bucks a month, there’s a lot of potential. And I’ve been using it in my projects and have really enjoyed the final output of of what I get. But, the idea there is to be able to take a single piece of material and see how many different iterations you can get.
This wasn’t a commercial for Eleven Labs, I am just impressed with their product out of the ones I’ve used.
So, I get the straight read. a theatrical read, and ultimately a soundtrack for animation. I’ve been trying to develop the visual assets to be able to create the animated shorts, but I’m still working towards that. I have been looking at AI as a way to efficiently be able to take my character designs and help me create an animated final product.
So stay tuned for that.
For drawing lately I’ve been looking at resources trying to get better. Domestika has some really great classes. Bodies in motion, has great photo reference. Line of Action is another good drawing resource.
Proko.com is another awesome drawing lesson resource.
I’ve run out of time and I’ve run out of tape.
I really appreciate your time and attention for these.
I hope you have a great day.
See you soon.