near di mi animation writeup (wip)

man i can’t believe it’s over. I just posted the final render as im writing this and i still cant believe it. my first complete blender project is done. i am really, really tired rn. but while we’re at it, i thought id do a writeup to document my process.

but first, the stats:

• original storyboard is dated 14/8/24, 20:59, which means from conception to release this took 599 days, or about a year and 7 months.
• now obviously i didn't work on this 24/7 every day, in fact quite the opposite. i use blender on steam, though unfortunately it doesnt actualy track time history, just total time. but by estimating from screenshots i took, right now i have 438.4 hours on record. the oldest screenshot i have is from 6/11/25 when i hit 200 hours. now i had already been working on this prior to all that, so i think a good estimate would be about 300 hours.
• i grinded the hardest at the end. on 6/11/25 when i hit 200 hours. on 24/11/25 i hit 260h with 55.7h on the then last two weeks. on 18/12/25 i hit 300h, with 33.3h on last two weeks, meaning i put 100h on in little over a month. makes sense i was this productive since at this point i was done with school for the year. since then and now i've added 138h to the tally, which means 46h per month on average. i've no idea of blender keeps track of time spent by itself, but i aint going to check each file one by one.
• speaking of, project folder's final weight is 17.5gb, including blend files, renders, footage and krita files for the hand animated sections. 48 .blend files were used (one per scene p much).
• the rotoscope in total took 17h07m (krita keeps time spent on document). the breakdown per scene would be: 5h bass 1, 16m credits, 2h for drum 1, 2h for drum 2, 1h fake im alive, 33m im alive, 42m im fine, 1h losing your mind, 2h greep gt 1, 2h36 matt gt + effect

the idea

this is the original storyboard. i cant remember exactly what was i doing at the time, but by the date this was during that 3 month period where i had no job, i dropped off of school, i didnt know what to do with my life and basically started painting my walls not to lose my sanity. i don't know exactly for how long i had the idea, usually with stuff like this when i listen to a song images pop into my head, and eventually i somewhat tie em together, and something like this is the result. a lot of scenes originally said "rotorscope singer". the original plan was for this to be a fully 2d animation, and filling most of it with rotoscope. this was inspired by the music video for loneliness will shine by toe. i had already messed around with rotoscoping in this fashion by making this tabuchi hisako animation. the background of that was done in blender using the react to sound funcionality. these two things were the basic idea that i thought would carry my animation. another thing to notice is the absolute lack of clarity in some of these. one panel says "some cyclic animation need to figure out", another one is straight up blank. i kinda saw all this in my mind's eye but had no idea how it'd look for sure, let alone how to make any of it. i think this is the biggest lesson i take from all this. dont start production till your storyboard is crystal clear. this would've saved me a bunch of headaches down the line.

the beginning

as i said this began as a 2d animation project. i was gonna embark in a full project without ever having practiced the basics of 2d animation. as i soon realized, this would be a bad idea. 2d animation is very hard, and it's very easy for it to look like shit if you don't know what you're doing. im my case i tried raw 2d and rotoscoping a 3d model, but none of those looked good.

Can I borrow your rain coat? When the world is too blue so I put my night-light colored sunglasses on. There's still the half-burned polaroid picture of us under your ashtray, that I look at to remember my face.

• No quiero dormir
• Look back
• She only sleeps when it's raining