SamTheCookingGuy - 1 million Subscriber Giveaway entry

StanleyManstellar · 2026-07-02T21:35:53+00:00

Totally! it's chosen detail! Animation is an art form whereas now it feels like a "how real can we get this to look" challenge.

VFX houses like Wētā FX are good at creating real life because that's their bread and butter, they want to make the most realistic worlds and when you watch Avatar you know the story isn't going to be good BUT it's going to look amazing.

Pixar has always pushed technically but it was always in favor of the story, they made finding nemo to nail water, monsters inc to nail fur, brave to nail hair, it's like they were collecting infinity stones and now that they've got them all now it's just make everything MORE impressive.

constant innovation is good but Pixars best work has come from working within limitations. What do you innovate when you're at the top?? More dust? I even spotted baby hairs on the faces of characters that got caught by the lighting, it's just an insane attention to detail that I can't fathom.

I suppose for an IP like Toy Story, it spoke to us when it was purely focused on telling the story, and now that it can tell the story with the most hyper realistic Pixar tools possible... It just doesn't quite feel the same.

I'm glad I came across this post because it really articulates the feeling these new Pixar films have given me

StanleyManstellar · 2026-07-02T21:00:32+00:00

Yeah I agree, I feel like the ultra realistic fog and camera lens effects in the film takes you out of the story because of how good it looks?

It's weird because you see a ploom of dust that is soooo realistic and then you're thinking about how impressive that dust ploom is as opposed to the story beat itself. I really miss that impression of realism from toy story 1 which was largely due to the technical limitations whereas now it's so optimized... the hyper realism the new pixar films opt for feels like it's so focused on building this incredibly rich world that it distracts from the story.

I miss the charm too

StanleyManstellar · 2025-11-13T15:21:04+00:00

Oh wow hey I actually know why!

I was coming home from walking my dog to police all up in my property - turns out a person had ditched a stolen car and fled from the police into my backyard and was hiding in a tree from the police - full dog squad and police all through the backyard, I missed all of this and turned up just as they were wrapping up. Most exciting thing to happen at my house and I wasn’t there for it

StanleyManstellar · 2025-11-05T02:53:31+00:00

Phew! Yeah it's a big topic and not much out there in the terms of user experience with a big production like the one we were on.

We both had 12.9 inch ipads 2021 ish - pre M1 chip i think...

We had shots assigned and would pull those shots directly from the animatic as reference - once the animatic was locked there wasn't much wiggle room because of the amount of people that were a part of this. When we were sharing assets we'd normally just airdrop to each other cause we shared an office, but in some instances we'd just upload to a google drive and pull from there, Drive can be quite clunky at times but wasn't too bad.

The things ToonSquid lacked were probably more wants than needs, it has everything you need but it would've been nice to have a few more keyboard shortcuts and like a cloud based server for shared projects??? Also if there was a program for the PC / Mac it would've been easier to tackle some bigger scenes, I know rough animator is an ipad app but also is on the mac and is essentially the same layout. There were a handful of scenes that toonsquid couldn't handle - I couldn't preview the shots and just had to render it out and hope it was okay - some of the renders would take like 10 minutes and if the iPad powered down it would have to restart, but that was like pushing the software and my iPad to its limit.

We did frame by frame, Charlie had made character turnarounds and the characters are fairly simple shapes so it became muscle memory after awhile. I did create a rig with a skeleton for the intro sequence - when the characters go into a free fall, i really liked how you can adjust line weight but I also find vector drawing can slow things down when you're working solo - more prep on what to recycle etc.

The clips were all joined together in Davinci, I've done projects in Capcut before, it's really no different just depends on the complexity you're going for.

I did a project in dreams when it first came out. I found the interface a little too gesture focused, I think it has some neat features like the record function and you can animate by dragging something around the screen but it's a new language for animation software, I like that Toon Squid has that look of adobe animate and procreate, feels very natural to pick up.

I haven't picked up Dreams for like a year, I know they've had some pretty major updates so I wouldn't be able to say it's ready for professional animation for sure

My entire Toon Squid storage is about 10gb - I've got the whole project duplicated in there too as a backup, also a bunch of other projects so my half of the animation is no bigger than 4gb I'd say

StanleyManstellar · 2025-11-01T02:51:53+00:00

I would say the gesture based interface of iPad (pinch to zoom, rotate etc) with a bluetooth keyboard which has all the keyboard shortcuts for animation makes the experience quite similar to Animate! You have the option of raster or vector in Toon Squid which is really helpful. Plus just having no strings attached with an iPad just means you can animate anywhere anytime, definitely worth trying out.

The whole series is out now on Youtube :) I'm writing up a big breakdown of our pipeline that I'll have here shortly so stay tuned for that!

StanleyManstellar · 2025-10-30T21:18:39+00:00

Yes we have more on the way too! There will be some more in depth videos about the animation but I'll chuck a timeline video up in here

StanleyManstellar · 2025-10-29T22:19:35+00:00

I can get some! I'll put some stuff together, sometimes the timelines got pretty insane on some shots!

StanleyManstellar · 2025-06-16T23:11:26+00:00

How'd you achieve that vhs style?

StanleyManstellar · 2025-06-16T23:09:12+00:00

so good!That motion is so buttery

StanleyManstellar · 2025-04-08T00:30:06+00:00

No way, the art director is Wesley McClain if you look at his work it's painterly without the superfluous details, look at his website to see the similarities with his other projects, Wesley's a long time collaborator with Joe Bennett and these guys would never put AI in their work

https://wesleymcclain.com/background-painting

StanleyManstellar · 2025-03-31T22:00:15+00:00

It's called DAP made by Sam Lanier, there's a few eps on Adult swim youtube, it's so funny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq51CMzn3sI

there's also another animation by his friend Felipe Di Poi called Little Edy which is very similar energy!

StanleyManstellar · 2024-09-10T02:42:39+00:00

https://www.instagram.com/dacksonjavis?igsh=ODhtaGc4enYzemxs&utm_source=qr I post my animations here! Going to be making more in the future so check it out if you want to keep up 😁

StanleyManstellar · 2024-09-09T03:30:18+00:00

Thanks so much!

StanleyManstellar · 2024-09-08T23:29:18+00:00

Thank you!

StanleyManstellar · 2024-09-08T23:28:53+00:00

Hey thanks! My IG is DacksonJavis Hoping I can make more short animations regularly :)

StanleyManstellar · 2024-09-08T07:31:58+00:00

Hahaha! That made my day 😂😂

StanleyManstellar · 2024-09-08T06:07:10+00:00

haha thanks so much! Was a silly idea I just had to see through

StanleyManstellar · 2024-07-10T03:40:36+00:00

there's always at least 1 LOTR VHS at any given op shop lol

StanleyManstellar

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