2019: A Year in Review

And here we are with another yearly review.

This marks the 5th year I’ve done these type of posts, and I always get a kick our of reading them before writing a new one.

I get to see what we accomplished so far, as well as what I thought we’ll accomplish the year after.

In our 2018 review, I said this was a quiet year.

So how was 2019?

Again, quiet.

Writing a feature film
New courses
Notable articles from this year
Most popular video this year
What’s next for 2020?

Writing a feature film

The main project I was working on personally was our upcoming animated feature film – Snowlands.

I finished writing the entire screenplay for the film, which took almost all of my time.

While there are still some rewrites to be made, the script is in very good shape, and I plan on working on pitching it in 2020.

I planned getting into pitching it last year, but it turned out it was hard to create marketing and pitching materials with a non-established story.

At first I tried coming up with a synopsis and a mock trailer, but it proved to be too vague without knowing the full story.

So I wrote the full story.

And made a cool concept trailer (:

That is why 2019 was again rather quiet.

New types of courses

We released 2 courses in 2019, and both were different from our usual software-oriented courses.

Teaching Animation

We’ve designed this course specifically for teachers and parents interested in teaching animation (to both children and adults), or even using animation to teach any other subject.
Animation isn’t easy, but we did our best to collect all the information one needs to be able to convey the basic principles of animation to students of all ages, and even help them build an entire animated project from start to finish using different animation methods. This course is your best starting point for becoming an animation educator.

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Stick Figure Animation

With over 9 million YouTube subscribers, Alan is one of the most renowned animators on the platform. He is mostly known for his viral animated shorts – Animator vs. Animation, and more recently for the spin-offs Animator vs. Minecraft, Animator vs. YouTube and Animator vs. League of Legends. In this online course, Alan reveals for the first time his entire work process, including how he creates a traditional Animator vs. Animation video from scratch.

Get the course

Notable articles from this year

Inspiration

Work

Filmmaking

What’s next for 2020?

I have big plans for 2020, which I can split to 3 main areas:

1. Making progress with the film

This is a huge priority, as I try to take Bloop into the feature film business.

That includes a) finishing the script b) getting a lot of meetings c) starting pre-production.

If I can get to the point where we can start pre-production on the film by the end of the year, I’d call that a huge success.

I’m aware that there are many obstacles on this path, and that I might not get there this year, but now with the script and marketing materials done I’ll have more time to focus on securing funding.

2. More courses + more talent-based courses

This year I’m going to push our courses production to the max, releasing new software-oriented courses as well as pushing in our newly-found direction of talent-based courses by bringing in more known animators to create courses for us.

I believe this new direction is the best way to differentiate us from any other course platform out there, so expect more of that in the future.

3. Language localization

One thing I’ve been trying to push for lately is localizing our courses to different languages.

People always prefer to learn in their own language, and if we can make it easier on our students then I think it’s important we do so.

We started this year with creating English closed-captions for all our courses, which helps many ESL students follow more easily, as well as support people who are hard or hearing.

That’s a great first step, but in 2020 I plan to take things to a new level.

We have started the process of translating our entire courses library to Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese, as well as our most important web pages.

That should bring in new groups of students who barely speak English, if any at all.

My hopes are that if this proves to be a success, we will be localizing to more and more languages, and by doing so providing more and more people with access to great animation education, which is something that might not be available in their country.

One more thing…

One last thing I should mention about 2019. A (not so) small thing happened that made this year huge for me, personally.

I became a dad.

My wife and I had our first boy this past August, which made this year the best year of my life.

Not sure if 2020 can top that, but here’s to an amazing new year!

– Morr

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Writing a feature film