This is perhaps the coolest thing I have ever made.

I have always enjoyed drawing but never been very good at it, and because of that I was always a little scared to try animation. I’ve never even more than dabbled in digital art, and never with very impressive results, but I took a chance on it this week and I think it really paid off.

I used Krita for all of the animation and the audio comes from the YouTube Studio catalogue. The “Her” in question is a protagonist I’ve been tossing around in my mind for a long time but have never written anything about, but I really liked the visual of a sword flashing across the screen and I know that is part of her character. Perhaps this will be the start of her life. I wanted to stay pretty vague in the trailer, since it is a trailer, but her story is one of a woman who is confined to shadows her whole life until she becomes terrified of the light, but for the sake of a child she must bring all of the secrets she’s collected to bear. I know that’s still pretty vague, but even I don’t know the whole story.

The sword moving across every frame is the same picture that I only drew once (see my earlier statements about artistic ability) and the words are traced over the Berlin Sans FB Demi font (my handwriting isn’t great either). I duplicated my writing from frame to frame rather than rewriting it because I didn’t want the dancing words effect I achieved in my gardening tutorial, but the writing might have still been the hardest part of the animating. Once I got into the groove of animating the sword that went pretty fast, or at least fast comparatively. I ended up with 152 frames in total, though some were holding frames, and I set the frame rate to 12 fps. The animation has three distinct chapters that I divided the work into: the text intro, the sword spinning animation, and the text outro with a sword wipe transition. I am genuinely really proud of this video, and I really hope you enjoy it.