Welcome Back!

Hello, my fellow readers! I have been gone for almost 3 years since I last wrote in my blog. Life stuff unfortunately happened, but I'm glad to say that I'm back with a better mindset.

I'm really thrilled to see how much the indie animation scene has grown over the past 2-3 years since I went on a hiatus. I was so delighted to see that most of the shows I interviewed had made splendid progress. I see you all on Bluesky! I'm keeping a sharp eye on you all, guys!

(I moved away from Twitter, so here's the link: Jocelyn's Bluesky)

I have seen a lot of indie projects being released on YouTube. Here's the list of what I watched! Small and big projects, so far, since I last wrote this blog:

• Lumi and The Great Big Galaxy

• Pretty Pretty Please, I Don't Want To Be Magical Girl

• Ramshackle

• The Amazing Digital Circus

• Murder Drones

• The Knights of Guinevere

• The Ghost Friends

• Swift Spark and Defense of Five

• Port By The Sea

• Monkey Wrench

• The Three Tomes

• Atlas and The Stars

• INDIGO

• and a lot more...!

Those animation projects blew me out of the water, and I am positive about the future of indie animation, with those new people coming and presenting their ideas. It just fills me with support for them. I can't wait to support more of their works, honestly. There are so many indie projects to come in a few years, and I'm so excited to ramble about them, folks!

I'm no longer doing interviews, so I would rather just promote the Sunflower Club's new indie zine, instead! They have a great zine concept going on, and I would love to support that! :D If you're interested in their zine and have a spot: https://forms.gle/KjiincFecinMLFKv7 and follow them on Bluesky!

In my next post, I will be sharing only my opinions on the indie shows I will plan to watch, starting with 2026 releases.

Also, please donate whenever/whatever you can to The Sunflower Club for their amazing efforts! :D

---

Since I didn't do interviews during my hiatus and will no longer be doing them, I would like to discuss my indie animation project I'm currently developing!

After a few years in development hell (2021-2024) with Corrupted Memories, I decided to shelve it for a while and go to a fresh idea, but the thing is that I didn't know where to start, so I went back to see why I was in development hell for years:

Promotional Art of Corrupted Memories (2023)

Corrupted Memories had too many things going on, with too many characters for a small team I had at the time. I was mainly writing and leading the project. Admittedly, the project was ambitious, and it was not enough for something I could produce in a year or two. That's where I "failed."

(I don't think I failed, but it was the word I could think of for it.) The idea I had at the time was kinda like a fanfiction or AU of the niche book I read when I was in middle school, haha. So I did have a few characters and a premise of the time in the 2010s, and simply put, they didn't fit what I wanted to do in Corrupted Memories.

No offense to my younger self; her intention was in the right place, but the execution was poor.

"Serlinda's Love" (2024) - My SVA CE Animation Short Film

So after shelving Corrupted Memories, I went on to take School of Visual Arts' Continuing Education program in early 2024 to improve my storyboards and character development, and I'm grateful to Professor Frank Gresham for his support at my time at SVA, and I developed a super short opening of my fantasy world, and I had "aha" moment of how to create the short film. I got to meet some awesome classmates along the way, and I got to enjoy some short films we did at the end of the 10-week class!

After completing my CE in March 2024, I spent time finding some ideas I had for a bit, just to see if younger me had a good idea, and alas, she did, in her old high school Google Docs.

I went further back to my roots when I was a freshman in high school, and I read the long-form novel I wrote on Google Docs. The idea was basically a fanfiction of Maximum Ride, but I decided to scrap the plot and settings, and I kept my OCs still, then I made it into something amazing. Throughout my revision process, I initially created the fanfic, then transformed it into a story about two characters trying to live their lives in the city. Eventually, I shifted the focus to the character's daughter amidst a digital realm war, then changed it to her exploring her mother's past through her history research. Later, I focused on her mother and father's experiences before the daughter was born. Unsatisfied with that direction, I discarded the former plot and finally developed the story into something I truly liked.

The blurb that finally spurred me to write The Resonant Era

Finally, I developed The Resonant Era. At first, I initially wrote the blurb as I was just bored, then I actually ended up liking it so much that I spent most of the first few months just writing ideas, and talking to my boyfriend-then-fiancè about it. I had like a whole few pages dedicated to that idea in my notebook, bahaha. Here are some current concepts so far I have drawn:

Then I revised the blurb to something like this now: Long before the 1st Corporate Congress and the formation of the new government, the graduate students Kai Amamiya and Kelly Sanchez embark on the Baffin Shelf to discover the new energy that will soon save humanity. The price? Kai and Kelly must sacrifice their morals to save billions of people, yet can they ever justify this new dystopia?

So I'm really excited to share this with the world because I'm passionate about this story, which includes government, research as the government's ammo, characters struggling with their morals and values, and finally, the realization of the system and how we got there at that point.

But I suppose, things got too real in the real world, but I still intend to finish whenever I can.

★

Stay cool and healthy. Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo. Abolish ICE. Justice shall prevail.

★