Vault is a traditional 2D animation, and even though it’s only about one minute long, it turned out to be pretty ambitious for a one-person project. The production was spread over roughly two years.

In traditional animation, you have to hand-draw up to 24 frames per second to animate a character, multiplied by the amount of characters, multiplied by the number of layers of highlights and shadows for each character — in this case, up to 4. That’s a lot of pencil mileage.

Managing the textures, the lighting, the camera stuff, keeping everything homogenous throughout all those drawings and layers, render times, and so on. Even things as mundane as dealing with the sheer volume of files this all generates added to the workload.

Overall, it was super interesting to work on and, it looks pretty unique. Some things could have been kept simpler for the sake of efficiency, but those are lessons learned for the future.