#glokia

[glo-vs-akia]

GLO vs Akia is now in production!

Recently I wrapped the storyboards up and now things are kicking into high gear with rough animations, clean lineart, backgrounds and whatnot.

This is also a first for me as I’ve rarely taken the opportunity to be this open about the process of making an animation from start to finish but I’m hoping by updating this blog and posting the backlog of drawings I’ve done with great friends I get to fill this with a great history that’s both as entertaining as informative. Currently I work a job that leaves me free on the weekends so I’m relying on the old diary writings as I continue to keep working on this shot by shot but I’m hoping that you look forward to how it goes, more details later.

Can’t wait to see y’all in the next post!

[glo-vs-akia]

WHO IS AKIA?

Animation by Sooshywww

Talking about Akia here’s a weird one, she’s literally not my character but instead she belongs to AK or @AK913000 on twitter whom I’ve had the pleasure lately of calling one of my best friends. I don’t think I’m exactly the right person to talk about her history and I think the only way I can do this post justice would be to properly thank AK for giving me this chance to use her character.

But in the honor of doing my best to properly introduce her in this post, I will give it a try and explain exactly who is Akia. Let’s begin!

Barring my first post that talked about the design process of GLO, we’ll be mostly talking about her story and why she’s in this to begin with. Akia’s an assassin with a cunning voice to compliment the looks she holds that charm men to her advantage. She’s quick and light on her feet compared to GLO’s slow-yet-methodical approaches and carries specialized weapons on her operations.

Said specialized weapons really dial in various poisons, toxins and chemicals rather than projectiles that pierce through the opponent. She is quite literally the definition of “silent yet deadly” if she goes into a fight.

By the time of the animation, Akia is on the hunt for various ingredients from an institution known as the Metahuman Regulation and Containment Initiative aka. The MRCI (more on that later) in the hopes of helping important people in her life develop a necessary cure for a dangerous virus that’s been spreading. However it is an unfortunate time to pick out that specific building to rob from as a certain Itsy bitsy spider also had other plans on what to do there….

What happens after? That’s for the duel to tell you once I can get my ass to finish it!

Believe it or not, I actually have drawn this person so much to the point that I can draw her from memory for the most part. Seeing the first time I’ve drawn her and the recent times I’ve drawn her is absolutely evident of that, I like to think I’ve gone a long way when it comes to blending my art style with ak’s due to the influence she’s had on me.

The proportions of my own style were rather closer to human so it took me a while to understand that glorified stickmen or “g-sticks” can also be closer to stickmen than actual human figures. Like I can stylize them how ever I need to and that the average thing people can suspend their disbelief to make way for this carefully chosen art style is higher than I thought.

It’s taken me a lot of drawings to even get a little bit closer to how I imagined she’d look in a more palatable style. Drawing comics back and forth helped me a lot when fleshing out their dynamic early on.

And since we’re here before I wrap up this blog post, I wanna take the opportunity to really appreciate AK who I’ve had the pleasure of having as one of my best friends for a while. There’s no amount of support and advice anyone gave that compare to how much she contributed to this and if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be so ready to go all out in this because…I am ready to put in my effort. I’m so happy with how much of an impact Akia had in the story I wrote for GLO and the best thing I can do is to make a good spectacle that can get people to love Akia the way I do.

Genuinely thank you AK, cheers to 2026 because despite all the bullshit that happened, you have my back as much as I have yours.

GLO and Akia look cute together in the art lowkey

See you next week!

[glo-vs-akia]

Who is GLO?

GLO is a character made around 2022 when I was doing a bunch of concept sketches for robots and somewhere stumbled upon the idea of a “quadrupedal sniper” where I was inspired by particularly the design of a robot chassis named “Geekatron Quadruped” from an old ass game called “Mechquest”. The mech chassis actually had an attack on its own without many attachments to it and I found it interesting enough to design a concept.

But as promising as it was, I knew my history and so did other people. I was mostly known as the person who only did “concepts” but never really followed through them so when I was challenged to actually animate this character before I go back to making another promise of “oh this guy is gonna have so many animations”

And so I did. I think I did pretty well for a test concept.

Once I got my friend to admitting that I’m someone who can put pen to paper partially out of a justified spite that worked out in the end ,I went ahead and did more drawings to get a good feel for him, mostly to solidify what I imagined it would look like if he were to walk, jump and do other shitpost stuff since I never really tried my hand at making cleaned up and colored animation by this point in time.

Outside of the quadrupedal prosthetics, other stuff from his design came from….my persona.!

Im someone who usually changes the way I draw myself and thought that it would be quite a waste to throwaway a design just for the sake of feeling different so I recycled an old sona design and applied it to GLO with a few inspirations such as the archer’s hood and sizing up the goggles to represent more bug-eyed characters and what came out of it was something that I actually liked!

He was quite unusual for his time because of how strict I was on clarifying that this is a fighter who spent all his stat points into range, he wants to be far away from you as possible because positioning and range is where he works best at with how his sniper role works and how his legs position him in areas that is easy to reach yet hard for his opponents to read. It was unusual for his time because back then, he came from a stick fighting community that loved its up-close fights.

Super talented people who are great at both high-speed action without cutting the cost of clarity with super simple stick figure styles, they really do showcase the “less is more” type of idea when a stickman drawn in mere seconds can do a lot of things without the need of complicated angles or professional-level drawing. I’m not someone who’s good at high-action but I did want to lean into stylized editing and a slower animation pace to show that chill-yet-cool feel. So it took me about 3 months into uncharted territory for me to make this demo:

As much as I would love to roast myself over this extremely old demo for all its flaws, I wouldn’t be here if not for it. I wouldn’t have developed long lasting friendships and made pretty good impressions on others with this character and I sincerely hope you do look forward to working what I have in store for him.

See you next week!

[glo-vs-akia]

Production Log #2

Oh….my god.

Time just flew by huh? I’ve kind of been too cooked up working on this thing that I’ve forgotten to make a post so lemmi sort of round up all the stuff that kind of happened since then- maybe a bit about my personal life but for the most part, it’s just project related.

Right now I’m sort of scrapping for money since this project is netting me a wonderful 0 dollars, which is why I’ve been contemplating on starting a patreon- not really with the hopes of being successful but mostly just to try and be able to pay for a week’s worth of groceries every now and again without ditching this project. On top of family issues, health issues etc.

Since the last update me and some wonderful friends who chimed in to help manage to get about 30% of the thing done, I’ve kind of also made the decision to have more shots done with 3D which mind you isn’t a light decision but I wanted to really make this easy on myself yet I didn’t want to sacrifice the art style that was already set out for the project so I spent some time and came up with this

I would still like to try and improve on the style so that it’s better translated while also improving the model so it can reach the more livelier animation I do when hand drawn but for now this will suffice because lord is doing cleanup going to take my soul here.

I’ll try to update the blog more, maybe not on a schedule anymore but more on a “if I feel like it” basis because there is a lot to talk about, but for now-

See you next time!

[glo-vs-akia]

PRODUCTION LOG #4

Mostly just my thoughts

"Dont get cold feet around me~"

"Don't try me."

It's been some time since I properly talked about all this, its mostly updates to the project but I kind of needed to remember more that this is supposed to act as my diary because fun fact, I tend to ✨️𝓼𝓮𝓵𝓯 𝓲𝓼𝓸𝓵𝓪𝓽𝓮 ✨️ when I work on these projects.

I keep to myself, I hide about my feelings in the production but something i kinda grew to understand is that talking about my project helps, it gets people knowing more about what I do and it lets me find some kind of outlet to talk about the stuff behind the scenes. If you actually do read this and find it all interesting, then genuinely, you are the type of person I'm creating for.

I've also had to speak to some people and upon maybe some closer retrospection, I think in a sense I might start marketting GLO vs Akia as an indie animation. I was maybe a little aversive to the idea because indie's kind of a buzz word right now but in a literal sense, this project is with a very...VERY small team, its nonprofit and it has zero backing, I have some wonderful friends helping me out but most of it is backed by my direction of the story and my skills/intimate knowledge of the craft.

Oh hey look she has hands

Animation is hard, and I remember speaking to people who would say that Im pretty much climbing a mountain in these regards, which speaks volumes when it comes from one of the more masochistic animators I know. Im not sure if I really plan to seek funding for something like this? But who knows, maybe people will like this, maybe they wont.

Either way, I'll enjoy what I made

Till next time!

[glo-vs-akia]

PRODUCTION LOG #3

WE HAVE A TEASER OUT NOW OH MY GOODNESS

Realistically, the project is about 30% done but I can see the pace picking up more the faster I get with this blender oriented pipeline.

Ive been still improving on using this program and I think the more i learn about blender and 3d the more this project becomes doable. Im not sure if im completely successful in bridging 3D and hand drawn but I think the outcome is acceptable.

I also have to be doing more jobs soon to help keep food on the plate but Ill be making sure to pass time up for this ^^

Till then!

[glo-vs-akia]

PROD. LOG Week #1

Okay I lied a bit, production actually did start way after I made that first post and as I write this very post I am agonizing over the 3D environments but I did wanna make two proper introduction posts before I get into the meat of things.

The 3D environments look really nice by the way, in my opinion. I spent quite a bit of time making them look nice from different angles which is maybe not that high of a bar since its...yknow a corridor but I promise it could've looked alot worse.

Ive had some friends who look at the stuff I do and theyre like "woah bruh thats quite alot for a duel" and im like "thats what im saying broooo, im fighting to push an agenda here...."

I have a dentist appointment first thing of the week which is always gonna be fun but assuming it doesnt knock me out of all productivity, I'm gonna see if I can finalize some more scenes before I finally....finaallyyyy get into animating these characters.

Tough week but that's why we gotta get tougher.

Until then!