Timmy Tuesday Newsletter

Hello everyone and welcome to the first Timmy Tuesday Newsletter!

First and foremost I’m so honored you signed up to hang out with me once a week and talk about things that are inspiring and motivating me. From people, to work, to tutorials. I hope that we can find and share some rad stuff together to get our creative juices flowing and roadblocks out of our way so we can do our best work.

Fair warning, this whole “writing” thing is new to me. So you’ll see the format change here and there as needed just because I’m trying to see what makes the most sense for what I share and what y’all are wanting to hear from me.

I also want this to be as interactive as possible. I’ll always share my socials and contact at the bottom of each newsletter so you can do a few things with those socials and emails:

1. What’d you think of this week’s newsletter? Did you have any takeaways from it that helped motivate or inspire you?

2. What have you been seeing that you think should be shared here with everyone in our community?

3. Celebrate a win! Share something you’ve completed that you want our community to celebrate along side you. Get me a quick writeup and some stills/gifs/mp4s and we’ll drop them in here each week and gas you up for your next project.

4. Send help. Are you stuck on something that our community could help out with, let me know and I’ll put the bat-signal up with you.

And that’ll pretty much be it for this week’s intro. Lets get to the good stuff.

Think about it:

This week we talked a little bit about productivity and I shared a few ideas of how I like to make sure I’m staying productive when it’s important I do so.

If you’re anything like I am, I’m easily distracted. There are so many things that I love and find joy in that if I let them will 100% of the time distract me.

The easiest helper I’ve found for myself, while still allowing myself to be distracted a few times a day is to get a timer. Could be a digital app, could simply be your phone’s timer, could be something more analog that sits on your desk. Give yourself 15 minutes at a time, and let your mind wander. Then collect yourself, and hop back to work feeling like you’ve scratched that itch.

Figure out your productivity rhythms. When are you the most productive? I’ve found for myself and my friends that there are really two times a day when a lot of people are at their most creative. First thing in the morning, and well into the evening. I’m not sure there’s a “best time” to be productive, it’s really a personal thing. But it’s important to figure out when your brain is the most ready to shift into the gear needed to get your head down and knock some stuff out.

As soon as you know when you’re prime for the most productive work, create a list and attack the biggest need first. That could be the thing that’s the most time sensitive or the thing you know will take you the most time to put together. Set that up as your first task in your productivity window and get after it. From there snowball the work down until you’ve completed all your work.

Use social media to curate a feed of content that builds you up. Gets you excited, motivated, and inspired. Using social media to fill your feed with content to be mad at, or mad about is the most unproductive thing I could think of. We’ve got this incredible platform and technology in front of us, and instead of using it for good and to help us out, too many of us use it to get mad at people/organizations we disagree with. Doom scrolling is the enemy of productivity as well as finding inspiration and motivation. Put all that stuff away and focus on things that will make you a better person, a better creative.

So fix your feed. Make it something that works for you, not against you. Which is a great segue into our weekly “two creatives to follow”.

Creatives to follow:

@alexcornell : Alex’s account is a solid place for inspiration. He’s got a lot to pull from in his feed but this one post he shared on October 26th stood out and hit hard. It’s a beautiful combination of digital art and practical art. Thinking about things differently to accomplish something he likely could have done all digital, but the natural feeling of the end product is uniquely practical. https://x.com/alexcornell/status/1717298693672763471?s=20

@HBCoop_ : If you’re even a little interested in AI Art her account is a fantastic resource for a number of things. From her AI creations to the retweets of other AI artists, you’ll have plenty of AI inspiration to draw from. On top of that, she shares her prompts so you can take what she’s made and add your own spin on it. So it’s a great place to learn what works and what doesn’t work when creating AI art.

Problem Solved:

Alright. So you’ve spent hours, maybe days, on an animation in Adobe After Effects and there are hundreds of keyframes putting everything in its proper place in it’s proper time. Then your client says to you, “Well, we’re not looking for a full animation of that entire character. We need it to be more of a lower third asset where we see it from the waist up.”

That changes a lot for what you’ve created and as a green animator that might freak you out beyond belief. How do you adjust all the keyframes to now be in the right place at the right scale while also getting masked with the right shape.

Well, it’s a lot easier than you might think.

Usually with really in-depth animations (character or otherwise) you’re nesting compositions, parenting layers to other layers that are parented to other layers and on and on… So there’s really no easy way for you to simply “adjust the animation” for a client’s new found vision for what you’ve made.

At least on the surface.

I don’t know how long it took me to realize that I could create a null layer and place it in the center of all the action. Make sure it’s in a place where it’s in the middle of the action that you’re needing to adjust. Then take all the layers that aren’t already parented to other layers, and parent those layers to the null you just created. Now you should be able to move that single null layer anywhere basically placing that dynamic and complex animation anywhere in your comp. You could also scale and rotate it from that null as well. Then as soon as you’re done, you can delete the null and the updated animation will stay in place. Easy peasy.

Again! Thank you so much for subbing and being here for the very first Timmy Tuesday. I’m really looking forward to keeping these coming. Look at the list at the top of the newsletter and if you’ve got anything for any of those 4 points, please don’t hesitate to hit me up. Make sure if you follow Alex or Heather, you let them know that it was because of Timmy Tuesday. :) A little selfish promotion never hurt anyone.

Also. If this was in any way helpful, and you know of someone who might get something out of this, please don’t hesitate to share the sign up for the newsletter w/ that person or people. Lets grow our community.

I want to:

• Celebrate your wins.

• Be inspired by what is inspiring you.

• Help you with any issue you might have, if I can or if the community can.

• What’d you think of this week’s newsletter?

Go make something! I’ll see y’all next week!