The Power of Completion: Lessons from My Alphabet Animation
It all started with sheer curiosity. I had recently gotten my first iPad and downloaded Procreate, a drawing app that also allows for frame-by-frame animation. I just wanted to see how it worked and what I could do with it. I hadn’t done any frame-by-frame animation since college, many years prior, and back then, we worked with old-school methods, drawing directly on film strips. I had recently started leveling up my motion graphics skills, which didn’t necessarily require drawing—or this raw, traditional way of working. But I’ve always loved animation—classic Disney, Hanna-Barbera, and all the weird, trippy stuff from the ‘70s and ‘80s (here’s looking at you, Raggedy Ann and Andy).
So, with my new iPad in hand and no clear direction, I drew a crude letter “A” and morphed it into an apple. The apple would have bites taken out of it, then morph back into the “A”—a seamless loop. Again, it was really crudely done—black lines on a red background.
I must have shown it to either my mom or my partner. I can imagine one of them saying, “Oh, that’s great! Are you going to do the whole alphabet?”
I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. I was just experimenting. But I enjoyed working on it. It felt like a playful exercise, and I was at a point in my life where I was exploring different tools to figure out which direction I wanted to focus on for my work.
So, sure, why not push this a little and do the whole alphabet?
I was working part-time as a bartender a few nights a week and spending my days honing my skills and building my portfolio. For the next month or so, I went through the alphabet—B is for Bling, C is for Coffee and Cookies, D is for Darkness. The further I went, the more elaborate the animations became, and the more creative the concepts for each letter. O is for Obsolete, T is for Trapdoor, and (my favorite) U is for Undies. A friend even started making musical loops to go along with them.
I was barreling through, pretty seamlessly. Until life kind of happened. It wasn’t any one thing in particular. I just didn’t have the same amount of time to dedicate. I played around with different approaches to try to speed up the process, which shifted the initial purpose of the exercise. Then I hit X. I so badly wanted each letter to stand for something clever, but I just couldn’t think of anything for X. “Xylophone” and “X-ray” were too obvious. I even considered doing Xavier Roberts—the man whose signature brands the butts of all the Cabbage Patch Kids—but I learned he kind of an asshole, so I opted against it.
At this point, months (maybe even a year or so) had passed. I had honestly moved on. But my partner would occasionally ask when I was going to finish the alphabet. It really bugged her that I hadn’t.
About a month ago, maybe six years after I’d completed the letter “W,” I decided it was time. It didn’t matter if “X” didn’t stand for something clever—I just had to finish. I sketched out my idea—“X is for Xerox”—and whenever I had 20 minutes here or an hour there, I buckled down and got it done. It didn’t take long—maybe a total of 2-3 hours.
With “X” behind me, I knew I could finish “Y” and “Z” in no time. Sure enough, about two weeks later, I was done. I had completed a project that had subtly haunted me, following me around for years.
It felt great, and it got me thinking—about the significance of finishing the things we start, about seeing commitments through that we make to ourselves, and about when it’s okay to abandon those commitments.
As I mentioned earlier, when I started this “exercise,” I hadn’t planned on making it a full project. It was meant to be an experiment—an opportunity to find out not just how to do something, but how I like to do it. It was about discovering the parts of the process that I enjoyed and where my skills and knowledge complemented the work, and about identifying the pain points—the stuff I didn’t enjoy, and the things I just wasn’t going to do well. What I ended up discovering was a lot about myself as an artist, animator, and illustrator. I figured out how I like to work, how I like to draw lines and shapes. I explored how my brain works in these kinds of creative endeavors. In a somewhat corny way, I discovered a lot about myself in general.
The time gap between when I left off and when I finished also gave me the chance to see how much I’ve grown. I’m currently in the process of redesigning my website, and the alphabet animations now have their own page filled with a grid of 1x1 looping GIFs. Seeing the transformation from A-Z is striking. I’m not saying that to toot my own horn, just to say it’s a gratifying record of the progress I’ve made over the years. The first 15 letters are so crude that part of me wants to redo them. But I also feel like this is a project I can safely say I’ve completed, which is kind of a big deal for an artist with ADHD and a thirst for curiosity. I’ve started many experiments that I thought might turn into a full project or a series of pieces, only to abandon them for various reasons.
Which brings me to the next thing completing this project has had me thinking about—when and why it’s okay not to complete some things, and how that can actually be a good thing.
As far as I can tell, time is finite and non-renewable. I can watch Groundhog Day or Donnie Darko all I want and contemplate whether or not we get a do-over, but as far as my consciousness is concerned, the answer is an emphatic no. Likewise, the phenomenon of time seemingly speeding up as we get older is, in my experience, real. Now, it’s possible that the pandemic, combined with our hyper-connected, overstimulated world, has aided in making the years feel like just a few months. But this isn’t limited to our present state of the world. Scientists, philosophers, and psychologists—people far more qualified than me—have done deep dives into this. Ultimately though, what this breaks down to is that, as I get older, I’m realizing just how limited my time is. And the more I realize that, the more deliberate I am with how I spend my time, who I spend it with, and which projects I choose to take on.
I don’t have the financial freedom to be overly picky about the paid client work I accept. As long as the people are good, the project isn’t promoting something that goes completely against my values, and the work fits my skill set, I’m in. But with my personal work, I get to be more decisive. If I start something that initially seems like a good use of my time, but turns into a chore, I’ve learned not to be too hard on myself when I let it go.
All of this is to say, we get one life, and the clock starts ticking the second we’re born. As we age, the time we have left gets shorter, and we need to be honest with ourselves about which people, activities, and projects bring us joy, fulfillment, or transformation—and which ones are okay to leave behind.