I had no idea what I was doing when it came to 3D or animation. At this point, I was an engineer who had started messing around with Blender in my free time. The more I experimented, learned how different systems worked, and actually started creating things, the more I wanted to see what I could build in 3D.

Around that same time, a D&D podcast called Die of Laughter started up. I immediately fell in love with its completely unhinged sense of humor! The kind of horrific jokes that make even the people saying them cringe, and of course, the absolutely insane idea of a D&D campaign where the players somehow never leave the starting tavern.

When I started working on Die of Laughter, I didn't just have limited time but I was also incredibly slow. Almost every part of the process was something I was learning for the first time.

I had to learn how to rig characters, build animation systems, animate scenes, and figure out how to make all of these different pieces work together. My inexperience meant that even simple things could take hours, and sometimes I had to completely redo something just because I had learned a better way to do it.

It took seven months of learning, experimenting, and a whole lot of work, but eventually I crossed a milestone I wasn't sure I'd ever reach: five minutes of finished animation!

For me, that was when Die of Laughter started becoming more than just an intro. It was becoming a real show. This is also when I decided that college would actually be very useful if I wanted to actually learn what I was doing.

Growing up watching anime, I was incredibly excited by the idea of creating my own animated intro for Die of Laughter. Anime has been one of the biggest artistic influences in my life, especially the shows that feel like they have a distinct artistic soul of their own.

One of those shows has always been Samurai Champloo. Its art direction, animation, music, and overall style have always felt incredibly unique to me. When it came time to create the intro for Die of Laughter, I wanted to make something that captured some of that same feeling.

The intro is heavily inspired by Samurai Champloo, including several specific references to its opening. But I also wanted to take the idea further and make it my own. I spent time thinking about the characters and what different visual representations of them could look like, eventually using those ideas as the backgrounds and imagery behind the characters as they danced.

It was one of the first times I really got to combine the things that inspired me growing up with this world that I have been creating! 

This is still one of my biggest achievements to this day: an entire hour of animation, created completely by myself.

Not every piece of it is perfect. Some scenes are polished, while others barely made it past a decent blocking stage. But at some point, I realized something far more important than whether every shot looked perfect, was that the story was being told. The characters were there, the world was there, and the animation was doing what it needed to do to bring everything together.

One of the things I find funniest about the show is just how wildly different the animation can be from moment to moment. There are scenes where characters are simply standing around talking, followed by moments where they're sprinting up and down stairs. Creating all of that meant learning how to animate not only the main characters, but all of the background characters and everything happening around them.

This workflow would look insane to a normal person. Where I have books now filled with notes that I would take when listening to the podcast. In this I would write out frame by frame when the mouths of characters should open and close. It was honestly grueling work, where I was doing my best to math it up.

It has been a wild journey, and every character, scene, and animation has taught me something new.

Reaching that first hour of animation was one of my biggest goals. Once I finally got there, I decided to take a long break from the project. I wanted to focus more on school, but I also needed some time away from animation to recharge.

After spending so much time learning how to make the show, I finally had a chance to step back and appreciate just how far it had come.

After learning Unreal Engine both in college and on my own, I eventually came to a big decision: Die of Laughter needed to move to Unreal Engine.

Blender had served me incredibly well, but render times were becoming a serious limitation. Ten minutes of animation is 14,400 frames. Even at just 3.5 seconds per frame, that's roughly 14 hours of rendering for only ten minutes of finished animation. As the show continued to grow, those hours quickly added up.

For the future of the project, I knew I needed a different solution.

Unreal Engine changed that completely. Instead of waiting hours for a finished render, I could work with the scene in real time and render sequences at speeds much closer to the actual length of the movie. Of course, moving an entire animated production into Unreal was anything but simple. I had to learn a huge amount just to get the village, characters, lighting, environments, and all the other pieces working together.

Then I discovered MetaHumans.

Facial animation had always been one of the most time-consuming parts of the entire process. I struggled to create high-quality facial animation for up to ten-minute segments, and learning lip syncing and facial rigs became a project of its own.

MetaHumans completely changed that.

With MetaHumans, Live Link, and the built-in tools for facial animation, I could create custom characters that could actually perform along with the dialogue from the podcast. Suddenly, facial animation that used to take an enormous amount of time could be generated and refined much more efficiently.

MetaHumans have now become the backbone of Die of Laughter. I still have a lot to learn, and there are plenty of ways I want to improve how everything looks and works, but the combination of Unreal Engine, MetaHumans, Live Link, and facial capture has completely changed the way I can make this show.

At one point, ten minutes of animation could take me months of work.

Now, I can produce ten minutes in about a week.

That change is what made continuing Die of Laughter at a much larger scale possible.

After all of that work, something happened that I honestly wasn't sure would ever happen when I first started this project:

I finished two hours of Die of Laughter.

What started as a small experiment in Blender had grown into something much bigger than I ever expected. I had spent years learning animation, modeling, rigging, Unreal Engine, facial animation, lighting, environments, editing, and everything else that comes with trying to make an animated show by yourself.

And now I had hours of footage sitting on my computer.

The next challenge was figuring out what to do with it.

Season 2 had been created as individual scenes and segments, but I wanted to see what it would feel like as an actual movie. So I started putting everything together.

Scene by scene, I assembled the episodes into one continuous experience. Dialogue had to line up. Shots had to flow together. Scenes that had originally been created months apart suddenly had to feel like they belonged to the same film.

It was a completely different kind of animation work.

For the first time, I wasn't just looking at individual shots or ten-minute sections. I was watching Die of Laughter as a movie.

And eventually, the timeline reached a point that felt almost surreal: Two hours.

Two hours of animation that I had created, assembled, and edited on my own.

There are still things I want to improve. Some scenes are more polished than others. There are shots I look at now and think, I could definitely do that better. There are places where my older work shows through, and there are plenty of things I've learned since creating the earliest parts of the project.