Oh, where to begin. How about happy New Year’s Day! I hope everyone has been enjoying the holidays. I definitely have been. I’ve had a great time spending time with my family and my amazing girlfriend, Abby. A lot has happened since my last update, so I’ll try to include everything I can without making this post too massive. First, I’ll share some awesome news about my life, not relating to animation in any way. To begin with, I recently bought my beautiful girlfriend a promise ring. I love her to death and can see myself being with her for the rest of my life. We had been talking about how much we love each other and how happy with are with each other, so we decided to take the next step and get a promise ring. That was really exciting for us. Christmas was also our nine months of being together and we’re still going strong. As far as I can tell, that’s never gonna change and I’ve never been happier.

As far as Christmas goes, I had a really great one. I got lots of cool gifts from Abby and my family, and had lots of fun spending time with everyone. I also got a surprise gift from Kohl’s (where I work) a few days after Christmas. I came into work to find out that my name was drawn for an associate appreciation contest we had for the entire district. You were entered into the contest if you worked the two days after Christmas. I worked both days, so my name was entered twice. Three winners were chosen with a prize of either a $500, $200, or $100 Visa card. I was in disbelief when they told me that I had won the $500 Visa card. Needless to say, I had an amazing day after hearing that. I’ve already managed to spend $100 of it on two pairs of Vans shoes. Me and Abby went to an outlet mall yesterday and today to shop around, where there’s a Vans outlet. Money well spent? Probably not.

In other news, I’m finally back on track with animating the Alan Wake Tribute. I admit, I was getting lazy with it there for a little while. School was over and I was just looking forward to the holidays. I actually got my head into gear and started working on it again before Christmas even arrived. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you might know some of the details already. The storyboard is now completely finished and I’ve started to work on the final scenes of the animation. With the storyboard complete, I can now properly calculate how much of the animation is finished. As of right now, the animation is 69% complete. (You can check out the image of this post for a screenshot of a newly completed scene.) It doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but I practically have this whole week off of work. I only work again on Tuesday for a small shift and school starts again for me next Monday. During this week, I’ll try my best to get a good chunk of work done. I stopped working for a while, but I’m gonna try to keep working on it as the days go by. I would really like to have it finished by February or March at the latest. As always, we’ll see what happens. Past “hope” release dates haven’t been so smooth, but I’ll try my best.

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed reading this wall of text if you actually made it through the whole thing. I’m sorry for the lack of posts, but I’m also gonna try to manage that a little better as well. So expect more posts as I’m wrapping up the animation for the Alan Wake Tribute. If you want additional details on anything I’m doing, I usually update my Twitter more than anything else. You can follow me on there if you like. That’s all I’ve got for now, guys. Catch you later!