My Time on The Sensational Spider-Man

 Six years.

Damn does time swing by.

I can barely remember how things started. 

Sometime in 2016-2017, fresh off the heels of surviving the really strange process of helping to create an Unreal Engine spidey game (another story for another time perhaps) I offered to help conceptualise a cool little fan-animated show, with all the things we loved about the character. 

From cel-shading, hatch-shading, drawing inspiration from anything and everything that came before, the shows and movies we grew up with, the ideals this character represents, god the love we have for this character is insane. It's been slow-goings ever since though, at least for me.

It was incredibly difficult to focus on this. I struggled a lot. I found myself not keeping up on my side of things like developing character designs for Doc Ock or Shocker, kept hitting walls in how to get the style and gear right, hyperfixating on getting a lot of sky and cloud photos that took an entire year to put together, among other smaller things.

Every time I came back to the discord server the team from my perspective went leaps and bounds beyond what I was expecting to see. The music was incredible. The shaders, animation, art style, the script, everything looked so great.

But I got disillusioned over time. I had really dark thoughts. Para-social nonsense, self-doubt, using this in my CV/resume to get a job, fear of it being not good enough, the character I grew up with and essentially replaced as a father figure being owned by a mega corporation with really dubious-at-best-and-ignorant-at-worse-for-profit shit anyway I digress

I gave myself a year (2022) to recover and get back to working on this labour of love project. When I heard the call that it was gonna be wrapped up, my brain snapped back into the zone. I first thought oh god no. I still have things to do! Things to finish! Characters and environments we still need to sort out! Maybe even a season 2! The list felt longer and longer, and I had a separate solo passion project story to do with pigeons I had been chipping away at for a few years. It's been as chaotic as it is trying to write this coherently.

Today, we all got together for one last hurrah, listening to the entire soundtrack, posing, animating, drawing. Like the good old days. A little bittersweet, but it does feel like I can close this chapter in my life, and that feels good more than anything.

Aaryn, Rig, Autumn, the rest of Low-Tri, everyone who worked on this, thank you for letting me chip in when I was able to. I will forever be grateful to be a part of this, and I hope to keep seeing you develop and grow in the future. With everything considered, this has been the most wholesome lot of people I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and I have nothing but utter respect for all of you.

And especially thank you to those that followed us on this journey. This won't be the last time you hear about our things, I've heard some pretty cool things in the works, and I can't wait to see them.

"No, god no, I couldn't do that--it's part of me, I'm just finding a better place for it. I'm going to take one last look, and I'm going to put it where it belongs." 
- Aunt May (Sally Fields), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)