Hello everyone. I joined scratch about a year ago knowing nothing about coding or animating or really anything. I only did scratch maybe once a week to spend like 15 minutes on a small project or game. Around two months into scratch, I started watching sharky's comedy animations. Sharky was only at about 1,000 followers (crazy to believe right) and was making pretty funny projects. Sharky led me into bmb who led me into huntedskelly. These were my three main inspirations at the time, each adding their own personality and pride to their projects. This was the pinnacle of my time on scratch. I wasn't making any good projects at the time so why was this such a fun time for me? Well, because I had no stress over scratch, it was just for fun, and also because scratch hadn't really got any fame chasers yet and thus, no need for rants and a "toxic community". My pinnacle only lasted about a month or two before GES (@GoldenEagleStudios) announced he was leaving scratch for youtube. I'm not sure why this affected me so much. I just loved the fact that he was going to a make a huge project to end his career on scratch. It was his time to move on. This is when I changed my goals on scratch from having fun, to getting fame. I knew I would have to leave scratch at some point due to me getting older and of course other things and I couldn't bear the fact that only 10 or so people would know (or even care) that I was moving on. I began to chase clout. I started advertising on projects that I shouldn't have and making projects that the community viewed positively (comedy animations that made no sense). Scratch wasn't really fun anymore. I was stressed to do whatever it took to raise my follower count and gain popularity. It was a literal nightmare.... One day, I saw that huntedskelly had posted was he called a "MAP" part. I had no clue what that meant and began to investigate. I found out that it was a multi-animator collaboration to make a project to a song or play or something. I thought it was genius. Also, people at viewed the MAP part extremely positively! I was inspired to make some of my own. At first, my parts were very choppy and I look back on them today to see how far I've come. At that time, I actually never even had the idea of putting a wait block between costumes. It was just straight to the next one. This went on for a while until I discovered one of the best animators to ever reach scratch, rbop. Others had discovered him long before me but I was still ultra-stunned by his MAP parts. They were creative and extraordinary!! He made me drop my fame obsession and start focusing on improving my animations. It worked, soon, animators began recognizing my projects and I started to gain popularity (which I didn't care about anymore). I was started to let into MAPs like crazy and actually meet fun animators like me! This went on for a while until one day when I opened up scratch and saw that I had 67 messages. I clicked on the mail icon and read what I couldn't believe. My dream had come true, sharky loved. My main inspiration had enjoyed one of the projects that I had created. I was overflowed with shock and wonder. Nothing in my scratch career gave me more motivation than that. I started to then develop a style of my very own. It used lots of pen which was mixed with vector shapes. I started to post more animation tests to experiment with what worked best and ta-da, I had become what I had originally wanted to be. A good animator. Many things had given me difficulty along the way and made me want to give up. The hardest thing was probably seeing all the generic games and animations sprawled across trending. I knew I could have done better than every single project on the front page of trending and still not get much more than a couple of views and a love or favorite in return. I was so demotivated, I actually quit scratch for a month before returning with a fresh mind and new motivation. So here I am, standing at my computer typing my story on a screen, spilling my emotions into black and white characters, hoping someone will care enough to read this far. I've been through a lot in scratch, improved so much, but I think it's nearly my time to move on. I never did get crazy popular like my 1 month old scratch self dreamed to be but I did make tons of friends and improve where I needed to. If you read down here, thank you. I don't think very many will. Just know that I'll be leaving soon and I'm not doing it because of a "toxic community". I'm not doing it because trending is ruined. I'm doing it because my time here on scratch is running out. It's almost time for me to move on..... Don't worry, I will make a few more projects before I leave.... See you guys later....
