They Were Wrong! We Were Right
June 2018
Ahh yes, the very first piece of art I ever drew of Jayden and Jasmine, my very first human ocs (I had a ponysona for YEARS when I was deep into the brony fandom).
A little bit of backstory, these characters and the very outdated story that went with them were actually born from an 8th grade assignment for my multimedia class. The class was okay, the teacher was meh, but the assignment was to create and film a music video. Having had attended a film academy for all 4 years of high school, it baffles me looking back that this man just handed us a camera and sd card and said go for it. Me and my friend Jayden (yes the character was named and somewhat designed after him), went scouring on YouTube to find a song, then built our story from there. Fun fact, the original song we chose is one of the few things that stayed the same, I just couldn't let it go! Once we found one, I instantly envisioned this super cool video in my head and began roughly designing the characters. This was for storyboard purposes (I think it was part of the assignment) because we had to either act in it ourselves or find people to act (and if you see pictures of us from middle school, you can guess which route we took).
Long story short, we never made the video because my teacher never took the class serious but we still passed. The storyboard however I was able to finish and it inspired me to adopt the characters and develop a whole arc that spanned 3 animated parts (the middle part was a flashback episode though), dubbing it The Trilogy.
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I just recently departed from the nickname and decided I needed a true title if this was going to be the real deal. Thus began the start of what Midnight Frequencies would be today.
As I mentioned above, the piece is from part 3 of the old version of the story (I could go into a whole rant about how much this story has changed my goodness). I guess this could also be considered my first concept art piece since it's inspired by the final scene I had planned. Since this part is scrapped, I guess the big spoiler is that I killed Jay in part 1 and part 3 was essentially him trying to escape purgatory by saving their mom who was being held hostage (shock value was my crutch lmao). Bonus points if anyone recognizes the lyrics!
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Back to the art. My knowledge of drawing people was very low and I pretty much taught myself from Equestria Girls but put my own twist onto it. Now, almost a decade later, the shoeless, fingerless, round headed features are part of my style and I know basic anatomy!
At this point my tablet was still fairly new to me so I hadn't quite transitioned my whole process to digital. Also school took up a lot of time so I would draw traditionally in my free time during class or after school. So to the right is a scan of the original sketch in my notebook. It wouldn't be till like my junior year of high school that I focused more on digital art and stopped drawing traditionally.
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My final thoughts would be that maybe that old story from your childhood or that box of character sketches sitting in your garage just need a bit of TLC. I love these characters and the story it's become and I could never give up on them because this is all I know :)