of her own. She values making animation over other
forms of content on the platform because she finds a
sense of control in scripting and animating and hav-
ing the freedom to make changes, rather than only
having whatever footage you were able to film prior
to editing. Now, it has become a huge facet of her ca-
reer. Ilyssa hopes to continue doing animation online
as a career for the time being, as it gives her the free-
dom to explore her own ideas without the influence
of others. Eventually though, she hopes to break back
into the traditional animation industry.
FROM IDEA TO UPLOAD
Her general process for animating is working on
multiple projects at once. “If I’m animating, I’m try-
ing to think of more video ideas.” For outlining ideas,
she prioritizes using word processing software that
autosaves. “I’ve made the mistake too many times of
using something that doesn’t autosave.”
As far as pulling from her own experience for ideas,
she said, “I’m kind of racking my brain for things
that made me sad that don’t make me sad anymore
and trying to figure out why that is. Or things that
make me sad that I can now joke about, which is an
even further take on, ‘I’m really
not sad about this anymore. I’m
very okay.’” She likes to introspect
to discover how she got from the
immediate sadness to feeling
okay, so she can figure out how to
portray that in her animations. “I
think that’s the path that is hard
to see when you’re in that awful
moment.” She strives to be the evi-
dence that things will be okay for
other people, regardless of where
they are at right now.
When she has her idea writ-
ten out in full, she then moves
her script to Google Docs to add
comments describing what the
scene will look like. Creating
backgrounds comes last, where
she’ll use a sophisticated and
creative color coding system in the
script to indicate patterns in the
background, like scenes where her
character is against a white back-ILYSSA
AN INTERVIEW WITH ILLY OF ILLYMATION
In one installment of Ilyssa’s series on her abusive ex, she meets up and bonds with an-
other woman who also had unpleasant encounters with the same man.