2025 Retrospective and 2026 Plans! Update 1.11.26

Hello, Resolute Patrons!

Now that BackerKit stuff is all locked and loaded, we wanted to do a PROPER recap and a glimpse at our plan for the year. It's gonna be a long post!
This will involve a bit of reflection, a LOT of thank-yous, and a peek at how chaotic and fragile the animation production pipeline can be alongside our future plans. Followed by more thank yous. In that order!

• So let's start with a reflection/after-action on last year.

It wasn't our best.
As an indie animation studio, the balance can be rather precarious regarding getting content out the door. Holding out for a larger project can create lengthy dry spells, while constant output can be a shortcut to burnout. Last year our plans included an Angel Hare easter special, season, and Christmas special, three ROT cases, a new pilot, an animated feature film, and a Halloween puppet show. What we managed was about half that. An easter video, two ROT cases, prep for a pilot, and Your Angel's Here. The Christmas special barely came out in time to still be part of last year's line-up, and that's 14 videos for the whole year, not including ones that were purely promotional. That isn't an attempt to be reductive, but rather to demonstrate how easily plans can be shaken by adjusted priorities, changed plans, unexpected events, or sometimes just plain poor planning. With such a small team (two leads who are the writers and animators for every project), it's just very easy to have the workforce taken out. If one of us is sick and the other's taking care of them, productivity is now 0%. If we're travelling to see family or helping friends move, productivity is now 0%.

Sometimes it isn't even that we can't work. Sometimes we plan a Halloween special, scheduling conflicts with voice actors delay the start of production by only a few days, it doesn't get done by Halloween, urgency evaporates, we have to re-prioritize the Christmas video alongside BackerKit prep, and it hits the back burner. Sometimes we try to get a Magisaurs pilot done in time to submit to some of our favorite film festivals, family needs us, the festival deadlines don't happen, and now we have to shift focus to get Your Angel's Here out while giving us time for a more involved next season of Angel Hare. And sometimes a project just peeters out after the initial conception and has to be shelved until its time in the sun properly arrives.
Long-time Patrons will be familiar with this! Many are the projects that we've discussed in here but have never seen the light of public release. To only name a few, the Death of the Deke short film which we fully storyboarded and rough animated some shots for, the Space Triage and N.A.T.S. mini-series (NATS was actually going to be a stealth season of Angel Hare, introducing Cam's game without initially revealing its connection!), Future Robot Rockstar Pirates (mini-series), Far Harvest (short film), the Whiskered music video, Mythed (mini-series), End of Mystery Road (live action short film), several other shorts and game concepts... all on the shelf! And that's not even including things that got delayed but did eventually make it out, like how our Decembers are cursed and we've had two separate instances of planning a Christmas music video, having it 80% done, but waiting till next year to actually get it done within a reasonable winter window.
Some of these are only just on the edge of the shelf, ready to jump down as soon as time allows. Some of them were shelved because we don't think our current resources have the scope to create them in the way we want them made (RIP Deke my beloved). Some, like Kind World, are going to continue in the future but in a different form that'll be easier to produce or a better fit for the material, or both. If you think about how many news headlines you'll see for "[studio] acquired the rights to [property] and are developing a [movie or show]!" just to have nothing come out as development, for any list of reasons, never reached fruition, it isn't so different at our scale! Stuff gets in the way, collaborators drop out, plans change, projects evolve, and any number of life's curve balls end up changing the plan.
Having had such a low-output year, it makes us all the more thankful that you all supported us throughout it. Being able to have such constant support lets us have confidence when we dive, pivot, or plan. It has let us afford more travel to conventions where we get to meet y'all in person, larger casts in our videos, more original music than ever, and general ambition. The safety to be ambitious is invaluable, and you all make it more and more tangible every week, month, and year that you support our work. Thank you for that, from the bottom of our hearts.
With that peek into the past, we're not satisfied with our 2025. It's got us motivated to try, this year, to make more but to approach it smarter. We worked on a schedule that, hopefully, has a nice chunk of work but with an equal amount of margin for error.

• Let's look at our plans for 2026!

January: 'Unfriendly Demeanors' (the late Halloween special) and 'Magisaurs' pilot
February: 'ROT' and/or live action short film, BackerKit concludes
March: Charity event (late March), pre-production on Easter video and April Fools video
April: Aforementioned, and pre-production on feature film
May: Feature film pre-production, Hyrax in the Rocks game completion
June: BackerKit fulfillment, feature film crowdfunding
July: Mini-series 1 production
August: Mini-series 2 pre-production, feature film production
September: Feature film production, possibly Spooktober game jam, Far Harvest
October: Feature film post-production, possible animated Halloween short 'Feel Inc,' festivals
November: Mini-series 2 pre-production
December: Misc and rest

The intended results are: four shorts, two mini-series (1, and ROT), a pilot, two specials, and a feature film, with more ROT where time allows.
The goals for this duration are: minimal to no work on weekends, minimal flights of fancy/impulsive projects, lessen the workload during months with historic productivity lows (winter), more behind-the-scenes videos once projects wrap, and if something is removed from the schedule, it's because something else is replacing it (the amount of end product is the same). We also want to get a LOT of writing done in general.And to our delight, there's one very big, very special goal we've started working on and are going to be putting a lot of passive time into: The return of West Patch. This is going to be a long, thoughtful process, so it may be a bit before you hear about it more but hopefully, preciously, its time is finally approaching. For those of you who have been Patrons from the VERY start, we hope it's worth the wait.

• Time for all the thank yous

Those are a lot of BIG plans (will we finally manage our first feature length!?) and it has required BIG support to be able to dream so grandly. It cannot be understated how much your generosity has unshackled us. We remember very well how it was at the start, using whatever energy was left-over after our day jobs to try and get some shots animated and splitting time with commissions to afford voice actors. We remember streaming to no one, posting to little response, and trying to hire voice actors when we had no work history to speak for us. We also remember that first patron's name, and how surreal and humbling it was to have a stranger want to enable our success. That feeling of surreal humility has only grown alongside the support. We get light-headed if we think too hard about the scale we've reached and the messages we've gotten about the lives our stories have touched. We are both storytellers by nature. It's all we want to do, and all we plan on doing, and you've all made it so simply doable. From writing to video production to merch design, it's all been so much sheer fun and such a joy to get to approach without inhibition. You've all personally removed those inhibitions, hesitations, and constraints that stand between us and our craft. Thank you for that. We hope you like what continues to spill forth.

Here's to a year we can all be proud of!

Till next time,

-The East Patch Team