My Inspirations

Note

The people here are all YouTubers, as they are my main source of high-effort media. I generally don't watch actual movies and TV shows. For some reason, I used to be pretty sensitive to them. I still am, just not as much.

Alan Becker

Alan Becker is an ani­mator and ani­mation direc­tor on YouTube. His rise to fame began with a video titled Ani­mator vs. Ani­mation and ever since, he's been buil­ding con­tent off of ani­mated stick fi­gures play­ing around on his com­puter and in video games. I personally ad­mire how he's taken such simple cha­rac­ters and given them such depth.

He isn't doing this alone, though. He now has a sizable ani­mation team, a few sound desi­gners and a com­poser helping him out. Many of the team's recent works can be best de­scribed as cine­matic mas­ter­pie­ces. If you'd like to check out his work, the link is here.

Alan, posing in a brick-walled room.

Kevin & Luke Lerdwichagul

This duo of ani­mators-turned-show­runners started with a meme chan­nel filled with memey parody videos invol­ving Mario, Luigi, and se­veral ori­ginal charac­ters. They would then con­so­li­date their efforts into a com­pany called Glitch Pro­duc­tions, where they began run­ning more serious ani­mated web­series. Today, they have suc­cess­fully ran 3 sea­sons of one of their own series, Meta Runner, and are cur­rent­ly backing ano­ther show, Murder Drones, written and directed by fellow animator Liam Vic­kers. I appreciate them giving other creators a creative out­let they would not have had otherwise.

Kevin & Luke, presumably preparing to film a video.
Left: Luke, Right: Kevin

Cary and Michael Huang

This duo started the animated webseries Battle For Dream Island at the age of 12, and have kept it alive well into their early 20's. The afore­men­tioned show and its later de­scen­dants are centered around person­ified house­hold ob­jects who compete for a prize. If the art style appears even slightly familiar, you may recognize those same mouth gra­phics plas­tered all over all sorts of ran­dom YouTube thumb­nails. I admire their per­sis­tence in keeping their show alive, despite several bouts of burn­out.

In addition to their ani­mation channel, Cary (right­most on the photo) also runs his own solo chan­nel (carykh), where he posts about ran­dom pro­gram­ming pro­jects he's worked on. I per­son­ally found such silly pro­jects inte­res­ting, and it was through Cary's solo chan­nel that I discovered their ani­mation chan­nel.

Cary and Michael Huang, with Alan Becker at VidCon 2023.
This picture was taken at VidCon 2023 with Alan Becker.
Left: Michael, Middle: Alan Becker, Right: Cary

Grant Sanderson

Grant runs the math education channel 3Blue1Brown. He's made videos on a wide variety of gener­ally com­pli­cated topics, such as cal­cu­lus, linear alge­bra, and Four­ier ana­lysis. What sets his videos apart is how he breaks down these con­cepts into simple terms that a mere high school stu­dent can under­stand. I admire the way he teaches and strive to learn from his ways when I teach (I did teach at Computer Science Club this year, and will do so again next year).

Grant Sanderson