Revolting After Naptime with Yugoslothia

What I Did

Animated and edited a minute-long short film
Designed logos and wrote articles for a blog
Promoted a blog on social media
Tools Used: Adobe After Effect, Adobe Illustrator, WordPress, Instagram

The Need: Communist Revolution from an Inside Joke

All of this spawned from a video game storytelling assignment I had during my sophomore year of undergrad.My friend and I wrote about a fake sloth simulator. I joked that we should compare the simulator to a film I made up: Yugoslothia.

The plot of the film: a bunch of sloths try to run a communist regime, but they fail because they are sloths. The moral of this story is to keep your dreams realistic. We got an A, the professor told us we were weird, and not much came of it.

That would be where the story stops, but my senior year motion graphics class assigned us to make a fake television show intro. This came shortly after I started thinking about writing short stories about Yugoslothia and animating a few.

The Solution: A Short and a Fake Governmental Blog

I made a fake intro for a Yugoslothia cartoon show because it would establish the sloth’s dream world while bringing this story idea to life for the first time.

During the summer before graduate school, I created a blog for the Yugoslothia government. I did this since I still had many ideas for stories in the world of Yugoslothia.

The Process

After making a storyboard for the animated short while looking at a mood board of soviet propaganda and sloths, I realized I was having trouble drawing the sloths as militants, prisoners, and dictators. To solve this problem, I sculpted several models of the sloths with clay based on my best sketches. I then vectorized them in Adobe Illustrator.

Two frames of a storyboard on grid paper on a gray desk in front of a black computer monitor showing pictures of communist propaganda and sloths.

The upper half of a clay model of a sloth sitting on a brown cardboard box next to wooden sculpting tools and pieces of clay.

A fully sculpted clay model of a presidential sloth on top of a brown cardboard box and sketches on grid paper next to plastic and wooden sculpting tools.

A large off-brown tree with many ropes around it in front of a brown wooden box with a brown sloth in the top left corner of a room at a science museum.

I discovered that the nearby North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences had a sloth on display while working on the animation. I walked down there to film footage of him so I could make the animated short look as if it was that sloth’s dream.

With the blog, I decided to make it function as the fictional website for the Supreme Government of Yugoslothia. I based the color scheme on the colors from soviet propaganda and wrote about the regulations, culture, and founding myths of the regime. I also made a RedBubble shop to sell Yugoslothia merchandise as a joke.

In June 2019, I put the blog on hiatus once I took a volunteer video editing role with a British eSports team.

The Result

The Instagram account for Yugoslothia got 7,632 impressions and the blog got 94 views within its first five days. On average, the posts on Yugoslothia’s Instagram page got 88 likes.

I also sold about 40 pieces of Yugoslothia merchandise, but I’ve since turned that store into a general store for whatever sticker and t-shirt ideas I come up with.