And here it goes, the last newsletter of my seven-week dedicated time for developing Ladapaw Letters. This one is all about rescues, purebreds, and purebred rescues. 

To help me develop the outline, I put together some valuable questions to ask myself when looking through the research I’d already gathered. Then, I could decided if I needed to find more resources pertaining to the questions. 

What are rescues? What are mixed-breed animals? How many animals in shelters and rescues are mixed, and how many are purebred? What makes a purebred a purebred? What are breeders? What makes a responsible breeder vs an irresponsible one? Do I briefly touch on puppy mills? Why are most rescue animals mutts? What’s the percentage of purebred rescues? Why do purebreds end up in rescue situations? 

Using these questions as references, I could then expand them into a detailed outline that touches on all of these meaningful points. 

Outline

By now, I know I can’t go into a topic for a newsletter without a well-thought-out outline. With much thought, here is the outline I developed for the final newsletter.

1. Rescue animals
   • This section is all about what makes rescue animals what they are, and how they get there. 

2. Mixed-breed animals
   • What are mixed-breeds, and why are they so common in rescue and shelter organizations? 

3. Purebred animals
   • This section is all about what makes purebred animals what they are, and how they came about. Focusing on breeders.

4. Purebred rescues
   • What are purebreeds, and why are they more scare in rescue and shelter organizations?

5. Conclusion
   • Ultimately there are pros and cons to both options, and it’s always best to weight what’s best for the family.

Production

Using the same layout that I developed previously, I entered in the written content, referencing the storyboards from pre-production to ensure the planned animations would still work well. To no surprise and similar to last week, I ended up re-arranging and changing things as needed from the storyboard. 

Here is the detailed animation plan for this page in particular:

“Ladapaw Letters” animates from the top into the center top, “major reasons…” information starts to follow in after “Ladapaw Letters” from the top, down. Right side information animates in from the bottom. The cat walks in at the same time, from the right. Once each piece of information animates in, the references fade down. They fade away before the “major reasons…” animates out to the bottom, and the right-side information animates out to the top. The cat walks off to the right, returning where it came.

After I was finished in Illustrator, I then separated the layers out and imported everything into After Effects to begin animating. Animating isn’t something that is done in a short amount of time, at least not for me yet. Because of this, I’ve chosen a strategy to re-use the same walking animals in each newsletter, and re-arrange where they come from and go. It’s also a nice consistency feature to have. In the future, I would plan to use new characters retrospectively. 

Now that the animations are finished, the next step is to export the newsletter into a looping GIF. The GIF makes it possible to have the newsletter play simultaneously within the email that’s sent to the audience, rather than clicking an external link. 

Well folks, this is the last production stage for my first three initial newsletters of Ladapaw Letters! Next week, stay tuned for a detailed project page that reveals the three newsletters.