#its usually cat-ified/warrior cats aus cause of that lmao

[qoldenskies]

Sorry i live under a rock but whats a map?

omg do i live in a world where people dont know what maps are anymore??? what have we become (not mad at you anon im being silly)

TO ACTUALLY EXPLAIN maps mean multi animator projects, they're produced as passion projects usually free of any monetary incentive outside of individual creators putting wips/early content on their patreon and such if they have that.

basically a host cuts up the song into "parts", where it's either free game (which was mostly the case for 2010s maps, less so now), driven by a script/designs/instructions for what to animate in order to follow a continuity, or its completely storyboarded! animators will each take one part, sometimes several, which vary USUALLY from about 3-7 seconds of time. sometimes people collaborate/split up the work too.

back before things got REALLY intense and the standard of quality in the warrior cats fandom skyrocketed, this was a really good opportunity for smaller/inexperienced animators to find traction without a huge workload, because they only had to animate a couple of seconds. and pieced together it would be one big amv! a little while ago in the wc fandom making maps of scripted aus was really popular, and a couple of sparse people would even do maps of their ocs, and with rise's love for aus/fics being so apparent from my time here my brain automatically correlated the two lol

most "reanimated" projects of scenes of shows/movies are technically maps under a certain theme, but the ones the wc fandom did are popular for being completely original in composition since they were adapting parts of a book. and i swear to god something was put in the water and it was probably CRACK COCAINE because these people are CRAZY JUST LOOK AT THIS!!!!

sorry of course i had to use the opportunity to plug louixie. genuinely digital james baxter and she makes WARRIOR CATS MAP PARTS

wc community is crazy because as long as you have the patience to write up a script, organize a community, find traction in there, sort through applications, and maybe doodle up a couple of designs you could just get other people to make the amvs you want for you just because it comes from genuine shared love for the source material, and that's magical 2 me,,, even if there are some inter-community issues lolol