Future Andy, sending a cryptic message from the year 2059

Andy Bailey is a stop-motion animator who worked on films like ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, Wendell & Wild, and the most recent Chicken Run movie. When he’s not working on feature films, however, he runs the YouTube channel Andymation, which celebrates animated flipbooks as a creative medium. Over the years he’s created a series of flipbooks using invisible ink, created microscopic flipbooks, dove into the history of some of the oldest flipbooks, and even holds an annual flipbook festival. He’s also spent the last few years slowly injecting a narrative about his future self into his videos…and whatever has been going on, seems to be escalating.

Future Andy Emerges, With Really Cool Sunglasses
It all seems to have started in 2019, when Andy made a flipbook of a flux capacitor which caused him to time travel to the 90s, allowing him to reflect on how he fell in love with stop motion animation as a kid. After returning to the present, he brought back a pair of sunglasses and portable FM radio headphones. Later that year, Future Andy came back in that same iconic outfit to celebrate Andymation crossing the 1 million subscriber milestone.

Beard hair powered time travel, with Present and Future Andys. Robin is part of it too, somehow.

Every now and then, Future Andy would return to visit the Andymation channel. In 2021, Future Andy traveled back in time using a beard hair-powered flux capacitor to warn present Andy to enforce strict guidelines for Flipbook Fest 2022, or risk injuring his thumb. He’d also make a return for the Flipbook Fest 2024 announcement, although this time he was explicitly there to observe (and open a pack or two of Garbage Pail Kids cards).

From Quirky Sidekick to Alternate Reality Game Protagonist
For the first few years, Future Andy was a quirky character who would drop by to add some levity to the Andymation videos. However, things started to take a turn in March 2024, when a video focused on making a microscopic flipbook cut to a black-and-white image of Future Andy, holding up a QR code with the date July 26th, 2059 written on it. Scanning the code leads to a video from the YouTube channel futur_–e“, with Future Andy trying to get the camera in focus.

Future Andy holding up a QR code with the date “July 26th, 2059” written on it

Over the next few months, the Future Andy channel would upload a series of videos, almost exclusively dated July 26th, 2059. A Wingdings message encoded into a flipbook warns followers “DO NOT TRUST ADVOC8.0”. Audio from a cassette tape obscures a pigpen-encrypted message in its spectrogram, noting “you will soon need a password to help fix my mistake and flip the future”. There also seems to be a number of Magic Eye images hidden in static across the videos, although I have yet to see a sailboat, myself.

Things started coming to a head earlier in December: on December 9th, the channel posted a video that briefly flashed a QR code directing to Advoc8’s Comp Server, a password-protected page. By entering the four digit password also hidden in the video, it’s possible to remotely access Future Andy’s computer.

Future Andy’s personal computer

While many of the files on the computer remain password protected, playing the three games on the computer provides three different keywords. The file explorer also confirms our cast of future characters: Andy Bailey, Andrew Spencer, and Robin Bailey.

On December 13th, Future Andy posted his most recent video, which introduced yet another password protected website into the mix, through a stray glimpse at a computer screen: Escadvoc8.org/shh3, a login page for the InterARKive.

The InterARKive website, during a brief moment of legibility

From this, we can piece a few things together: at one point, Future Andy mentions that what we would consider the year 2059 is the year 10, in his timeline. Whatever happened on that day became known as “M.S. Day”, and was enough of a catastrophe that countless people died, and the modern internet ceased to exist outside of archival materials discovered in a bunker. Presumably, Future Andy is reaching back to us to help “Flip the Future”, preventing this unknown catastrophe from taking place. Jemigorbs are a thing too, somehow. Will the InterARKive reveal more secrets about our impending doom? And does Future Andy’s computer contain the key to prevent it?

For now, it seems like Andymation’s audience is tackling the Flip the Future ARG in the comments section of Future Andy’s YouTube channel.