It’s been 6 to 12 November 2016. Welcome to the new home of my production blog.
My Blender Conference lightning talk and presentation are online
First, my expanded Blender Conference 2016 lighting talk presentation is now available. Sorry for being a week late! 🙂 If you want to watch the actual presentation, it starts at 10:38 in this video:
A little downtime..
Last Saturday I was super optimistic. I’d taken the coming week away from the day job to beat the jet lag and work on the movie. After everything that happened in Amsterdam, I was all set to smash out a shiny new flat animatic by the end of the week. Naturally, I got as far as compiling thumbnail sheets before my enthusiasm got wrestled into submission by jet lag, post-conference blues, the symptoms of cold-turkey caffeine withdrawal and the feeling of despondent tedium that comes with rewriting a short for the millionth time.
Oh well.
With my confidence and creative drive temporarily out of commission, I opted for downtime instead and took a week off to relax, watch movies, ignore social media entirely for a day or two and generally clear my head.
..for a big result!
At around 3:00am on Thursday morning, I watched the work-in-progress reel again to try to understand what other people had been telling me. Most of what everyone else had noted and critiqued was suddenly lit up in blazing neon. Some of the fixes were already in the Amsterdam rewrite. But problems remained.
I recalled that Jason Schleifer from Nimble Collective suggested doing a motivation pass – re-examine the story, specifically digging into what the characters want and how they try to get it because of what they’re like. He wasn’t wrong – Pointy shifts character violently in the first thirty seconds of the film… and what’s the deal with Gronky anyway?
Jason’s advice took me back to thinking about what kind of movie I wanted to make, what kind of tone I want to hit and who Gronky and Pointy need to be to achieve that. I won’t say the answers came to me in a flash, because I’ve worked for months to get that moment of clarity, but if I make Gronky a harmless clown who comes under attack from Pointy’s insecure seriousness, it’ll hang together as a story with the breezy and fun feel that I’m aiming for.
Thanks for reading and see you next week!
