Working 9 to 15 August 2015, what a way to make a livin’.

It was a busy week at the dayjob with not a lot of energy left over for movie making. A motion-capture rig arrived on Thursday so I lost a night to getting that set up and working… then recording myself flipping the bird and importing that into Blender. Then slowly extricating myself from the mocap rig again.

Anyway. Movie stuff. The feedback I got from readers (thanks!) indicated the process stuff was interesting and it was preferable to reveal snippets of the story rather than dump it all out there at once.

Scene 5 is almost in the bag. Almost. There’s one specific character reaction that’s holding me up. It’s a pretty key character reaction and it feels distractingly contrived right now. On the day I drew it I wasn’t fussed, I was happy to have something. Now that I look back at it, it doesn’t ring true. The reaction works to move the story along but it doesn’t work in the sense that it breaks the illusion of the character’s emotional consistency.

It’s an important moment so it’s worth spending the time to get it absolutely right – if it clangs, the spell will be weakened if not broken and the audience will get distracted. I do not want this.

Getting this moment right means spending time getting it wrong in different ways and then finally figuring it out, only to wonder if I’ll look back at it a couple of days later and think “nah that doesn’t work either”. Far from being a triumphant Hollywood moment of hitting “save” with a grin on my face, it’s more a case of trepidation on the day and relief a couple of days later when I look back at the work with a clear head and see that it does the job.

This is completely normal.

I worked on Scene 6 a little bit too – just sketching it out in rough on paper. The development story of Scene 6

is an entire blog entry in and of itself, so I’ll leave that for next week. 🙂

See you then!