Welcome to 11 to 17 May.

This week I did a couple of reviews of the first draft layout. Here’s a word cloud of the notes (generated by this – somewhere along the way the apostrophes got lost).

The review process is mainly about how to get story points across more clearly, more humourously.. more quickly if appropriate. This is achieved through

• removing tedious clunky sequences and replacing them with something streamlined and tight.
• beating the inconsistencies out of the characters
• ensuring the audience knows only what they need to know, nothing more.

…and as ever figuring out the technical workflow as I go along. Once again, I’m in undercharted waters.

I’m glad I’m making a cute little comedy instead of something seriously deep and meaningful. A serious project would have failed long ago in its duty as a big juicy carrot to keep me pushing onward through all this. The fun characters and setting make the grind way easier to handle.

Not to say “easier” equates to “easy”. There’s a powerful motivation-sapping dread of having even more work to do once I’ve come up with enough solid ways to improve the short. I reckon that dread is just an emotional sign that I need to take a break and catch up on other stuff for a little bit.

So right now I’m doing a mix of review work on AMITS, watching other people’s short films observantly, playing around in Blender to suss out features and workflows I don’t know yet, and doing Proko’s Human Anatomy For Artists course to fill in a frustrating knowledge gap – along with a little bit of gaming and music here and there just for fun.

Also for you cutting-edge Blender version fans, I posted my Blender Buildbot downloader script to GitHub. It’s Win64 only right now and console only but it’s moderately robust and could be easily adapted to do Linux and OSX too without much alteration.

So short-term I’m working to improve my creative abilities and capabilities while resting up for the next push; longer-term, I’m building up a head of creative potential energy before leaping back into hands-on work refreshed. I guess we’ll all see soon enough whether I know what I’m doing or whether I’m just procrastinating because my winter aches and pains have set in. 🙂

Now go give money to Bill Plympton so he can make a new movie.